Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Tharn]

As far as the cost thing goes, what exactly makes it cheaper to outsource anyway? Ultimately the bottom-line cost must be paid somewhere along the line, and an additional company has its own overhead.

Outsourcing can be cheaper when you're outsourcing somehting what is not core business of your company and therefore there are other companies who can utilize:
- experienced experts on the subject
- economies of scale
However you can in general outsource only something, what's usualy done elsewhere too.

Blizzard is game development company so their core business is making game design and content. They could have bought some graphics engine for WoW, sure. However, I'm afraid this network design is too proprietary for each MMOG company to be able to work with some standard tools or even outsource it.

There's also the issue that when systems are getting under heavier load, unexpected bugs start to surface, which is I guess plays big part in WoW problems.

Btw, Malakar, you must pay maintenance fee for both hardware and software you're using on the servers, if you ever want some support (that's including fixing bugs in software, btw). You can count with 5-20% annualy of purchasing price (depends highly on what purchasing price you negotiate too), where some notoriously known companies are very bastardly.

I however wonder why, if this is caused by some company's product, Blizzard didn't draw their CEO by an ear and made a nice big press conference.