The Daily Blues

A game of this size and scope requires a sustainable income in order to finance the maintenance and upkeep of all of our realms, maintain a very large staff of employees to support the game, develop the tools necessary to support our players and keep things running smoothly, and afford all of the work that goes into evolving and improving upon the game with each patch.

A subscription model is ideal for MMORPGs due to the fact that the scale at which they're run requires a lot of work and investment. Yes, the game has been out over five years now, but that doesn't mean we no longer need money to afford the substantial, ongoing operation and development costs. It seems that such logistics were not fully considered in the argument made within the original post. The amount of money it costs just to keep the realms running and pay all of the staff working directly on World of Warcraft each day is probably a number you wouldn't imagine.

Your continued support in the form of playing World of Warcraft ultimately helps to secure the longevity of our company. It allows us to find and retain some of the best talent in the gaming industry and continue to develop fun, engaging content for the future, which we hope you'll enjoy as well. :)

Server maintenance will commence at approximately 9:00am PST on May 14, 2010 for all PTR servers. At this time, all PTR servers will be unavailable for test.

There is no current estimated time of completion for this maintenance.