Warlock and Mage 1.6 bugs

[Kevin]

i doubt that... considering they used to do a game/exp every year, and selling 5-10 million copies (10 is high i think, iirc, sc sold 7-8 million worldwide) at $50 per, that's only $50m per year (and they don't get all of that)...

right now they are pulling in $30m a month ($15 * $2m), with similar (within a factor of 10?) non-payroll expenses to d2... so $360m a year if they can keep 2 million subs (doubtful), but even half that is 3x as good as they used to be doing... and even if they have 2000 gms/phone support/support staff, that's only $10m a month in payroll (at $5k per person)... and i'm pretty sure they have nowhere near 2000 support staff... and probably less than 200 coders/artists/managers/designers, and if they get $10k a month, that's only $2m/month in salary... 

so, unless you know something i don't, i really doubt that money is the reason of any of their problems... they rushed this game out the door in time for the holiday season (and probably due to pressure from eq2) and it obviously lacked polish in a few areas, so i think it's not unreasonable that they skimped on some stuff early (testing, documentation, etc) and its hitting them now... i've heard that it takes a year for a new hire to get ramped up, and that coupled with turnover can cause problems, especially if you have #$%&ty pay and work your employees hard (which i've heard they do)...
[right][snapback]83522[/snapback][/right]

I'm not claiming to know all the details, but there is a lot more to an MMO than just employees pay. There is a large initial money sink in the servers, the massive monthly bandwidth bills that need to be paid for all the data that gets to fly around, the initial production sink, the 3 or 4 years of salary that have to be recovered from before the game was released. The bandwidth thing is a huge difference from the what battle.net was for everything else they did. For everything but D2 realm games b.net was just a match making service and recieved almost no data after the game was started since the game itself was hosted on one of the players systems.

I never claimed the game wasn't rushed, or didn't have problems, or that money wasn't mis managed. I'm just saying that most every other MMO before WoW took over a year and some of them nearly 2 years before it was turning a profit from the standpoint of project finances. Many people aren't familar with corporate finance thinking at all. That's all. I'm done talking about this since I really don't have any other informatio. It was just something else for people to think about it.