Jan 28, 2008

10 million subscribers on WoW

One of my favourite games, although its a money and time sink also, and which I have not been able to play for the last 3 months as there is no broadband connectivity in my building ( yeah - its a fact, broadband in pune is one big deal), has touched the 10 million subscriber mark.

Not impressed cause its a game ? I know people think games are for kiddies. Well, heres something for you to think about ...

Gaming in USA is the 2nd largest entertainment industry, next only to Hollywood. Tourism comes a distinct 3rd.

Still not convinced are you ?

Lets try again. This time with WoW as the base.

WoW works on a monthly subscription. So, one pays around $15 per month to play the game - which is an online virtual world. So, in terms of the current headlines .. that amounts to :
10m x $15 = $150m per month.
x12months = $1,800 million per year ! phew !

lets do some cost reduction on this wrt expenses taken by the company for making the game available on various servers and also the bandwidth rents, as well as the dev costs. lets strike out $800 million from the list ( the company is around 300 people , so this seems reasonable). The end of year profit is a cool $1billion.

Wipro is a $1billion company ...

do the maths, how much money per head.

phew!

2 comments:

  1. Why dont you try Reliance wimax. No, i am not an agent. I am a biker like you and suffered for one good year to get broadband. I live in a defence colony and wimax (it is wireless) is the only service in my building.
    In earlier days, it was giving so many problems like not getting ip address from DHCP server, but since last 1 month, its working perfectly alright and speed is too good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Sneh. I did try to get the Reliance WiMax. The guys came, but even after 3 days were not able to set up the system. Finally i got frustrated and sent them packing.

    In hindsight, if i had followed up with them, it would have been deployed till now !

    A week back the Reliance guys again contacted me, and this time for broadband through the wire. Lets see how this works out.

    ReplyDelete