Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Malakar]

On a related note, I was also told that the day to day costs or running the servers is immense- to the tune of several million dollars a month.

If they're referring to anything other than the ISP costs, that sounds like utter BS to me. I see no major legitimate costs for running servers after the hardware is bought and the system is fine tuned.

One big factor in the cost I was surprised to hear was what my friend refered to as the "defense budget"- the cost of protecting the servers themselves from direct attack via the net. They are assaulted constantly by hackers who attempt to crash or hack in to the servers, either maliciously or to track the info flowing both ways on the networks. Its not a smal feet to protect them, and still allow the game to flow at all, let alone smoothly. The figures discussed put the wow servers at about the same target level as the pentagon, if not more so, in the attempts to hack in to, moslty my rank amatuers, but some serious damage has been done by pros as well.

Sensationalism... and throwing money at it isn't going to do much.


On the general topic of outsourcing servers, the idea seems absolutely ridiculous to me, especially when contracts are involved. I'm not saying Blizzard didn't do it, I'm saying it's really stupid if they did.