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@omegablue231 / omegablue231.tumblr.com

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askagamedev
Anonymous asked:

In a video by a former Blizzard employee, he claims that a single WoW mount generated more revenue than Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. How likely does this seem to you, and how common is for a single skin to generate more revenue than entire games?

askagamedev answered:

This is a little bit disingenuous - it wasn't any old WoW mount, it was the [Celestial Steed] - the very first microtransaction mount offered in WoW. It was a skin (admittedly a very pretty one) for a new mount mostly using already-existing resources. The cost of development for the Celestial Steed was practically nil because all of the tech had already been built and all but the skin itself had been created already - the animations, the sound effects, and so on. The marketing budget was also very small - The Celestial Steed sold for $25 each and it launched in 2010 at the peak of WoW's popularity of 12 million subscribers. It sold like hotcakes and 100% of that revenue went to Blizzard. The Celestial Steed sold so well that it convinced Blizzard to continue selling microtransactions and develop more.

Compare that to Starcraft 2, which sold for $60 and had a development team of over 300 people that worked on the game for over two years. If you assume the normal "napkin math" cost of an employee (roughly $10,000 per month in total costs, 24 months of development time), that's a rough budget of about $72 million. Starcraft 2 needed an enormous marketing campaign as well, easily at least that much again. Blizzard also had to share part of the proceeds with the retailers, so a significant percentage of physical sales paid out ~20% to the retailer. This means that Starcraft 2 needed to earn around $150 million just to break even.

Obviously, not all microtransactions sell that well. It was one of those moonshot black swan events that no one on the development side ever expected to happen, so unexpected that it altered the course of Blizzard's financial future and convinced them to keep doing it. The Celestial Steed was released at the peak of WoW's popularity and sold a thing that many, many people wanted at a time when very few were selling microtransactions in that space. Sometimes people just want more [Skyline Stuff], and they're willing to spend on things they like. As long as players keep spending this kind of money on microtransactions, we're going to keep making them.

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lakefama

my partner & i recently transitioned to being best friend platonic partners and romantically separated (due to some simple romantic incompatibilities) - we're both very happy with and excited about this change and most importantly we think it is VERY funny and gay to continue doing everything together and living together as exes

(she wrote the first comic!)

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ladyzerodark
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refinery29
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rainnecassidy

what an amazing lady!

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bi-trans-alliance

Trans people have always existed 🌈

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thisismisogynoir

They always have. 🥰 

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captain-acab

Yes she’s lovely, but I’m a little surprised no one has commented on the denied government benefits for not being cis part. So I read the article and here you go:

After Norwood died, you discovered that you had been denied widow benefits because the Social Security Administration claimed you were not a woman at the time of your marriage. What happened, and how did you use that experience to become an advocate for other trans people?
“I had changed it all — driver’s license, pilot’s license, passport — a long time ago, and I didn’t think much of it anymore. The act was finished. I’m a woman. I’m not going to think of myself as anything but a woman. “Then I got a letter in the mail after a year of applying [for widow benefits], saying that I was denied because I was not a woman at the time of my marriage, that I was not legally a woman. And that got me mad, and I thought, Boy, I got to do something about this, this is not right. I was thinking that there must be other people like me, and I was fortunate that I was not needing the money, I didn’t need it to live. But I knew at my age, that there are a lot of people living on Social Security who need it. Suppose one of them was denied their Social Security, that is catastrophic. “I started to look for any kind of legal help where I could get it, and I came across Lambda Legal, and I called them up and they invited me to come down to see them. I call them my four horsemen, because, when I went to see them, they opened up their arms and they really tended to me well. In a relatively short time, they had won the case for getting my Social Security, and got the agents to change their whole attitude about people like me. “The day that I got it was Valentine’s Day.
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datathestarfleetofficer
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clementine-kesh

voyager definitely had its issues with how it treated tuvok but it was so awesome how they decided to make their vulcan character one of the most kind and loving father figures in all of star trek. not only to his own kids but to so many of the other people around him who desperately needed that kind of person in their life. it’s such a good way of showing how the logic of vulcans does not come at the expense of love

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ladyzerodark
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draculasdaughter

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

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three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat

Listen, this is serious.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?

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whateverthebeeswant

Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.

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three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat

Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.

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teachingtales
Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid
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professionalwritingnerd