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I think one of the key parts of parenting for our generation will be to equipt our children with [...] the willpower to handle and enjoy games like WoW properly.

How do you do that?

I don't have the answer to it yet. However, it will likely involve exposing them to WoW or it's equivalent and then showing them how more long term sound activities can be even more rewarding.

Fully agreed. I've been playing since launch at a similar level, and I've since gotten married, had a kid, founded and sold a startup, and done a bunch of other stuff. I work from home, so you betcha it takes good time management to not spend time playing when I should be working, but I think I've got a pretty decent handle on it.

(Plus, writing addons is a fantastic way to switch mental gears to recharge sometimes, too. And it's pretty decent residual hobby income, to boot.)

WoW is very easy to spend way too much time in if you're not careful, but it's not inherently evil; like anything which is fun and enjoyable, if you spent an inordinate amount of time on it, that time will eventually have to start coming out of other activities. In moderation, it can be great.

Is there any money to be made writing WoW addons? My impression was that most people were doing it out of love and begging for donations just to cover bandwidth costs.

There's good money to be made, yes. Like the app store or Facebook games or whatnot, the best benefits are realized if you're a top-tier developer, but Curse (http://curse.com) runs a revenue-share program with addon authors. Donations don't cover much, generally, but Curse's payouts cover about half of my rent. I use the platform because they provide git repos, automatic release management, and issue tracking, but I'm certainly not going to complain about the revenue share. :)

I write addons because I enjoy writing them, and because they scratch itches I want scratched. I've never sat down and written an addon with financial incentives in mind, but the resultant income is a very nice bonus.

I know a few guys like the QuestHelper guy were making extremely good money off of addons - enough to be a full-time job - but it's very hard to build a career on that; Blizzard can kill that income stream even more easily than Apple can with an app store app, because they continually fold the popular stuff into the base UI. If your massively popular addon has its concept shipped in the base UI, your installed base drops precipitously, and the income stream dries up.

Interesting. I had considered writing some addons as a possible alternative to mobile app development for a little extra income but I gave it up because I assumed it wasn't viable. Glad to hear otherwise.

It's likely far less lucrative than mobile apps. I've got some exceptionally popular addons, but they aren't going to make me rich. I suspect the average developer with low-to-medium visibility addons doesn't make very good money with them.

(I've been meaning to get into mobile app development; I've written a free Android app, but I can't seem to come up with a good concept for something I could charge for)

Didn't Blizzard at one point say no one can charge for addons or put in-game directions to donate or pay for the addon? How did Curse manage to get past this?

They did. Curse runs ads on their website and client, and does a revenue split with addon authors. The idea is that hosting your addons drives traffic to Curse, which drives up their ad income, so they give authors a bit of it to incentivize them to continue sending traffic to them. I think the exact split is based on your addon's install base through the client.

The end user never pays for the addon. They can pay for a premium client subscription, which gets you priority bandwidth on patch days, one-click updating, no ads, and that sort of thing, but you're very solidly in paying-for-service territory then, and there are still fully functional free methods to get the same addons. I think what Blizzard mostly wanted to avoid was an environment where some players could gain an advantage over others by purchasing some addon, and they didn't want the in-game experience turning into an advertising slum.

There is a subtle problem with all this, which is that you don't know what your life would have been had you not played WoW, it may be that you would be living in a cardboard box or it may be that you would have ended up even better than where you are today.

The best I can glean from your description is that for some people playing a game like WoW need not be a debilitating thing. I know a person that uses a scary amount of hard drugs and that in spite of that still functions quite well. Of course everybody has been saying 'it won't last long' but they've been saying that for longer than I can remember and he's still at it.

That doesn't mean that in general hard drugs are not a negative and it does not mean that he'll never get the bill. It just hasn't happened yet.

"I'm engaging in anecdotal junk science here but my theory is that the people who really loose themselves in games like WoW are people with very poor time management skills."

I totally concur with this statement. It's just a matter of prioritizing your time correctly. There doesn't need to be all of this WoW is a drug you need to cut it off completely or else you'll be a fat gamer that hasn't gone anywhere in life.

All of this WoW bashing could easily apply to several other things where people don't take in moderation, like alcohol, watching football, etc.

Good point. As a game and as an immersive environment there's a lot of good to be said for WoW. The game mechanics are actually pretty interesting. I don't think it's inherently any worse a use of time than watching TV. It can be dangerous for people without the discipline to limit their game time though.