Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC 188
Yesterday morning at GDC Austin, Blizzard's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took to the stage to finally give a peek inside the inner workings of World of Warcraft. Tipping the scales at around 4,600 people utilizing 20,000 computer systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage, Blizzard has created a raging behemoth. The Online Network services group alone has "data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. [Pearce] points out the picture of the GNOC (Global Network Operations Center) in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers."
Should I Be Concerned... (Score:4, Interesting)
...that WoW servers are guarded and maintained better than DoD networks?
Small programming dept (Score:3, Interesting)
The programming department currently consists of 32 people, and envelopes systems, tools, gameplay, server technologies, and UI.
I know adding more developers can slow down production in the short term, but 5 years on I would think they would have been able to scale their programming staff up a bit more by now. New ui elements (gear manager, quest helper, even voice chat) have tended to be late and light on features, so thats one area I would think could benifit from more bodies in the future.
Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue (Score:5, Interesting)
Except ASIA is a large portion of the subscriber base (the 10 million number they like to quote a lot)and doesn't pay much per month at all. Blizzard licenses the game to ISPs and other partners that resell the game service as part of their offerings.
So that part of it IS known, and you should factor that into your equations. Monthly income off WoW is nowhere near $120 million.
Re:Story at 11... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Story at 11... (Score:4, Interesting)
The interesting question with the amount of people working at blizzard is that will indie mmo's stand any change?
World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.
That's quite hard to compete with, and it only seems to be growing. Even other big MMO's have trouble competing with WoW, with Eve Online pretty much the only true competitor (and its more targeted for hardcore players)