Thinking this game is a bad investment

[Waliel]

I believe a while back I heard that World of Warcraft cost $100,000 to run for a single day, and that game has way, way, waaaay more servers than this game. If WoW for how enormous it is costs that much to run for a day, take a small fraction of that for what it costs SE to run this much smaller game, and compare that to how much they get in a month.

This game is like printing money for them, and just like Blizzard, I don't see hardly any of it going back into the game. It's fine to make a profit, but changing enormous parts of the fundamental game just to have to get around doing any actual work is pretty messed up.

So I went to check the numbers and FFXIV has 26% of WoW's server capacity (64 to 246) and 9% (500k) to 18% (1m) of their subs (5.6m Q2 2015). Server cost to subscriber ratio is actually almost three times worse with FFXIV in the worst case. Then there's also wages and taxes and million other things.

No doubt it's making a profit, because there probably wouldn't never have been an expansion and real euro servers otherwise, but I've never liked the "subs x monthly fee = gazillions of profit" logic.