World of Warcraft continuing to boost Vivendi's bottom line
by Elizabeth Harper 
Jul 30th 2007 at 5:43PM
Vivendi, who happens to own Blizzard Entertainment, recently announced its earnings for the second quarter of 2007. Revenues from their gaming division are up 29% (with overall revenues up 7.4%), with the report claiming these numbers were up due to the continued success of World of Warcraft. Despite the fact that the game hasn't been growing as quickly during 2007 than it has in the past (Blizzard's official announcements suggest they're growing at a rate of approximately 160,000 new active subscribers a month compared to approximately 330,000 new active subscribers a month mid-2006), it's still a huge financial success that shows no signs of fading any time soon.Filed under: Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kevin Jul 30th 2007 6:49PM
That just totally ruined my wholesome views of Blizzard. Is it really just about us players? Really?
GamerJunkie Jul 30th 2007 7:34PM
The decreased growth rate is a reflection of the dissatisfaction of many early players who felt BC has been a failure to them and Blizzard's inability to fix the games balance issues and lacking of real PVP content.
Majority of items and stuff in BC are just re-colored and reworked stats, nothing original as the 1.6~1.9 content. AQ, BWL, and Naxx are the most original content Blizzard has created and so far nothing in BC has the same feel as those old instances.
Thus, you have a declining veteran WOW population but increase in farmers and Asian-Pacific region players.
Areris Jul 30th 2007 8:00PM
@2 your comment will surely be quoted in the next 20+ replies as being so wrong or innacurate.
Decreasing rate of new players means the cap is hit, I bet many people thought 6 million then 7 million was the cap since EQ1 did not even hit 1 million in its prime.
Wow is primarily made up of new players to mmos, reason this is so obvious is because no other mmo has come close to these numbers. Word of mouth helped spread the popularity and the majority of the player base never raided before let a lone see BWL AQ40 or even got bothered to attune to naxx.
Recolored items? The greens and blues pre 60 were recolered numerous times and this time they recolored t1 and t2 sets which were many players who could not raid were able to now get the sets they thought looked cool before and now attainable to more casual players.
The new 5 mans made the game more challenging compared to the old 5 mans because most of them were not tank and spank ecounters.
Rep grind was fixed imo because instead of incredibly hard rep grinds the rewards were spread out into a bunch of new factions and many different ways to earn the rep was implemented.
Game balance complaining has become the stuff of legends and there are more players mocking complaints of balance and the nerd rage makes good comedy.
Blizzard I am sure thought of the fact that veteran players after 2-3 years would eventually quit after the expansion due to burn out but the influx of returning players at expansion who bought the expansion and played for 4 months and then quit again is still a financial gain for blizzard.
overneathe Jul 30th 2007 8:03PM
@1
Well... let's do the maths then shall we? Currently Blizz has 9 million active accounts, which means that for the past 2 months only they have made... what? Not sure if this price is exact but let's assume it's $30 for 2 months. 9x30 = 270... million, for 2 months. Not including newly bought accounts, merchandice, toys, card games, books and RPG books. Well, I think Blizz should buy Vivendi soon.
It's never all about gamers. But compared to other companies I think I'll be paying my $30.
X-Wower Jul 30th 2007 9:38PM
Every 20 seconds a developers head explodes while thinking about the incredibly sick amount of money Wow brings in on a monthly basis.
CauthonDM Jul 30th 2007 11:18PM
I'd love to see the balance sheet on WoW. I appreciate that they bring in an unprecedented amount of money for an MMO, but the server upkeep and backbone must be very costly.
It's also quite interesting that while Vivendi are talking about WoW the $287 million that the games division seems like a small drop in their total $7.1 billion revenue