At a first glance it would appear that you could easily extrapolate this into a matter of how much cynical juice flows into one’s body and that’s not really that far from the truth. As a simple equation, Profit is the amount gained minus the original investment and taxes. Profit is also the name of a god that is worshiped by most CEOs and that requires constant and painful sacrifices on altars such as marketing, quality control and last but not least, Progress. Why Progress? Because this little bundle of joy usually comes to life in the shape of a cute little furry animal we generally like to call “an Idea”. Raising such an animal requires time, a suitable environment and lots and lots of neurons this little monster feeds on until he is big enough to go out into the world and provide for himself. This, most of time, due to the volatile nature of the requirements which go against the basic rules of the Profit religion, never actually happens and Progress faces an untimely death.

Yet, when it comes to entertainment, things seem to be slightly different since this bright little corner of our existence is governed by much more powerful concept: fun. Sure, smashing some bastard’s face in a sport arena, speeding by an opponent in a chicane or watching reruns of M.A.S.H. will never grow old, for some at least. But when it comes to video games, we, the general public, the consumers, the gamers, the crowd of enthusiastic representatives of the junk food generation, demand more and more and… more, and still we’re never happy, never fully satisfied. So what happens if you re-release Super Mario Brothers on a PS3 Blueray? Well, absolutely nothing. Apart from the bunch of fanatics that will cover the expenses of the release from their own pockets, the entire event will go unnoticed, at least from a financial perspective. That’s because in the video game industry Profit and Progress go hand in hand… most of time. Investing time and resources in attempting to provide the gamers community with new and interesting features, better design, enhanced graphics and a state of the art soundtrack, pays off. If it doesn’t you’ll get fired (*cough: Mythic*), but most of the time it does pay off.

Take a look at Blizzard for example. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Blizzard fan-boy, on the contrary. If some day some group of people decides to picket their HQ and do nasty things on their lawn, I’m going to be there and I’m going to lead them. But the next the next day I’m going to repent and send them flowers and cookies and a thousand apologies. That’s because Blizzard has one special and rare quality: they take their sweet time and polish their games and release them only when they are market-ready, which in most cases takes about a million years. But as a result, most of their games have some little thing you never thought of before, they look great, they sound great and, here comes the shock, they sell. They sell because people know they will not be disappointed, because they know the game they are buying is top quality, that it’s fun at least for a while and it’s worth every penny. So when you look at their World of Warcraft 10 million subscribers from a couple of years back and think of them as a source of huge Profit, try not to lose sight of the time and money invested in creating a game which represents Progress for MMOs from many points of view.

So remember folks: no Progress, no Profit. Or in the words of the brilliant Eddie Izzard (look him up if you don’t know who he is): no pain no gain, no fish no fowl, no socks no shoes, no hair no haircut.