So, let's dispense with all this news business, since we've talked you to death about the usual upgrades and downgrades, the levelling tweaks and delay of The Burning Crusade. Instead let us discuss something near and dear to our hearts: money, and how World of Warcraft is making a ton of it, and what it has to do with other people.

Over at Spong, they've made an interesting guesstimate of how much money Blizzard makes in a year from World of Warcraft alone. There are approximately 7.5 million people playing World of Warcraft these days, and according to Spong's estimate, if each of them pays around £9 (US$ 17), that nets Blizzard and Vivendi SA is a video game developer; formerly known as Vivendi Universal">Vivendi £12,500,000 (US$ 224 million) each month, leading to £ 1,350,000,000 every year.

That's a little shy of US$ 2.6 billion. Wow for WoW, indeed. Of course, they didn't factor in the number of people who want to pay for Paid Character Transfers (at US$ 25 per character, no less), which would really increase this count by even more. By normal standards, it's a huge number, but Blizzard is taking steps to make sure they can do better.

Now, what does this have to do with anything? Simple: WoW makes more money than some countries do each year. Rwanda, for example, has a yearly Gross Domestic Product of US$ 2.1 Billion, and they have nine million people over there and Sierra Leone has a GDP of US$ 1.1 Billion across five million folks. If you're thinking there's any other spin to it, that's all. It's a sobering thought to bring to mind when you're out to hunt down Nefarian.