There's a wealth of information out there on Blizzard's announcements or meetings that describe their cost of development and operating expenditures, however many of them are down-right contradictory.

Note: When I refer to Operating Costs by the way, I'm talking about EVERYTHING related to operating the WoW Servers and Employees (e.g. staffing, customer support, their Avaya phone switches & sets, HP servers, electricity, etc.)

Here are the top 5 common beliefs:

1. WoW cost $100 million for development and total upkeep for 4 years (Source)
2. WoW cost $200 million for development and total upkeep for 4 years (Source)
3. WoW cost $200 million for total upkeep but not development (Source)
4. WoW cost $100 million for development and/or total upkeep (Source)
5. WoW cost $63 million for development that took 4.5 years (Source)

If you read the articles and comments, you can certainly understand that there is a lot of confusion over this number.

Let's take the most expensive number - that WoW upkeep costs $200 million over 4 years (it's 47 months actually). On average, that's $4.25M per month.

That number seems extremely high considering that there are only ~2.5k servers (~15k blades / ~730 realms worldwide) utilized. Until that is, you read this:

"That's $200 million for the total cost of upkeep since the game's November 2004 release (presumably not including the initial cost to develop the game). This includes payroll for the entire staff, hardware support, and -- apparently the biggest infrastructure cost -- customer service."

That makes more sense: the biggest upkeep cost in that $200 million figure is customer service. So, that $4.25M per month figure is probably a lot less now considering that there have been significant numbers of lay-offs in the WoW offices and support teams, and that the server count has pretty much remained the same since the announcement.

Also, some Blizzard employees have stated that they have reduced yearly operating costs by $500,000 and have introduced new policies that have resulted in multi-millions of yearly loss reduction. (Link)

So it's safe to say that all World of Warcraft operating costs are at max $4.25 million per month. Realistically though, it's probably half of that amount or less now.

Keep this figure in mind, it's important for another post that I've been preparing. :)

It appears that Activision Blizzard's quarterly earnings report came out yesterday after my post, it actually addresses one of the updates I had provided in regards to Blizzard's Next-Gen MMO - ie, Activision is investing heavy into the new MMO, which will kick development into high gear "very soon" as previously stated.

They'll be moving employees over from other departments (e.g. Cataclysm team) within the next few months.

What's funny about the Activision Blizzard news release though, is that people think that this is "new" information. Hundreds of online news services have been posting that Blizzard's MMO will be based on a NEW IP which is apparently "new and exciting" information. That information however is actually over a year old.

So anyways, one item I forget to mention in the previous post was the release date for the game. As mentioned, even though they've been working on the "next-gen MMO" for 3 years - there hasn't been a lot of progress. Analysts have predicted that the game will be released by 2012 or 2013. However, at their current pace (although development will start increasing soon), a release date of 2015 is more likely (with beta testing in 2014).

A streaming MMO is a possibility for the next gen consoles (PS4/XBOX720) but I still have no confirmation on that from my source. There have only been some discussions and some unrelated experimentation (from the next gen MMO project). And there's basically no team tasked with creating it as of yet (not until they confirm that it can actually work well).

Other than that, Blizzard biggest concern for their product on next gen consoles is the interface.. if motion-tracking software is a bust (which it is), expect standard keyboard/mouse setups for the consoles. Blizzard will probably release customized kb/mouse hardware as well for the consoles. (Gotta milk revenue wherever you can right?)

Note: The reason I say motion-tracking tech (like Kinect) is a bust for their next-gen MMO is because it's not really applicable for twitch-based/fast-action combat. It's fine for dancing, jumping, and fun kids games.. but not a game with consequences and competition where accuracy of commands and every second is critical. As it stands, the retail product has been called very laggy, unresponsive, and inaccurate. Check out Microsoft's faked Starwars Kinect footage by the way.. the actor mimicked everything the character on the screen did (the entire exercise was probably practiced over-and-over to make it look real). It's not good when a product is constantly failing during demonstrations.