1) That doesn't mean shit, 12 million will never be reached again, there'll be small bumps when expansions are released, how obvious that, but they'll still lose players overtime
2) If WoW was doing so good, why would they have to lay off 600 people
3) Tell me where in the world you have found which people of the dev team have been laid off
4) So there you admit that BioWare did overestimate how many players they would have.
5) 7-10 would be for casual players lulz. How about 15
6) We can argue as much as we want on that matter, but we'll see once the game is released. I fully agree on your point that the success is also dependant to the sales, but the success of a game can go from both sides and the fact is that you only look at it from the publisher's side, they'll be the ones happy by the sales and will not care about the quality of the game as long as dumb people buy it. But players who like quality games will be the ones who decide if a game is succesful from their point of view.
1) Are you a financial analyst ? Do you work in the gaming industry ? Do you have special skills that allow you to predict how a game will be in 2-3 years ? I don't think so. All of it is pure opinion man.
2) Lay offs are not proportionnal to a game's success. You see this happen in every company, compressing their work force in order to make even more money.
It's not rocket science, if you want a shit ton of money, you'll basically lay off the extra workers you have that bring nothing to the company. It's more about corporate greed than the game's success, really.
3) Tell me where in the world you have found that the DEV team has been laid off ? As far as i know, the dev team consists of 20-30 persons at most. They are needed to work on patches (Which are released every few months or so) and for expansion packs (A new one coming in october). The 600 that have been laid off are in the management/Marketing teams, that's the only logic approach Blizzard should take in order to lay off people.
4) No, they opened too many servers because they had a shit load of complains about 30-40 mins queues in order to start playing. They opened extra servers for a more smooth release and realised it was a better idea to make servers with more people in it. It's not a question of subs, just a question of server technical issues. I was there at release, it was indeed HELL in order to start playing, BioWare knew that in order to avoid a rage quit fest, they would need to open more servers and correct the shot a few months later, which they did. For now, i can tell you that the population has increased since that 400k loss, servers are packed after the merge, and there's a lot of them. You can make an account and play the free trial to see for yourself.
5) What i meant is that most of what fanboys think is purely a matter of opinion. People on WoW forums will say that anything other than WoW is shit. People in SWTOR forums will say that everything else is shit. People in GW forums will say that everything else is shit.
6) Good point, but do not forget that a player's point of view is useless to the devs. Just look at CoD series for exemple, devs keep ejaculating the same shit over and over again, every year, yet the fans will swallow it no matter what. There's so many good suggestions to improve the game in the past cod's forums, yet the devs keep copy-pasting the same garbage everytime and still rack up a lot of sales.