An article on Playfuls.com (which I found via Incgamers) tried to take the news about Blizzard's ten million subscribers from earlier this week, and suss out just how much money they're making. They do what most people would do, which is multiply their $15 subscription rate per month times ten million, which would mean that Blizzard is raking in $150 million a month, or about $1.7 billion a year is gross profits.

Except that's not right. Because while North American and European players pay about $15 a month, many Chinese and Asian subscribers don't pay monthly-- they pay hourly, at a much lower rate than what other players around the world pay. With 2.5 million and 2 million subscribers in North American and Europe respectively, Blizzard is still making $810 million a year (not to mention the cost to purchase the original game and the expansion pack, which at this point is probably negligible at this point given how much retailers like to take out) in those places. But that leaves 5.5 million players in other countries, and their payment plans aren't as rigidly defined.

Of course, obviously these are all estimates as well, and they're gross, too-- you have to remember that Blizzard pays a huge group of people money to keep up content, customer service, promotion, and administration, as well as maintenance on what must be a huge number of servers (each realm has at least three or four servers running on it, for each continent and all the instances). And Blizzard has other income coming in as well-- licensing fees, fees from The9 (the company that actually runs WoW in China, and likely collects subscription fees there), transfer fees from players, and so on.

Don't get me wrong-- Blizzard is still making a lot of net money on the deal, easily into the hundred millions. But it's not as easily as multiplying what you're paying by ten million, because that's just not the case.

Now that guild banks are incoming to the game, what's missing from our little virtual economy system? Taxes! That's what Noplat suggests, anyway-- he says that now that guilds have a place to store up their own central banks, the next step is to require payments from guild members for various guild running costs.

I'm not quite sure I agree-- most guilds don't require anything like this. The biggest costs I can think of simply involve raiding repairs, and not only is not every member of every guild involved with raiding, but repair costs aren't that big a deal anyway, especially with daily quests throwing out money for just a few minutes' work. There may be costs coming in the game (guild housing would obviously require a lot of money, and we still haven't been told how siege weapons might work in guild battlegrounds-- will we have to buy those?), but at this point, we don't really need guild taxes or membership fees.

The closest thing my guild ever did to a membership tax is that they ask everyone to pay a few g to any engineer that drops a repair bot during a raid (to cover those costs), but considering how the new instances are set up, I haven't seen a repair bot need to be dropped for a long time anyway. Does your guild need enough money to require membership fees or taxes? And if so, for what? Potions?

I'm very interested in seeing the answer to this one-- I have always used a credit card to pay for my account, just because it's all automatically done between Blizzard and my bank, and I don't ever have to worry if my account is all paid up. But I'm sure there are tons of people out there, like popsixx, who play from game card to game card, buying them one after another, or hoarding them up (from gifts or elsewhere), and putting them in when necessary.

For the life of me, though, I can't guess which one would be more popular. There are definitely a lot of kids playing the game, and they'd use game cards for sure. But then again, most of the folks I play with are a little older and financially more stable, and more likely to use credit cards (or PayPal for that matter)

So which is it? Game cards or credit cards? And feel free to tell us in the comments why you do what you do-- maybe there's some huge benefit to using only game cards that I haven't noticed yet.