This time, about gaming.
You guys have heard me talk about gaming before, if you've been following this blog for any length of time.
Trust me, and read along, and I will try to hold your interest here; this isn't going to go the direction you may think.
Blizzard Entertainment, the owners and operators of the world's most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, have decided that their online forums are a seething cesspit of trolls, spammers, and stalkers.
They're right.
Now, a sane and rational gaming company would respond to this by hiring people to moderate the forums, to ban trolls and spammers, and respond to harassment proactively and visibly, as has been done in every online forum of significance for years.
Blizzard, sadly, is not that company.
See, Blizzard has an investment to protect, which we'll talk about in a bit.
And because of that soon-to-be-discussed-at-exhaustive-length investment, they have no urge to spend a penny more than they have to on policing their own forums.
And they don't want the risks historically associated with taking player volunteers as moderators.
So, they've decided to link players' forum accounts with their game accounts - one forum account per game account - and publish all forum posts, starting with the release of their upcoming expansion pack, with players' real names. (Bonus points for them getting 48 pages - as of this posting - of complaints from players in that thread.)
Go back and read that again.
They're going to post every single player's real, actual name - from the billing records - in a publicly accessible web forum.
Now, in addition to the obvious (to men) danger of identity theft associated with this kind of move, there is the increased risk to female players from harassers and potential rapists; the risk of employers finding out that their employees play World of Warcraft in their off time and responding with some sort of harassment of their own; unwelcome family members, annoying coworkers...
...A thousand, thousand times worse than Facebook.
Now, I said they have an investment to protect, so let's talk about that.
See, World of Warcraft - unlike Guild Wars, which point we'll return to in a minute - charges a subscription fee.
Every month, anyone who wants to play World of Warcraft has to send in a little bit of cash to keep their account active.
The cheapest level of subscription - if you buy 6 months at a time - is $12.99 a month.
Many players register multiple accounts, but let's go by Blizzard's numbers for this.
According to the numbers in December 2008, World of Warcraft has 11.5 million subscribers.
Hold that thought.
Blizzard explains the subscription fee by saying that "The fee is used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."
I'm sure it does.
But I'm also sure they're making a tidy profit on it, too.
So let's see how tidy, shall we?
11,500,000 subscribers times (at the cheapest tier of subscription; many pay up to $14.99 a month) $12.99, is $149,385,000.
Look at that number again.
I am one hundred percent certain that there is no possible way Blizzard spends a hundred and fifty million dollars a MONTH on "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."
Let's play with numbers some more, shall we?
Blizzard makes - $149,385,000 per month times twelve months - $1,792,620,000 a year in revenue from this game. For the fees to be justified, they would have to produce the entire Lord of the Rings movie trilogy each year.
Even allowing them a semi-sane and reasonable profit - say, 40% - they're still looking at an operating budget of $717,048,000 per year.
I'm pretty sure they don't produce or supply anything that requires seven hundred million dollars a year, which means that their actual profit margin is way, way higher than 40%.
Bear in mind, I am only counting the subscription fees, and making the totally unwarranted assumption here that all the subscribers use the cheapest tier of subscription.
But there's more to the mix; Blizzard also allows for a huge spectrum of items, privileges, and abilities to be purchased with cash for use in the game world.
That revenue is totally unaccounted for here.
So let's use my patented method of guesstimation, here.
Assume that only 10% of the people who play World of Warcraft ever actually buy anything with cash outside of their subscription fees.
Make the further assumption that each of those people buys one item per year, for $10.
You and I both know that it's more than 10% of the players, and they buy way more than one item per year.
But even given those assumptions, that's an additional $15,000,000 a year that Blizzard has coming in, bringing their operating budget to a little over $730,000,000.
You might object here, and point out that the number I used for the subscriber base is old; that's fair, but doesn't really affect this.
Why? Because the primary cost, once development is complete, of operating an online game, is the bandwidth necessary to transmit the data back and forth to the players; if the numbers of subscribers grow, their subscription fees directly offset those costs, and if the numbers of subscribers fall, they use less bandwidth, and therefore the costs drop.
So.
Blizzard has to make a buck; they are apparently making plenty, but they cannot afford to hire moderators, and must therefore subject their entire player base - eleven million people - to an increased risk of identity theft, stalking, harassment both on and offline, and potentially violence.
How much WOULD it cost them to moderate the forums, anyway?
Taking a page from the service industry as a whole, let's start off by assuming they hire every moderator at part-time, and therefore don't have to give them benefits in the form of any compensation other than an hourly wage; but because dealing with trolls, flamers, spammers, and harassment claims all day is stressful, let's say they're generous and pay the moderators $20 per hour to police the forums.
They'd need at least a thousand moderators (not really, less than a hundred would be more than adequate, but I am trying to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt in every way I can, here,) for 32 hours per week.
So, that's 32,000 hours per week at $20 per hour; $640,000 a week for forum moderators.
Outlandish!
Crazy!
Why, that adds up to $2,560,000 a month in payroll for the moderators alone, or a total of $30,720,000 a year - just for forum moderators!
Insane!
Unprecedented!
That only leaves them...
$700,000,000 a year to pay for "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft," without affecting their profits one tiny bit.
...Whoa, there.
That's right; in exchange for the expense - which is small enough that even if it's wildly exaggerated (a hundred moderators at a much more believable $12 per hour adds out to $1,843,200 a year, a number so small as to be unnoticeable in a 730 MILLION DOLLAR budget) it's hardly significant - Blizzard has decided to place their entire player base in direct physical and emotional danger.
Great job!
This is necessary, of course, because of "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."
Guild Wars, on the other hand, can be had for the low, low price of $40 - for all three campaigns and the single expansion pack.
And then you never have to pay them another penny.
You CAN, of course, if you really want to; they do a tidy business selling all kinds of little perks and extras in the game, and I'm sure it's a pretty good source of revenue for ArenaNet (the makers of Guild Wars.)
So much so, that based off their profits from the development, maintenance, and operation of Guild Wars, they're developing a sequel.
Without ever charging a subscription fee.
The sequel won't, either.
And yet somehow, for Blizzard, $149,385,000 a MONTH is required for "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."
Let's see how that stacks up, shall we?
$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)
$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)
$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)
Y'all poor Blizzard kiddies are getting raped to a fare-thee-well.
So, I'd think, having given examples - in matching resolutions as far as was possible, to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt everywhere possible - that we've established that they're not spending $149,385,000 a month on "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft," especially if ArenaNet can provide almost exactly the same thing for (errrrr...) $0 a month.
So what ARE they spending it on?
Well, this:
