I am not sure what I expected but this is more than that.
Estimat 5 million players at 15 a month for subscription that’s 75 million monthly 900 million yearly. Idk how the game runs, idk if there are a lot of microtransactions nor do i know how much the expansions are. But alone at nearly a billion per year wow is a huge success. When they bring it over to consoles and have another surge in profits microsoft will be all smiles.
I used to play WoW back in the days and am mildly interested in the game development afterwards, but somewhere I read that currently some players are able to buy in game time with their game money, so I presume not everyone is actually paying this price. And their most dedicated hard-core players are probably not paying it either.
In reality I don’t know how easy it is and probably casual players are mostly paying subscribers but even back then the game was plagued by a lot of micro transactions.
Additionally we don’t know how much it costs Blizzard to support the servers and run them, as they run a lot of them for sure.
You can buy wow tokens with in-game gold, however the tokens are ‘created’ by someone buying one with real money to sell for in-game gold.
So all the wow subs purchased with gold were actually paid for by someone else.
And its $20 instead of $15. So its actually MORE money for blizz to buy via in game gold
I haven’t really played mmos since around 2010. But as far as i know, there was always pay for gold and items for sell. It was waay more sketchy though. I played wow and a bunch other when i was a teen. I played with my older sister, and she paid for shit in every game we played. Underground selling had been a thing since the beginning of online games. Btw microtransactions have stolen money from farmers and botters that sold items and gold for profit.
