Slippy wrote on May 3, 2012, 22:42:

RollinThundr wrote on May 3, 2012, 20:51:
It's not expensive on their end to host, the items are already designed, developed and in the game and paid for.

At that point it's pure greed on Blizzard's part. but of course the usual blizzard sucktard is all for it. How shocking.

I'm not digging here RollinThundr, just curious... what exactly do you do for a living? I manage a factory that employs over 150 people and I do contract programming as a side job for anywhere between three to five companies at any given time.

I've always been amazed at how much things really do cost to research/design/purchase/assemble or build/ship/market and finally sell... The ROI on a game like Diablo 3 will no doubt be a longer time than you might realize. They will make money (don't get me wrong) but throwing statements around like "It's not that expensive to..." you're probably further off than you think. Also remember, D3 doesen't just have to make money to pay off what they invested in it, they also have an obligation to continue to provide a steady revenue stream to support all the other games/servers/web-sites/research/etc that they do on a daily basis that no one sees.

D3 was also publically announced just under 4 years ago. I'm sure they did a lot of R&D before the announcement... So that is, at the very minimum, four years of wages, software, Hardware and 'brick and morter' that has been paid out before even $1 was collected prior to pre-orders. If you take the size of the development teams (coders, IT support, play testers, artists, sound teams, media teams, sales and public relations, team managers, and on and on and on) coupled with the average wages and benifits for people of their skill level, you have a heafty dollar value that needs to be recouped before a single dollar of profit is seen. Where do you think a lot of the profit from past ventures go??? Not in the pockets of the CEO's. Most companies bank the money so that they can afford to pay these new projects for 4, 6 or even 8 years without return so that they don't have to go out and borrow the money while the project is developing (this usually kills projects, especially software related ones). Even then, from a business perspective, they have to ensure that the ROI on the money they are spending or banking must be higher than if they would have rolled those profits into some type of return investment like a bond... otherwise it wouldn't 'pay' to fund the project in the first place.

Yet you still state, "It's not that expensive to..." which I respond, "OOOOhhhhh Kayyyyyyy..."

The ~15%(applied however many times on monies in and/or out) is what their research and statistical data tells them the market will bear to maximize a ROI in the shortest time possible coupled with box and digital sales of the game. This could go up over time and could go down depending on all the afore mentioned variables... but I'm sure I'm wrong and it's much simpler than that...