Total Operating Costs for Warcraft: $200 Million

Video gaming is big business all over the world. If you don’t believe it, here are some statistics on one of the more popular online games, World of Warcraft.

During a conference call yesterday with industry analysts, Blizzard’s number crunchers revealed the total cost of upkeep for World of Warcraft since the game’s launch in 2004. Between hiring customer service staff, paying for servers and co-location facilities, and ensuring the [monsters] stay fed, the total bill for the game since launch comes to $200 million and change, reports Kotaku.

Normally that would be a staggering figure, but when you consider the money generated by World of Warcraft’s immense playerbase — estimates range from $75 to $150 million in revenue per month for the last four years — you can see why most analysts see a rosy future for the Activison/Blizzard conglomerate.

In other words, it took about 3 months for them to break even on a product that has (so far) had about a 48-month lifespan.

Fundamentalism

The term “fundamentalism” has been branded a dirty word, even in the church. It’s been equated with terms such as “legalism” or “intolerance” or perhaps even “sadism” in terms of the interpretation of certain passages of Scripture. However, I consider myself a fundamentalist in the sense that I believe the Bible as the Word of God at face value.

For example, I believe that God created the world in a literal 6 days and rested on the seventh. The people that want to believe that a day = 1,000 years so they can explain dinosaurs or carbon dating or whatever with a mixture of religion and science are too limited in their faith and too limited in their vision of the transformational power of God.

So, here is an interesting premise: Jesus was a fundamentalist too. After all, it is the set of fundamentals that He taught us and put down for us that we base our faith upon.

The spirit of the age is tolerance… Fundamentalism is regarded by many as a dangerous social disease… Christian fundamentalists have become like ancient plagues to a new world order.

Our spiritual enemy is using a multiple strategy. The spirit of anti-Christ is split between: (a) secular confessions of tolerance and (b) religious strategies of control, intimidation and coercion. On one hand are the secular forces that want to purge the name of Christ from public life. On the other are the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Christian fundamentalists who are attempting to impose their conclusions of faith on an unbelieving society.