Statistically speaking, Everquest is a very small fry compared to the Super-sized game of World of Warcraft. However, just because a large number of players are playing a game, does that alone make a company profitable? Sony’s Everquest 2, this by assumption only, has roughly 250K (at max) subscribers that play the game, whereas Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (in documented articles) has as many as 8 million players. That’s exponentially larger revenue than Everquest 2. But does that mean that Blizzard is eating steak and potatoes while the people over and SoE is eating bread and water? Not necessarily, in my opinion.

People can rant and rave about how great WoW is compared to EQ2, and how EQ2 should do this and that, and that WoW is the back breaker to SOE and it’s future, but let’s look at it from a business standpoint. The following numbers are all hypothetical and hold no real value only to proove the case at hand. These are only my assumptions and opinions and should not be used or taken out of context.

This is only assuming that players are paying by the month, which is completely not the case in most situations ( I know this), but for base numbers only, we’ll assume they are:

Everquest 2 Number of Players: 250,000 max
Average Subscription Rate: $14.99 EA/month

Total Revenue: $3,747,500.00 max /month

World of Warcraft Number of Players: 8,000,000 max
Average Subscription Rate: $14.99 EA/month

Total Revenue: $119,920,000.00 max/month

Blizzard has 32 times more monthly revenue that SOE does for the games we have listed. That’s not a small amount of difference, it’s a huge amount of difference. Overhead is substantial obviously with constant R&D, maintanence, marketing, etc… I can only assume that Blizzard has a much higher overhead and SOE studios does. However, does that mean that SOE is a flop here? Not exactly, in fact, not at all if planned correctly.

To the point of the post we go. Blizzard is in a very sensitive situation at this time since it seems to have all its eggs in one basket. They obviously have other fish in the fryer, but they have the majority of it’s product in WoW. Sure SoE has games that are not as popular as Blizzard, but they have the fries/shakes to go with the burger. They have Vanguard, Matrix Online, SWG, Planetside… and more to come in the near future. So rather than being all revenue coming from the majority of one game, SoE has implemented a risk reducer by generating revenue throughout their entire gaming platforms, with intelligently offering the service of STATION PASS or individual subscription rates. It’s a very safe investment and will prevent from a massive fallout. Wheras with Blizzard, a fallout could be the end of a gaming giant.

It will be interesting to see how World of Warcraft does within the next 6 months. As they are now implementing “dummy down” patches to allow people to pass through obstacles in the game that were originally set for time sinked, high tiered players. These casual gamers can now access alot of the higher end content without much time invested as its original intent. Blizzard has a slower release model as does SOE, and it’s been a huge selling point as of recently that SOE releases a ton of very impressive free content, yearly expansions, and a ton of free addons. However, Blizzard has only release one expansion since it’s release in 2004. I will be watching with binoculars the movement of these MMO giants in the next couple of months.

article from www.vicsale.com