I'd drop $60 on it, yesterday. Oh there's my girlfriend too, $120.
This is exactly what they are banking on.
They vastly underestimate how rapidly and widely gaming news travels. If this is literally not Skyrim Online, we will all know, far before a purchase is made.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited January 2014
Ultima Online! UO-esque games are on the verge of extinction... If they were to create a UO-esque MMO, you wouldn't have anything to say!
:P
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
"...were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
The best line for that.
I was actually looking for just this line, but when I watched the entire seen, I could help but feel that the entire bit was 100% spot on. If someone with smart brains could edit that video so the background screens were showing shots of ESO, it'd be comedy gold.
I saw something earlier today about their spending hitting $200 million. I guess we were wrong, they're not trying to be WoW, they're trying to be TOR.
$200 Million on this game?! Do you have a link or something? That seems like a crazy number.
As crazy as 200 Million is, I believe it--just on the voice acting alone. I won't go so far as to completely violate NDA with everything I saw in beta, but I sure as hell recognized at least one or two household names voicing lines. I believe I remember seeing official looking reports from SWTOR early days disclosing that voice-acting is just a high-cost production value in and of its own right. There was a certain Brit whose voice had to cost a pretty penny all by itself.
“There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.” ... also, "Ah, turn blue!"
XBOne | LyrKing
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I cannot say either, but two of their names rhyme with Deve Clum and Sim Hummings.
And yes, I can personally attest that paying voice actors is pricey. As I recall, the minimum for a union gig was like $650-ish per four hours. Sometimes just 10 minutes of dialogue can take an hour to get through. And I feel confident in saying this is a union job.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
I cannot say either, but two of their names rhyme with Deve Clum and Sim Hummings.
And yes, I can personally attest that paying voice actors is pricey. As I recall, the minimum for a union gig was like $650-ish per four hours. Sometimes just 10 minutes of dialogue can take an hour to get through. And I feel confident in saying this is a union job.
Voice acting can be a great thing. The class stories, planet arcs, etc. in SW:TOR are the one thing that game did right, because it all felt like KOTOR 3. They just used design methodology that people were already tired of for their group content and end game and failed at out WoWing WoW.
If ESO fails hard, and it probably will, it won't be because it has voice acting.
I personally saw negative value in the Star Wars voice acting, because I usually play MMO's on voice chat with people. The voice acting just got in the way, and I'd have to keep taking my headset off to listen to a quest, or asking someone to repeat themselves, etc.
You could just recycle everyone's voice like skyrim did. It's not so much the voice that does it in an open world environment, but just the fact that they talk at all.
200 million is obscene.
A team of 10 programmers with a development cycle of 4 years is about 3 million. (75k * 10 * 4)
Let's double the team and reduce the salary by about 10% for artists, that adds another 5.3 million. (67k * 20 * 4)
Those are very high numbers for salaries in the field in general (game programmers and artists get laughable salaries TBH).
So let's be supppppppper liberal with how much some servers cost here. Average rackmount servers with enough power to host a few thousand people at a time are probably in the ballpark of 15k, and probably cost another 15k (that's conservative, it's probably way more) a year to run. So let's say you get 10 of them, because you anticipate your subscriber base at a million users. Each server can handle 100,000 users at a time, a pretty conservative estimate. Assuming you're not hiring retards to program your game (at 75k, you'd hope not). But you're looking at pretty specialist servers, so let's ramp up the cost by double because you're going to probably exceeding the 64 GB range (let's give it roughly 1 meg of data in memory per user connected, you're sitting close to 100 gigs, so to give us some leeway you've got 128 GB servers, with some beefy processors).
Okay, so 30k per server, and you're getting 10 of them. You're expecting a million subscribers (that's a pretty high number TBH). That's 300,000 in server costs, and maybe another 150,000 a year in maintenance and upkeep. Plus let's be super conservative and tack on maybe 3 administrators for our servers because in this day and age, we should have our shit together and 3 people should be able to handle 10 servers. That's another $300,000 a year (100k a pop). Most servers don't cost near that amount, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt that it's going to be more expensive for this game because we want a high quality of service
Then we're going to tack on some DB specialists to make sure our programmers don't fuck things over by accident, and if they do, they can fix it easier. Let's say 2. Let's give them 100k a pop too. Another 200,000 a year. It's worth it to pay the premium on these guys, trust me.
All in all, our total budget costs for this game, without voice actors so far is about:
Total so far, is 9,250,000 for 4 years of development. I'm only using a year of server upkeep and maintenance because they weren't being used at full capacity yet. WoW's server upkeep is about $140,000 a day, but I think they're factoring in their cost of maintenance, electricity in california and all the colos, and all the employees they have. Plus I don't agree with a lot of their decisions on how they run things because they like to go after cheap, but plentiful labor. Or at least, that's how they did it a decade ago when WoW came out. Even if our servers costed $140,000 a day, that's only 51,100,000 a year.
Our conservative budget comes out to about $9.25 million from their 200 million.
Where the fuck is that other $190,750,000 going? You can't tell me they're spending 190 million in voice acting? Even actors don't get that much.
Oh wait you say, my server maintenance is wrong! So let's use wow's data for that.
9,100,000
51,100,000
==========
60,200,000
Okay, where's the other $139,800,000 going?
Something is very off about those numbers. As far as I know, my numbers are okay.
I don't know the exact number of years of development, but 4 is about average for a game that size. 5 would be ... eh, but it wouldn't change my numbers substantially. Even if you're running those servers full kilter at the scale of an 12 million subscriber game, you're still nowhere near the budget for this game. Also those db admins and server admins were brought in the last few months of the development cycle, they weren't really needed before, so I'm only going to give them a years worth of salary. Even so, that shifts my numbers by about 5 million dollars lower than anticipated. As you can see, we're a hundred million away from being in any red zone of my numbers being wrong. And they're probably not wrong.
Obviously CEO pay isn't accounted for in there. Nor a game engine. But a 4-5 year dev cycle would make me believe they're not using an engine, so. I guess a CEO could bring home $150,000,000 a year in a game company. I'm sure Bobby Kotick does.
The problem isn't the genre, I think I've said this before. We could probably make an MMO game and make it profitable with a little elbow grease. The problem is companies think they're going to make back 200,000,000 worth of investment. But man, I don't even know where that 200,000,000 fucking went!
Clearly you can bank on a lot of existing content for your game if it's an TES game. That's a lot of lore and work you don't have to make up, it's just a matter of modeling the shit and throwing together your world in a coherent manner.
Granted I spent about 45 minutes coming up with these numbers and data... but did no one do their homework on this game, like... at all? I don't even make games for a living, I run IT at a healthcare clinic, so I mean, I'm kind of in a sweet spot between normal IT and "NEEDS TO WORK ALL THE TIME" IT. But those numbers seem to match pretty decently with other numbers that have been given out, and my internal ones, so, hm. Granted for $200,000,000 I could probably make a really kick ass motherfucking game, but why spend that much? You could probably drop 10 million on a TESO game and have it be better with some smart planning and good teamwork.
10 million is easy to make back with an MMO just from physical copies. If you only get 300,000 subscribers, at $50 a pop, congratulations, you made a motherfucking profit of 5 million.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
75k per year for programmers is low, BTW, because you need to include not only the base salaries, but benefits, payroll taxes, etc. There's also the overhead - people who aren't programmers, but are managers, etc.
Also ... 10 people? Really? You think an MMO is getting put together by 10 people?
75k per year for programmers is low, BTW, because you need to include not only the base salaries, but benefits, payroll taxes, etc. There's also the overhead - people who aren't programmers, but are managers, etc.
Also ... 10 people? Really? You think an MMO is getting put together by 10 people?
No no no, he generously doubled the team size to include some artists.
75k is low for a programmer with 10 years of experience in DC or SFBay.
75k is almost triple for a game developer. Beginning salaries for a programmer at Blizzard was something like 23k back in 2003/2004 during an economic boom right after the early 2000's recession.
But we're talking about peanuts of money difference for benefits, and payroll taxes there. Managers? You can appoint a lead for each group and a project lead. Again, peanuts against 190,000,000 pitfall.
Remember, I'm not throwing a game together in a year here, that's 4 years of work. Almost a quarter million hours of work into the game over 4 years, with a team that size.
Even if I doubled my team size (or their salary because I'm super fucking generous), that'd still not account for maybe $125,000,000.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
9,100,000 * 4 (double the team size (60 people now) and double their salaries), that's 36,400,000.
Tacking that onto wow's operating costs of 60,000,000 a year, brings us to 96,400,000.
We're still about 100,000,000 away from our goal there. Let's be honest, graphic artists pulling in 134,000 is a bit inflating in our numbers, programmers not so much, but that's definitely accounting for things like secretaries, and cost of running business, and benefits, and bonuses, now.
Wow's server costs are still a bit high for our project, considering we're projecting for 1/10th the customer base. If we 1/3 our customer base, we could probably drop our costs astronomically too.
Like no seriously, did they do like 0 work? I'm basically pulling hyperinflated numbers from worst case scenarios and I'm still so far under budget it feels like I'm working at the DoD with all this missing money.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
60 people is too low for World of Warcraft's operating costs.
Skyrim was made with about 60 people. An MMO does not cost significantly more person time over a single player game, FYI. The only thing that changes is your architecture, and infrastructure costs.
When I say 60 people, I almost mean all the people at Bethesda that were doing other things but were included in the staff list because sometimes they chipped in to help the other team.
Games are not really hard to make, it's the assets that will probably get you. It's time consuming, not difficult, a quarter million man hours fits in nicely there. There's a reason games take, on average, 4 years to produce.
Though when you have to significantly rewrite your game because of backlash... well I am not accounting for that cost I guess.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Blizzard employs about 250-300 people at the moment (from my best research) in their R&D team. If we are shooting for 1/10th their customer base, we'd expect to need 1/10th their employee count (less actually, employees would need to scale logarithmically/exponentially based on customer count, I'd expect).
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
75k per year for programmers is low, BTW, because you need to include not only the base salaries, but benefits, payroll taxes, etc. There's also the overhead - people who aren't programmers, but are managers, etc.
Also ... 10 people? Really? You think an MMO is getting put together by 10 people?
Gotta mark up the salaries. Gotta include overhead and indirect. There'll be some HR people, there'll be a couple managers. There'll be some kind of sales guy for getting the necessary relationships.
There's facilities. People have to actually WORK somewhere. There'll be IT costs to get the office outfitted, keep everyone having phones and net.
There'll be travel costs. Gotta go to game conferences, gotta fly out to meet with publishers, etc.
There'll be licensing deals.
They've got a website and some marketing people working, gotta factor that in. Probably some advertising cost of some sort.
Blizzard employs about 250-300 people at the moment (from my best research) in their R&D team. If we are shooting for 1/10th their customer base, we'd expect to need 1/10th their employee count (less actually, employees would need to scale logarithmically/exponentially based on customer count, I'd expect).
I believe that in every single instance, the ongoing maintenance team of a game is smaller than the initial dev team.
Sales guy? What the fuck? You're not pushing widgets.
Facilities? Okay you got me there, offer telco and run lean. Sure as fuck isn't going to be 100 million. In terms of comparison to salary? Miniscule.
Travel costs? Minimal expenses.
Licensing deals? Bethesda is paying them to make the game, they didn't put a bid on it. It's a bit different compared to needing to license a game engine or widget. Even game engines are not that expensive. Unless you're going unreal3 or something stupid like that.
Marketing and advertising? Websites are cheap. I haven't seen much in advertising for this game. It's mostly been word of mouth and internet, which is pretty small potatoes in terms of Microsoft needing to push their surface pro 2.
None of that would get anywhere near 100 million. Feel free to counter it with some numbers though, but I'm going to piss into the wind and say we're talking maybe another million tops for all of that.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Blizzard employs about 250-300 people at the moment (from my best research) in their R&D team. If we are shooting for 1/10th their customer base, we'd expect to need 1/10th their employee count (less actually, employees would need to scale logarithmically/exponentially based on customer count, I'd expect).
I believe that in every single instance, the ongoing maintenance team of a game is smaller than the initial dev team.
R&D. The maintenance team is probably included in that 60,000,000 a year figure. Remember, wow is actually pushing new content and game shit all the time (probably much more than the initial engine cost per expansion, vanilla wow was... well... vanilla).
I'm doing the research as best as I can, I'm not really trying to half ass it. Granted these numbers are incredibly hard to find so there's some discrepancies.
But so far not 100,000,000 in discrepancies, like I said, feel free to come at me with numbers there, I'm more than willing to fine tune my numbers.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
200 million. say it with the balls it deserves.... 200 million.
wow.
is tor profitable now? i know f2p has helped it out...
or are we in it will never ever make its money back ever ever territory.
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
At any rate, I would imagine negotiations to get product on store shelves to be done by the publisher, not the developer.
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
At any rate, I would imagine negotiations to get product on store shelves to be done by the publisher, not the developer.
Typically the publisher takes a cut on it for those services, yeah. I think average is about 20-30% of game sales. I think steam does 20 if you sell your product on their steam store.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I think the real take-away here is that Bowen has a minimal but fairly solid (assuming you've budgeted writers in with your 'artists') cost scheme for making a potentially solid game.
I'm fairly certain the real disconnect is that I doubt the intention behind TESO was to make a solid game. I'm confident they suffer the hubris almost all MMO designers delight in nowadays, where the aim isn't to make a solid game but a AAA blockbuster. When your focus is on the game sales potential and cornering a given share of the market, making something worth playing almost doesn't even enter into it. Which is a shame--it might be there somewhere but the drive is hitting certain numbers and the idea of retention rather then the driving force (play-style and content) that actually generates it.
Pretty sure that was your point too, Bowen, but we kind of fixated on the numbers. I think you're a little too dismissive of some of the things Darkewolfe and others bring up but I do get that you have insight. I just feel you have to remember there are a lot of amazing games out there that never see mainstream attention and success almost because they focused too much on the game and not the rest of the business. To everything a time and season, right? Balancing aspects of reality is king. I really don't think you can JUST make a good game, even with the Social Web that is nowadays. Word of mouth (and keyboard) only gets you so far I have to imagine.
“There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.” ... also, "Ah, turn blue!"
XBOne | LyrKing
Yeah those were really rough numbers to highlight the huge discrepancy in spending. Even tacking on a whole host of things... I probably would have a hard time hitting that budget unless I started quadrupling things unnecessarily or decided setting up a 5000 square foot warehouse in SFBay was a good idea.
TESO hit pretty much all the worst aspects of marketing. Worst mistake was saying that making a non-wow clone was a bad idea, so far, I think. The rest of their downfalls could be amended with some real kick ass PR. Though both the store and the monthly fee soured some people, but WoW does it, so I'm not too shaken up by that.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Temporary consult contracts, subcontractors, wildly ranging salaries for 250 people not counting the freelancers like voice actors, the game engine license, deals with distributors and big and expensive marketing campaigns (TV, Radio, Internet, print) and a lot of unforseen costs for development hurdles during the usually very difficult MMO design, playtesters and QA, setting up server farms, making contracts and deals with foreign companies to oversee their own servers in their countries, foreign retail and all that infrastructure you need to have in place in order to launch a global MMO, translators for the foreign versions of the game, taxes on all the things ever, musical orchestras and composers for the soundtrack, events and launch parties. Before you know it you're 50 million deep in the hole and still have 2 years left in development.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I mentioned above the minimum wage for a voice actor and that is like for someone who is brand new to the union.
Someone like Jim Cummings probably costs, eh, at least 10k per four hours. I don't know if Steve Blum is quite up there yet, but he is easily making 1k+/4hr. Chances are pretty good that none of the voice actors are making less then 1k/4hrs.
Depending on the pace of the recording you can easily end up spending an hour doing just two or three minutes of spoken lines. On the flip side, sometimes the actor is just in a groove and is spitting out one line after another.
For a interesting and funny look in to the process check out this video.
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XBOne | LyrKing
This is exactly what they are banking on.
They vastly underestimate how rapidly and widely gaming news travels. If this is literally not Skyrim Online, we will all know, far before a purchase is made.
:P
The best line for that.
I was actually looking for just this line, but when I watched the entire seen, I could help but feel that the entire bit was 100% spot on. If someone with smart brains could edit that video so the background screens were showing shots of ESO, it'd be comedy gold.
$200 Million on this game?! Do you have a link or something? That seems like a crazy number.
XBOne | LyrKing
And yes, I can personally attest that paying voice actors is pricey. As I recall, the minimum for a union gig was like $650-ish per four hours. Sometimes just 10 minutes of dialogue can take an hour to get through. And I feel confident in saying this is a union job.
... because of its haphazard nature?
I've seen a lot of MMOs fail, and I can personally attest to "Terrible voice acting" being fairly far down this list.
If ESO fails hard, and it probably will, it won't be because it has voice acting.
Voice acting is a single-player thing.
200 million is obscene.
A team of 10 programmers with a development cycle of 4 years is about 3 million. (75k * 10 * 4)
Let's double the team and reduce the salary by about 10% for artists, that adds another 5.3 million. (67k * 20 * 4)
Those are very high numbers for salaries in the field in general (game programmers and artists get laughable salaries TBH).
So let's be supppppppper liberal with how much some servers cost here. Average rackmount servers with enough power to host a few thousand people at a time are probably in the ballpark of 15k, and probably cost another 15k (that's conservative, it's probably way more) a year to run. So let's say you get 10 of them, because you anticipate your subscriber base at a million users. Each server can handle 100,000 users at a time, a pretty conservative estimate. Assuming you're not hiring retards to program your game (at 75k, you'd hope not). But you're looking at pretty specialist servers, so let's ramp up the cost by double because you're going to probably exceeding the 64 GB range (let's give it roughly 1 meg of data in memory per user connected, you're sitting close to 100 gigs, so to give us some leeway you've got 128 GB servers, with some beefy processors).
Okay, so 30k per server, and you're getting 10 of them. You're expecting a million subscribers (that's a pretty high number TBH). That's 300,000 in server costs, and maybe another 150,000 a year in maintenance and upkeep. Plus let's be super conservative and tack on maybe 3 administrators for our servers because in this day and age, we should have our shit together and 3 people should be able to handle 10 servers. That's another $300,000 a year (100k a pop). Most servers don't cost near that amount, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt that it's going to be more expensive for this game because we want a high quality of service
Then we're going to tack on some DB specialists to make sure our programmers don't fuck things over by accident, and if they do, they can fix it easier. Let's say 2. Let's give them 100k a pop too. Another 200,000 a year. It's worth it to pay the premium on these guys, trust me.
All in all, our total budget costs for this game, without voice actors so far is about:
Total so far, is 9,250,000 for 4 years of development. I'm only using a year of server upkeep and maintenance because they weren't being used at full capacity yet. WoW's server upkeep is about $140,000 a day, but I think they're factoring in their cost of maintenance, electricity in california and all the colos, and all the employees they have. Plus I don't agree with a lot of their decisions on how they run things because they like to go after cheap, but plentiful labor. Or at least, that's how they did it a decade ago when WoW came out. Even if our servers costed $140,000 a day, that's only 51,100,000 a year.
Our conservative budget comes out to about $9.25 million from their 200 million.
Where the fuck is that other $190,750,000 going? You can't tell me they're spending 190 million in voice acting? Even actors don't get that much.
Oh wait you say, my server maintenance is wrong! So let's use wow's data for that.
Okay, where's the other $139,800,000 going?
Something is very off about those numbers. As far as I know, my numbers are okay.
I don't know the exact number of years of development, but 4 is about average for a game that size. 5 would be ... eh, but it wouldn't change my numbers substantially. Even if you're running those servers full kilter at the scale of an 12 million subscriber game, you're still nowhere near the budget for this game. Also those db admins and server admins were brought in the last few months of the development cycle, they weren't really needed before, so I'm only going to give them a years worth of salary. Even so, that shifts my numbers by about 5 million dollars lower than anticipated. As you can see, we're a hundred million away from being in any red zone of my numbers being wrong. And they're probably not wrong.
Obviously CEO pay isn't accounted for in there. Nor a game engine. But a 4-5 year dev cycle would make me believe they're not using an engine, so. I guess a CEO could bring home $150,000,000 a year in a game company. I'm sure Bobby Kotick does.
The problem isn't the genre, I think I've said this before. We could probably make an MMO game and make it profitable with a little elbow grease. The problem is companies think they're going to make back 200,000,000 worth of investment. But man, I don't even know where that 200,000,000 fucking went!
Clearly you can bank on a lot of existing content for your game if it's an TES game. That's a lot of lore and work you don't have to make up, it's just a matter of modeling the shit and throwing together your world in a coherent manner.
Granted I spent about 45 minutes coming up with these numbers and data... but did no one do their homework on this game, like... at all? I don't even make games for a living, I run IT at a healthcare clinic, so I mean, I'm kind of in a sweet spot between normal IT and "NEEDS TO WORK ALL THE TIME" IT. But those numbers seem to match pretty decently with other numbers that have been given out, and my internal ones, so, hm. Granted for $200,000,000 I could probably make a really kick ass motherfucking game, but why spend that much? You could probably drop 10 million on a TESO game and have it be better with some smart planning and good teamwork.
10 million is easy to make back with an MMO just from physical copies. If you only get 300,000 subscribers, at $50 a pop, congratulations, you made a motherfucking profit of 5 million.
Someone's gotta stuff their pockets.
Also ... 10 people? Really? You think an MMO is getting put together by 10 people?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
No no no, he generously doubled the team size to include some artists.
75k is low for a programmer with 10 years of experience in DC or SFBay.
75k is almost triple for a game developer. Beginning salaries for a programmer at Blizzard was something like 23k back in 2003/2004 during an economic boom right after the early 2000's recession.
But we're talking about peanuts of money difference for benefits, and payroll taxes there. Managers? You can appoint a lead for each group and a project lead. Again, peanuts against 190,000,000 pitfall.
Remember, I'm not throwing a game together in a year here, that's 4 years of work. Almost a quarter million hours of work into the game over 4 years, with a team that size.
Even if I doubled my team size (or their salary because I'm super fucking generous), that'd still not account for maybe $125,000,000.
Tacking that onto wow's operating costs of 60,000,000 a year, brings us to 96,400,000.
We're still about 100,000,000 away from our goal there. Let's be honest, graphic artists pulling in 134,000 is a bit inflating in our numbers, programmers not so much, but that's definitely accounting for things like secretaries, and cost of running business, and benefits, and bonuses, now.
Wow's server costs are still a bit high for our project, considering we're projecting for 1/10th the customer base. If we 1/3 our customer base, we could probably drop our costs astronomically too.
Like no seriously, did they do like 0 work? I'm basically pulling hyperinflated numbers from worst case scenarios and I'm still so far under budget it feels like I'm working at the DoD with all this missing money.
60 people is too low for World of Warcraft's operating costs.
Skyrim was made with about 60 people. An MMO does not cost significantly more person time over a single player game, FYI. The only thing that changes is your architecture, and infrastructure costs.
When I say 60 people, I almost mean all the people at Bethesda that were doing other things but were included in the staff list because sometimes they chipped in to help the other team.
Games are not really hard to make, it's the assets that will probably get you. It's time consuming, not difficult, a quarter million man hours fits in nicely there. There's a reason games take, on average, 4 years to produce.
Though when you have to significantly rewrite your game because of backlash... well I am not accounting for that cost I guess.
And I'm a project manager at a software company.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
And my axe!
Well, if I am allowed to put on my other hats, I'm also head of IT, project director, software engineer, equipment purchasing, sales, etc.
If we're gonna do that.
Gotta mark up the salaries. Gotta include overhead and indirect. There'll be some HR people, there'll be a couple managers. There'll be some kind of sales guy for getting the necessary relationships.
There's facilities. People have to actually WORK somewhere. There'll be IT costs to get the office outfitted, keep everyone having phones and net.
There'll be travel costs. Gotta go to game conferences, gotta fly out to meet with publishers, etc.
There'll be licensing deals.
They've got a website and some marketing people working, gotta factor that in. Probably some advertising cost of some sort.
You can't just say ten people at 75k.
I believe that in every single instance, the ongoing maintenance team of a game is smaller than the initial dev team.
HR, maybe.
Managers? Maybe.
Sales guy? What the fuck? You're not pushing widgets.
Facilities? Okay you got me there, offer telco and run lean. Sure as fuck isn't going to be 100 million. In terms of comparison to salary? Miniscule.
Travel costs? Minimal expenses.
Licensing deals? Bethesda is paying them to make the game, they didn't put a bid on it. It's a bit different compared to needing to license a game engine or widget. Even game engines are not that expensive. Unless you're going unreal3 or something stupid like that.
Marketing and advertising? Websites are cheap. I haven't seen much in advertising for this game. It's mostly been word of mouth and internet, which is pretty small potatoes in terms of Microsoft needing to push their surface pro 2.
None of that would get anywhere near 100 million. Feel free to counter it with some numbers though, but I'm going to piss into the wind and say we're talking maybe another million tops for all of that.
R&D. The maintenance team is probably included in that 60,000,000 a year figure. Remember, wow is actually pushing new content and game shit all the time (probably much more than the initial engine cost per expansion, vanilla wow was... well... vanilla).
I'm doing the research as best as I can, I'm not really trying to half ass it. Granted these numbers are incredibly hard to find so there's some discrepancies.
But so far not 100,000,000 in discrepancies, like I said, feel free to come at me with numbers there, I'm more than willing to fine tune my numbers.
wow.
is tor profitable now? i know f2p has helped it out...
or are we in it will never ever make its money back ever ever territory.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
TOR has 1m subscribers right?
At $15 a month, they'd make that back in about 2 years.
Typically the publisher takes a cut on it for those services, yeah. I think average is about 20-30% of game sales. I think steam does 20 if you sell your product on their steam store.
I'm fairly certain the real disconnect is that I doubt the intention behind TESO was to make a solid game. I'm confident they suffer the hubris almost all MMO designers delight in nowadays, where the aim isn't to make a solid game but a AAA blockbuster. When your focus is on the game sales potential and cornering a given share of the market, making something worth playing almost doesn't even enter into it. Which is a shame--it might be there somewhere but the drive is hitting certain numbers and the idea of retention rather then the driving force (play-style and content) that actually generates it.
Pretty sure that was your point too, Bowen, but we kind of fixated on the numbers. I think you're a little too dismissive of some of the things Darkewolfe and others bring up but I do get that you have insight. I just feel you have to remember there are a lot of amazing games out there that never see mainstream attention and success almost because they focused too much on the game and not the rest of the business. To everything a time and season, right? Balancing aspects of reality is king. I really don't think you can JUST make a good game, even with the Social Web that is nowadays. Word of mouth (and keyboard) only gets you so far I have to imagine.
XBOne | LyrKing
TESO hit pretty much all the worst aspects of marketing. Worst mistake was saying that making a non-wow clone was a bad idea, so far, I think. The rest of their downfalls could be amended with some real kick ass PR. Though both the store and the monthly fee soured some people, but WoW does it, so I'm not too shaken up by that.
Someone like Jim Cummings probably costs, eh, at least 10k per four hours. I don't know if Steve Blum is quite up there yet, but he is easily making 1k+/4hr. Chances are pretty good that none of the voice actors are making less then 1k/4hrs.
Depending on the pace of the recording you can easily end up spending an hour doing just two or three minutes of spoken lines. On the flip side, sometimes the actor is just in a groove and is spitting out one line after another.
For a interesting and funny look in to the process check out this video.
They edited it down quite a bit, but I am willing to bet he spent a couple minutes with each line. :P
just... just 30gb to download now. Very slowly
That video is the best thing.
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, IT'S SPECTER!