Quote:
Originally Posted by Cindy Claveau  But it'd be a bogus number. |
I don't disagree with the questionable nature of mmoprgcharts.org, but Blizzard, being a division of the publicly-held firm is under regulatory requirements to provide accurate accounting. They recently put out a press release
claiming 10 million paying WoW accounts worldwide including 2.5M in North America and 2M in Europe and 5.5M in Asia. Those numbers I believe accurate; compared to which I view any LL numbers as something this side of marketing fluff.
Incidentally, assuming $150k per developer-year, you should be able to clean-room clone
SL for about $4M which should yield you $40M in revenue over 5 years (I'm a decade out of that industry, so my numbers are slightly suspect but very pessimistically biased). Incidentally, Blizzard claims an R&D staff of only 250.