Blizzard north got realeased to work an an "unannounced project" Many believe to be Diablo 3. Maybe they will shock us all with a new franchise or even a new gaming style.
and...
I am a very big blizzard fan. I would love to see SC2 and D3. to think that they are working on only one project is just plain stupid. Especially with the money they have rolling in. (they could make even more if they were smart and sold stuff they can create out of thin air on ebay)
I'm sure just about every penny of WoW money is being spent in some way or another.
Much of it I'm sure goes towords server maintenence and bandwidth charges. The rest goes to employees... health insurence and other bens, office staff, programmers, artists... It's crazy. I'm sure they don't make a whole big bank roll off of everything. Especially since Diablo2 and starcraft are still somewhat popular games and warcraft 3 is still a hugly popluar. The servers for those are free, but not free to maintain. I think it's safe to say they might bank 1-2 million profit a month from everything put together.
As for people having to buy new copies of games for valid keys when they get banned for hacks/bots. Those copies on the store shelves have already been paid for and I'm sure those stores won't restock such old games and are happy to finally get rid of them. Except for warcraft 3 of course.
NtRik_ said:
WC1 --> D1 --> WC2 --> SC --> D2 ---> WC3 --> WoW --> SC:G --> SC2
Kthx.
WC3 --> WoW only because of the market. They figured they could get a nice chunk of the MMORPG pay per month pie and they did, now taking a very large section of the pie.
If you notice there is no other two franchises repeating themselves in that bracket besides warcraft. and the bracket goes more like WC3 --> 1.10 --> WoW --> SC:G --> D3 which would follow the same pattern. 1.10 was a very big update to the diablo series. Obviously the largest update to the game besides LoD itself.