Activision Blizzard Spent More Than $100 Million Developing StarCraft II

Wall Street Journal writes : "Although videogame sales are in a slump, expectations for "Starcraft II" are high. Blizzard's parent company, Activision Blizzard, has spent more than $100 million developing the computer-based game."

[Forbidden_Darkness]

"To continue reading, subscribe now."

NO! Damn you and your stupidness!

[Saryk]

I don't personally have anything against Activision or Blizzard. But I don't think they will get their money back. I hope I am wrong.

[Hyrius]

Don't worry, 100.000.000$ = what they earn every month thanks to WoW subscribers.

[Zinc]

The first game sold 1.5 million units in its first year.

Now, it has sold almost 10 million units worldwide since its release.

My guess is they will sell 2+ million units before this calendar year is up. That's not even 6 full months. If they do that, that will mean $100,000,000 in final retail price sales. Which, probably means 75,000,000 after retail markup; and after that I don't know what the split would be between the developer/publisher. But, since they all own each other, like some kind of family circle-jerk, I suppose that's a moot consideration.

If the 100,000,000 number is accurate, it won't even take a full calendar year to recoup the investment. That is astonishing. What is more astonishing; is that even when you consider multiple production runs and price reductions over time, they will still(most likely) at the very least triple the initial outlay.

Not only that, but since the initial investment in resources is front heavy, they will only need to spend a fraction of that original amount to produce the next titles in the series. Which, no doubt, will be just as successful , as the last.

All the while they are making more than a billion dollars a year from WOW.

And I didn't even go into Diablo 3...

Can you say hand-over-fist? I can, but barely, mostly because of the brain damage and concentrated gorilla dust.

[led1090]

NA preorders alone are over 600,000. It will probably sell 1 million copies in america alone. My bet is 3 million copies at launch which equal around 180 million. So they'll probably see a profit in the very first week

[despair]

people who are too young to remember starcraft don't understand the support and love for the series, SC2 is going to sell millions easily,I've been waiting 12 year for this sequel and definitely day one for me.