Blizzard, what are you doing, and where are you headed?

Foul things are afoot.

Fact 1) A load of people find Cataclysm massively dissatisfying compared to prior expansions.
Fact 2) Blizzard is running out of content; instead of creating new content, they either jack ideas from outside or recycle old content. (FYI, patch 4.1 will include about 28 new invisible polygons in Ghostlands, about 2 square feet worth of photoshopped jpgs, and 300 lines of code)
Fact 3) According to certain statistics, the Blizzard userbase is declining
Fact 4) The ActiBlizz stock (ATVI) has not experienced ANY significant growth since summer '09.
Fact 5) Gathering from the limited data available for 2010 we can assume that only limited expansion has occured since then.

bottom line: there is no cash to buy us goodies.

my question: why the hell is there no cash?

According to Activision, World of Warcraft reached 12 mil subscriptions october last year. that would mean that the revenue from subscriptions ALONE would be over $2.1 Bn a year (~$500mil/quarter).
(this could be ambiguous: i take 'World of Warcraft®, [...], now exceeds 12 million players worldwide.' means 12 mil active players)

So we have approximatly 500 mil dolla in cash money per quarter.
according to a blog of a dude called 'daeity' static blizzard operationg costs (power, staff, maintainance, servers, customer service, blah blah) was around $25mil a quarter in 2010.

'but there's tax' for the sake of argument

if you slap a 15% tax on the 500mil you get 425mil
and if you slap a 15% tax on the 25mil you get 29 mil

you still have freaking 395 million united states dollars left for shenanigans per quarter, that's

one point five billion united states dollar profit per year

that's $1500000000

supposedly call of duty: modern warfare 2 development and production costs were around $50 mil. The the advertisement campaign itself however came close to $200 mil.

So if we assume that Blizzard spends about $200 mil on advertisement each year there are still $1.3 billion left!

and even if the cataclysm cost another $100 mil to produce and develop, there's $1.2 billion left!


where did all that cash go? did one of the activision execs have the grand idea to invest the cash into a fleet of Gulfstream G650s? (fly like a g6?) ? You could buy freaking 20 with the ammount of cash you have there. Where is it? Why don't we see it in the game?

I mean if you spent 1 freaking billion dollars on development, do you know how epic this game could become? And to be perfectly honest, blizzard, you owe it to us. We are paying for a service. And you are not rendering this service to the best of your abilities from the looks of it.

ITT: discuss where the money could be, or where my calculations are wrong.
ITT: Imagine what the game would be like if the missing $1bn were used for development