• Some of my most memorable gaming moments from two decades ago involved the most offensively challenging parts of a game and me eventually conquering it. "And finally, after a seemingly endless evening of running across the bridge and into the chamber again and again, our fearless hero was on the verge of destroying the evil vampire when--DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" and the game locks up with the endless drone of a single note from the musical score. $@#*ing Castlevania!
• Yet, I remember this moment most fondly of almost all my gaming memories from that time. Shortly after, I pwn'd that damn vampire.
• My point is, profiling people and giving them what they want is shit. It's what you don't want or expect that often becomes the most valuable experience in retrospect. It's the people you end up working with that you would never have chosen to work with because they are so different that often ending up making the most valuable contributions to your growth.
• And then again, when someone deliberately tries to place you with "complementary" people, that can be a disaster as well.
• I think it is best to simply offer as uncompromisingly good an experience that you can to a gamer. It may not be the type of game they have enjoyed in the past--so what? It may take them in a new direction; they might simply avoid it. Pandering to every taste is a recipe for mediocrity. It's just like trying to be everything to all people. Disaster.
• You put yourself or your game out there as your best expression of what you think you or your game should be, and then people take what they want away from the experience. It's a general pattern in all things. Like trying to optimize peoples' DNA into certain archetypes at the expense of a diverse array of genetic responses to potential pathogens. In other words, man breeds robustness out of the system by trying to game the system and create the "perfect experience".
• There should be a univeral rule for this mistake we make again and again: something like all maxima are relative and any finite set of maxima is insufficient. What the Hell am I even saying? *goes to bed*

• casual -- small use, usually infrequent and in balance with time spent on other entertainment
• hardcore -- large use, usually at regular intervals and consuming significantly more time than most other forms of entertainment
• addiction -- very large use, as often as possible; disruptive to other essential life activities (child rearing, eating, earning a living, etc.)

What these 2 times a month people don't do, is contribute to the community aspect of the game. They aren't wired into a guild or other group of people in a meaningful social way. They don't contribute to the fabric of social interactions that occur on a daily basis for the more wired in players. In other words, they cost Blizzard less, but they also contribute a lot less to what brings a lot of people to the game. The sense of community.

If you want to enjoy the group or raid oriented content, or have a rewarding battleground or Arena experience, you need people that you can rely on to not be socially incapable and unskilled. Scrubs will really ruin your game experience, turning a 2 hour run into a 4 hour nightmare, or giving you an evening of getting annihilated repeatedly by an opposing team that is well-organized, communicates well, and is having fun.

So, I think the concept of "many" you describe is where the real question is. I would respond, though I don't have the data, that those people don't cost Blizzard much, but also a lot of those people stop spending their money on WoW after a few months when they realize they paid $45 to log on 6 times in 3 months and play for 6 hours. More importantly, they aren't driving additional subscriptions or retention of current subscribers that keep playing because their friends do and that's what makes it fun for them.

The original article is just very short-sighted. Look at the movie industry. Yes, there is the processed formulaic shit put out as mainstream entertainment. But there is also the much higher quality, thought-provoking and rewarding material available, and there's a huge market for it. The volume is smaller, but it's a huge market. It's a market created by more discerning customers and supplied by more discerning creators of content that wouldn't find anything less amazing a rewarding use of their time.

The article is just fluff. It's written by one of those less discerning people, and it will be happily consumed with a nod of agreement by our less discerning fellows.