There's probably some explanation for this, perhaps that directing "the creation of sword replicas, statues, and other physical objects" takes a lot more manpower than I imagine.
"Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers."
Programming, art and design, and cinematics adds up to maybe ~250 people. Supporting and monetizing what they make requires about 10x the manpower. Is that normal among all mega-corporations/projects, or is that something unique to MMO staffings?
If a small percentage of people are having billing issues, that's tens of thousands of people with issues, and billing requires detailed, one-on-one interaction from a Blizzard employee, so 340 to handle all that seems reasonable to me.
Based on the size of the player base the numbers seem right. The support staff will have to grow with the userbase.
That's 242 realms, US only. Probably similar number of realms in the EU and China regions.