Everyone always talks about how monumental a money generator World of Warcraft has been for Blizzard, but here's a figure you don't hear much about: How much does WoW actually cost Blizzard to maintain? According to Kotaku's report, Blizzard stated during their Analyst Day conference call yesterday that the price has been over USD 200 million since the game launched in 2004.
That's USD 200 million for the total cost of upkeep since the game's November, 2004 release (presumably not including the initial cost to develop the game). This includes payroll for the entire staff, hardware support, and apparently the biggest infrastructure cost customer service.
We don't have figures for exactly how much revenue World of Warcraft has generated since its launch, but we can at least do a little arithmetic (and some loose estimation) to try to put this in perspective.
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