News #1

How much did World of Warcraft cost since 2004 up till now? Somebody? Anybody?

I’m talking about servers, GMs, customer service, water bills in the offices, marketing, those cute little spring company picnics… I mean everything. So, what do you think?

The answer is $200 Million as stated in Blizzard’s latest analyst conf call (source).

As Kotaku puts it:

That’s it. Staff payroll, hardware support, customer service (which, interestingly, they say is their largest department), the lot. Well, mostly - we think they’re just talking the upkeep costs, not the original development costs. Sure, in isolation $200 million is a lot of clams, but when you put $200 million in the “expenditures” column then put $300 gazillion in the “revenue” column, you’re not just laughing all the way to the bank, you’re cackling.

News #2

Why did Sega stop making the Dreamcast? Any takers? Anybody know?

Peter Moore says it was Sega of Japan’s fault (source):

“Dreamcast was a phenomenal 18 months of pain, heartache, euphoria… We thought we had it,” he said.

“But then Playstation came out… And of course, EA didn’t publish which left a big hole, not only in sports but in other genres. We ended up that Christmas period not being able to get to where we needed to be - we weren’t far short, we just couldn’t get that critical mass.”

In other words, Moore explained, SEGA Japan set a target that just couldn’t be reached. “I can’t remember the exact figures - but we had to make N hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season, and shift N millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn’t sustain the business.

“So on January 31st 2001 we said SEGA is leaving hardware - somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people, it was not a pleasant day.”

News #3

Microsoft is releasing a new controller!

Allegedly it should fix most of the issues with the D-pad the old one had, even if our friends at Eurogamer don’t seem to agree (source).

If you ask us, whoever designed the Xbox 360 d-pad in the first place was having a bad day. Or perhaps they didn’t realise what it was for. But after a couple of days testing, it’s clear that the replacement will need software designed to take advantage of whatever magical advances live beneath its bright green exterior, because while it feels a bit different beneath your thumb, the physical change alone is insufficient to improve your average Xbox Live Arcade game. Although for some reason we do like the colour.

I dont see any physical difference from the previous one (below) - apart from the green color - but sure, hopefully its more sensitive or something…

Top Blizzard Fan Art by Krisanna McKellar (Yaoumei)