The quote was to hint how much a typical game project *could* cost. That cost of course would more than likely come from A) investors or B) publisher. I wouldn't go as far as saying you shouldn't worry about how much anything should cost but it highlights the point that majority of your projects funding is not coming from your pocket so trying to estimate how much X will cost isn't something that should be on your mind first. Estimates of office space, tools, supplies, and so on before any type of publishing deal should be to hard to calculate before hand.
Although WoW is a powerhouse now, it really shouldn't used for any example being they obviously had unlimited resources and of course content that was developed many years before WoW was even announced. Not having the exact same content age and detail or even the same budget as Blizzard does not mean the next gen MMO's will fail. A good game will always be a good game...
[Edited by - Fastidious on August 5, 2007 10:22:51 PM]
A few (abstract) questions about MMOG design
Indeed. That article did spell out many things which should be thought of when approaching your business plan.
While WoW is now a powerhouse, I don't see how that makes it an invalid example. I think all that shows us is that it is important to keep things under wraps until the time is ripe. The interesting thing about WoW is that they did not follow the tradition Art Pipeline. I would wager that they can churn out content at twice the speed of other teams (say a team like Age of Conan). Even so, it still took them as long as it did, and as much money as it did. That only shows that Blizzard made another smart decision and went to play the game smarter, not harder, but still didn't save any money.
While WoW is now a powerhouse, I don't see how that makes it an invalid example. I think all that shows us is that it is important to keep things under wraps until the time is ripe. The interesting thing about WoW is that they did not follow the tradition Art Pipeline. I would wager that they can churn out content at twice the speed of other teams (say a team like Age of Conan). Even so, it still took them as long as it did, and as much money as it did. That only shows that Blizzard made another smart decision and went to play the game smarter, not harder, but still didn't save any money.
Quote:Original post by Jerky
While WoW is now a powerhouse, I don't see how that makes it an invalid example.
WoW is the only powerhouse. There isn't other MMO's with 5-6 million customers to compete with them. In short, they are rare and not the average MMO. So using them as the example in something in dealing with costs and production wouldn't be correct. That's because WoW is generally new on the market compared to what is out there now. No matter how old their content is, other MMO's have been here longer and they are the prime examples of how much a MMO could cost under the avg plans.
UO, EQ, DAOC, and EVE would make better examples.
You wouldn't say that having X amount of money isn't enough because Blizzard needed had more. When clearly the MMO's before them cost much less to develop compared to WoW.
I think you would be suprised to find out how large their team was and how much money they used. I bet its smaller/less than you would expect. I won't argue with you about their popularity, but they never planned on being that large( read popular), which means they didn't develop with that scale in mind.
I am sure the trend of the team shrinking after release was broken by them, but we are discussing pre-release development. You are correct that they had previous success to help their budgeting problems, but that doesn't mean that they threw their money away just because they could. Like I said, it wasn't until after release that they saw that they needed to scale larger, not smaller. Again, not in the scope of this discussion.
Anyone else have anything to say on this topic? We're starting to hog this thread. ;)
I am sure the trend of the team shrinking after release was broken by them, but we are discussing pre-release development. You are correct that they had previous success to help their budgeting problems, but that doesn't mean that they threw their money away just because they could. Like I said, it wasn't until after release that they saw that they needed to scale larger, not smaller. Again, not in the scope of this discussion.
Anyone else have anything to say on this topic? We're starting to hog this thread. ;)
This topic is closed to new replies.
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