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I'd like to take a moment to talk about monthly fees. Most MMOs charge a recurring fee of some sort. Now, don't get me wrong. I understand that running all of those servers can be costly. But really, World of WarCraft has a member base of some six million players. If everyone pays $15 USD a month, that's $90 million a month that Blizzard is raking in. I think that's more money than most games ever make. I mean, I know it's not nearly on the same scale, but Blizzard has kept Battle.net open for free for many years. It seems silly that they should have to charge $15 a month for the most popular MMORPG around.

I think there are a couple of choices that could make everybody happy:

1. Lower the monthly fees. $5 is much more reasonable to pay for a month. That's still $30 million a month that Blizzard would receive.

2. Make the game itself free, but charge the $15 a month. They'd still be raking in the dough there.

3. Make a Collector's Edition that costs more, but waive the monthly fee. This could be with Option #1, so the Regular Edition copies would still have to pay a small monthly fee.

Yeah, that's probably why I've never played a MMORPG that costs a monthly fee

But I agree, it's so much money =\

Yes Blizzard is raking in a ton of cash even though they have to pay for all the servers and etc...
But Battle.net and what WoW uses are significantly different. Battle.net is basically a chat client and a game finder. When you get in a game, you can disconnect from battle.net and still be able to play. Battle.net has nothing to do with in game packets. Infact Battle.net uses so little data that they can afford to keep it free.


With a MMORPG, they have to send data to everyone. If there is 500,000 people on, there is data constantly going between servers and the players non stop. There is a lot of data.

Plus they can use that extra cash to get filthy rich, make Battle.net even better, hire more programmers, modelers, increase there Quality Insurance department, to make games quicker and better. Of course Filthy Rich is #1 on their list. I know it would be on mine. Anyway, as long as people are willing to pay $15 a month it will stay at $15 a month.

At least Blizzard can use that huge amount of money to make the WoW movie.

Well, if it were possible for me to make all that money in a month I would take that chance.

If people really like the game, they will pay. The more money that Blizzard recieves will probably go towards a new Blizzard game. I think it is worth it.

Or what if all this time that blizzard chose to make Wow so once they have the money they will do a big favour for starcraft say like THE WORLD OF STARCRAFT and make doubles the cha-ching!

I highly doubt they will ever make a game called WoSC. That would be just plain stupid and I know that people that play it are probabally going to be called posers. Rofl.

They are most likely using the money they invest to update the games that are already out and make them alot better. I think that is reasonable.

Games which they're still concerned about: World of WarCraft (and its expansion pack)

The have 6 million accounts, but a fairly large amount of them aren't active accounts, which do not pay. This means that they earn less than $90 million a month.

Then you have server costs. North America alone has 156 realms, and then you have the European servers, Asian servers and Australian servers. This should bring up the number close to about 300 servers worldwide.

You have to pay for the server itself, operation costs of the servers (Electricity, programs, maintenance, T3 line, etc...) and the people that maintain the servers.

Then you're currently always making new content for the game, which means that you have your own dedicated team of programmers that only work on making new content. Then you have programmers for bug fixing, server performance, etc. You then have artists, writters, QA Assurance, Tech Support, Game Masters(About 3~4 per server at any given moment, so it should be about 9~12 per server)CD manufacturing companies, shipping costs and lots of other stuff to pay for.

It all ads up.

That is why I don't play MMORPG and especially don't play the ones that cost money.

I don't think option 2 would work. Making the game free means that people will just download (or take it but making cd's cost money so downloading would be better) and go to private servers, as many people are doing at the moment. They can still download it peer to peer but it takes much longer and will discourage some.

Anyways, I think that it is best if they make the game cost a bit more and make it free monthly costs. 5 dollars is a bit too cheap so make it around 7-10 dollars if you are going to have monthly fees.

Higher montly fees make less people want to play. There should be a small fee per month like $3. This would make more people want to play the game.

Every instance in a realm has one own server, that means there are like 50 servers in every realm. And then there are realms to fill with 6 million people, plus those that are not as full as the others. You do the math, heh. It must be very expensive

Well the prices won't ever go down

1) All the other rpgs are close to the same price... why do it cheaper when other MMRPG Arn't

2) People Pay for the price that they have so why would they change the price if they have an odd 6 million people paying the price alrdy and making that much!!

3) Its just fricken smart!! get use to it get a job... WoW offers game cards so if you can't pay for it monthly... Or better yet get a private server >_< they are free but have the risk of being shutdown!

The more popular the game is, the more employees will be needed. They have the freedom to set their prices and they so happened to be really successful. Of course, WoW won't stay huge for long, I'm very sure that once that new MMORPG comes out (I believe it's by the makers of EQ), a lot of people will move on and Blizzard won't be raking in as much money. I believe it's perfectly fine to set the price to $15 dollars a month. Think of it this way, you're buying a game every three months.

I think its stupid, why pay 90$ for a game, and then pay for it again over and over? it defies the point of buying something! Its like expensive renting..

Most of the people that I know ONLY play WoW so any other games are put aside for who knows how long. All I know is that the expenses for WoW is reasonable as long as you don't buy new console games and such.