Not an accredited institution
Here’s the thing about the Wall Street Journal. First of all, it’s published from Wall Street – you know, in New York. Second, it has the word the “Journal” in its name, which makes it way better than if it said “paper” or “post” or “cat box liner”.
Ok, that’s two things, but the point is that they should know what they hell they’re doing.
Turns out, not so much.
In an article on July 16, the WSJ decided to break the story that Starcraft II had in fact cost $100 million dollars to develop. While this could easily be equalled by potential sales of the game, the cost seemed absurdly high, and many questioned just what exactly the hell Blizz had been doing to spend that much money developing an RTS, even one as legendary as Starcraft.
Turns out Blizzard never disclosed how much the game actually cost to make, and the $100 million figure was in fact in reference to the cost to develop World of Warcraft. While this is still a staggeringly high number, the costs to develop an MMO that has spanned almost six years and generated an installed fan base of over 10 million would naturally be more on the ”holy hell that’s a lot of cash” side of the money fence than anything like Starcraft II.
What’s interesting is that the retraction didn’t get published until July 24, 2010. Presumably, Blizzard knew it was wrong as soon as it hit newsstands, and unless they don’t have anyone on staff who can actually read numbers, they should have been on the phone with the WSJ letting them know the error of their ways.
And yet, it took eight days for the correction to be published. Oddly enough, even more buzz about Starcraft II was generated during the last week as gamers and geeks everywhere drooled over the $100 million dollar game they were going to get to play. Sure, Blizz needed to correct that information…eventually…but in the meantime, their supposedly insanely high cost of development went ahead and generated some free publicity.
Misinformation and disinformation FTW, apparently.
On the heels of a “SCII cost this much” fake-out comes another monetary mystic proposing some new numbers. According to Mike Hickey, a financial analyst who apparently likes thinking about videogames, the new iteration of the Starcraft franchise could potentially sell over 7 million copies by the end of the year, netting a cool $350 million for Blizzard.
To put this in perspective, think of these 7 million copies as almost double the population of Norway, one of the most awesome countries ever.
If Blizz can almost double awesome, well, watch out world when they announce their super-secret MMO at Blizzcon later this year.
We’re thinking a Lost Vikings spin-off is in the cards.
We heard they’ve already spent $62 billion dollars on it.
