Thursday, April 15, 2010

I fell...

Well first I have to apologize, I fell off the blogging boat and it took me sometime to get back up. So with that said, lets get back to business.

Firstly, tomorrow is the third Friday of the month, meaning the new stock advisor pick is coming out. I have been saving my nickels and dimes, and though I don't have as much as I would like I have a little bit to put down on it.

And while this is exciting... I have another issue to talk about. So as we all know I own a few shares of ATVI/Blizzard. You may or may not know that they are the owners of the game World of Warcraft. Perhaps you've heard of it? So what could possibly be new with an old game like that?

Money Sink.

Right now blizzard is selling for $25 an in game mount. While that may mean nothing to you, let me tell you what it means for the games revenue.

Currently there is a waiting list for this item, which is sitting at 8 hours. And there are 88% left available. When you get online it shows you your place in line. When I attempted this there were 120,000 people in front of me, I waited until there was a percentage drop which came at around 67,000 people in front. That means that there are about 5 million of these available assuming 1% is 50,000...

OK... so what? At $25 a pop, with about 5 million available that rounds out to about $125 million. Let's consider an extremely expensive design cost of about $500,000 and another $500,000 for implementation. That is a profit of just about $124 million, for little to no work at all.

And this is not the only in-game item you can purchase with real money, only the most popular thus far.

Today ATVI got a bit of a hit with people getting down on the gaming industry... well how many other industries can generate approximatively $15,000,000 in half a day, with the possibility of generating $110,000,000 with the push of a button?

... enough said.

-tCT