ASeven wrote on May 22, 2012, 19:54:
You are thinking in terms of revenue only. Remember that there are costs and with a MMORPG those costs tend to be huge, from paying personnel to paying the server structure, etc. I'm willing to bet that 60% to 80% of those revenues were eaten away by the fixed and variable costs.
I know but I'm sure that if we included the extra income that they have been making from the sale of retail and digital goods and service fees it would balance out.
And I don't think the costs are that high. Let's get aggressive and assume 200 employees in total costing an average of US$ 5K each per head and month = US$ 1 million.
Then there's ~200 servers and let us go crazy again and assume a rental fee or TCO of US$ 10K per server per month = US$ 2 million (I don't think it is anywhere near that high or they would have already merged servers if the costs were that high but anyway...).
Then we're at ~US$ 3 million and remember we're making US$ 15 million from subs per month so we're only at about 20% for employees and server maintenance now which should be the largest chunks by far.
Maybe if we add all of the other fixed and variable costs that every business needs to cover we'd be getting into the 30% - 40% range but I doubt that we'd ever get anywhere near 60% to 80%.