They're not raking in as much as everyone thinks.
They have some 150 servers, all of which have at LEAST 10 GMs on at a time, which is a full time paid job.
Not to mention they have a Dev team that is constantly working on shit in game. I guess people just don't see it that way
you are such a noob. how can you have over 10,000 posts and be such a noob? empty can rattles the most eh.
5 million subscribers @ $15 is $75m a month (thats 900 MILLION US a year) and if blizz make $20 per box sold we can probably assume their monthly income from subscription and box sales is $80m.
150 servers? ok id hazzard a guess at $20,000 cost a month per server with bandwith? thats $3 mil running costs. even if its double, its 6 mil, whatever.
I dont for a second believe each server has 10 admins active, making it 30 admins per server. lets say there are 20 GMs employed per server, requiring 3000GMs full time (lol) at $40,000 a year with employment costs (yea right the asian ones sure get $40k). On a monthly bases, the GMs cost would be $10m a month.
so on a monthly bases with 3 mil running hardware cost and $10m GM cost (my arse) blizzard have erm... an income of $67m. For $67m a month you can hire 11,500 developers at $70k us a year cost. sooo... why dont you eat a can of stfu and leave the thinking to the people who arebetter equipped to do so. blizzard makes 50, 60 mil US out of this game a month profit to subsidise the rest of their operations. they can afford to develop whatever the hell they want, however they wish to do it. this is why of course they are ploughing cash into d3. if you are making that much money you don't sit on it, you invest it. and d3 will be another immense earner.
as to subscription, yes i'd pay for diablo 3. ultimately, running 2 mmorpg games with 5 million+ subscribers is probably not something a game developer is capable of. blizzard have always been good at concentrating on their core products and distinguishing them from eachother. there is little reason for d3 to be a subscription based game. wow is so different from d2 playing experience so d3 is likely to remain in the spirit of d2 in pretty much every way. bnet character database, private hoster games, similar items, magic find, mass slaughter of mobs. same of the old, just bigger and prettier.