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Blizzard announced on January 22 that its popular MMORPG has reached the "more than 10 million subscribers worldwide" milestone and that they are very proud of that...

It took Blizzard almost 6 months to pass from 9 million subscribers to 10 million subscribers, the last update on how many WoW players are out there are happening on July 24, 2007. As expected, the Asian continent is where the title has the largest mass of subscribers, with more than 5.5 million gamers paying their monthly subscription for a chance to gold farm. The US comes in second place, with more than 2.5 million subscribers, while Europe is on the third spot, with only 2 million.
"It's very gratifying to see gamers around the world continuing to show such enthusiasm and support for World of Warcraft," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We're always pleased to welcome new players to the game, and we're looking forward to sharing the next major content update with the entire community in the months ahead."
OK, now let's do some simple calculi: if all those 10 million subscribers were to pay the regular $14.99 month-to-month fee, then Blizzard would fill its pockets with almost $150 million every single month ($149 million to be exact, but of course there are people who pay for 3 or 6 months in advance). For the company that also brought us StarCraft and Diablo that means a revenue-target of more than $1.7 billion ($1,798,900,000) for FY 2008, if (and that's a BIG "if"...) they manage to keep ONLY 10 million subscribers for the 11 months left.

But with China's online gaming population going towards 58 million by the end of 2008, with constant new-comers flooding servers worldwide, with a new expansion pack looming and with a plethora of mods (yeah, World of Porncraft included...) available, it somehow natural to think profits will go up even further in Azeroth, and we are not mentioning the up-coming launch of StarCraft 2...

Now, we all know that according to Blizzard these money are used for server maintenance, support, and ongoing content creation. We also know how most of the time servers are down, especially when new expansion-packs rush in (remember The Burning Crusade fiesta?...). After some googling on the Internet we've also discovered that the most expensive data center to date is the one Microsoft tries to built somewhere in Texas, which is to cost around $600 million (and yes, it's going to be gigantic, much larger than anything Blizzard has at the moment...). So building and maintaining server centers shouldn't surpass $100 million/year, and that's a worst case scenario...

Going further with our infamous judgement, we infer that it costs around $10 million to build a PC game these days (Halo 3 apparently cost between $25 and $40 to build, and $10 million more to promote, but that's an exception) and that offering support for it shouldn't cost more than $10 million (come on, it's a friggin' game, I know it's got 10 million subscribers, but not all have issues and it's not like Blizzard answers your questions the same day you asked them... if they answer...).

What does the total amount to? Well, $100 million in servers and maintenance plus about $20 million for content creation and support... you guessed it, about $120 million per year, and only if one expansion pack is released annually...

Where does the rest until $1.7 billion go to?...