WTF? Everquest... 3?

Flobee said:

How many devs do you need to rack up a $70 million bill? My point above is that the tools are getting easier to use and a single dev can do significantly more work. It just doesn't add up to this silly numbers people pull out of their ass.

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An indie team could do an MMO, for sure.
The tech is there and accessible.

Couple big problems: Art is expensive. Unless you plan to use Marketplace assets, a major cost will be creating art assets. Characters alone are expensive and time consuming. There really isn't a streamlined method to do well-done characters. Heck, Epic spent $12 million to create 26 characters for Paragon, scrapped the game and released them to the Unreal community. Imagine an MMO where you have TONS more assets... since the point is customizing characters & having a lot of variations. So either you skimp on cost and use characters that are quickly generated or you spend $$$ developing unique AAA characters.

Also keep in mind how many AI Characters/Mobs need to be created. Though with less detail, and can be more generic, but still.

THEN, you have World design/art. Do you purchase marketplace assets or do you create everything from scratch? For performance you'll want to stay away from the Marketplace, IMO. Also everything needs to fit the same art style, so generally you need to create it all to do that. Again, an indie team has no problem leveraging marketplaces, but a AAA studio will look foolish doing so.

You still need a team that can take the art assets and create engaging content, write quests, loot, etc etc etc. An MMO has a TON of systems compared to most other games.

But yea, an indie team CAN do an MMO... it would be very bare-bones / scaled back. Probably lacking some systems you've become accustomed to and you'll easily see a lot of buggy behavior, because simple fact is huge worlds are hard to do right without a lot of development time.

Lets look at some Avg salaries for game development, ranges vary a lot but this seems reasonable for an AAA studio that provides benefits, a lot of overhead costs at a AAA studio:

Artists: $75k/yr
Designer: $75k/yr
Developer: 100k/yr
Programmer: $100k/yr

Now how many do you need of each? Pantheon has a dev team of around 35 based on their "team page". A team of 35 seems small, and Pantheon is already on year 6 or 7 of development.

Add in office/hardware/software.
Voice actors, Motion Cap team/actors.
Music & Sound design
Servers... AWS adds up quickly.

What did Schilling spend with little to show? $50M?
I'd say 50M is bare-bones to get a AAA out the door with all the expected bells & whistles.



Also the biggest expense: Advertising. A Triple-A game is going to need to spend more on Advertising then game development.
At best I'd wager it's a 1:1 ratio: spend 50M making the game, spend 50M to advertise it.


just my 2c.

Flobee said:

Thanks! Happy to be corrected on it being a random number. I do feel that if a small studio was willing to cut corners on character models and animations (say ~50 unique models + lean heavily on reskins and humanoid enemies) plus did something like an EQ style one look per armor type system you could reduce the costs drastically. People on this forum are always saying shit like "I would love a game just like EQ but with better graphics". This is the type of route you would need to take to make that happen imo.

I feel like you could create some cool and unique systems with only a small development team. Combine this with a willingness to take some hits on the art side of things (Asset store environment items) and it seems feasible. It is a lot easier to go back and retroactively update graphics if your game is actually good and people play it. Also worth noting you could do something like a low poly art style and disregard a lot of this issue. Something similar to Albion Online for example.

Regarding marketing I'm a fan of the idea of a good game selling itself over time. This is obviously pretty idealistic but honestly I think you only need ~1000 players to keep you afloat with a tight team and smart monetization. Word of mouth will do the rest.

Sounds like you know a lot more about the industry than I do. My opinions are mostly coming from playing with various tools available for the last year or so and dreaming big.

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Don't think I'm an expert on the matter, just what I've researched over the years, discussed with current/former game devs, and from my experience with my own little project(s): I've been making a game (release before Pantheon?)

I could be very wrong. The more I think about it, the more $50M seems unrealistic for a AAA MMO. It's amazing how fast you can burn through cash. If your game takes over 5 years to create (most MMO), you're looking at some astronomical numbers.

Creslin said:

The thing I can’t ever figure out is how the old games ever got made.. I mean Eq or Daoc can’t have cost 50m back then but now with all the new tech and tools it feels like programmer productivity is actually significantly worse.

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Original EQ had a shell of an MMO by today's standards. Google says EQ had a budget of 3M, which is ~5M after inflation. How much broken shit did EQ have, empty zones, low res models, so many missing systems. Practically no raid content at release. Also their team size was super small and everyone wore multiple hats. You didn't mocap or voiceover anything. Just super-bare-bones.

A small team could do the same thing today, with better graphics, but would it be played? Probably not. EQ had the benefit of being 1st. Nowadays an MMO needs to come out of the gates with every bell+whistle + something extra to even capture a small audience.

Fucker said:

I think it's not even close. Wow was made with 60 people, and they used a lot of recycled assets and low res models. Today, a small team of 100 quality people would cost $100MM in salary and benefits over 5 years. This doesn't include the cost of getting those employees, either. Good employees want bonuses and annual raises. More $$$$$$$$$.

Big building in a nice area isn't cheap, either. Around here, a nice building for that many people will cost you $5MM in 5 years for lease. A nice office in a popular tech city will cost WAY more than that. And then there's taxes, insurance, utilities, hardware, software, and the bazillion incidentals that come along with running a business. $150MM not only seems like a reasonable number, but also a small number for a project with a long development time and a small chance of success.

People wonder why companies don't make MMO's anymore.

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I agree. My 50M number was mainly thinking about a small team running at peak efficiency, but it's a helluva stretch.
At the salaries I posted, 35 people = ~$15M for 5 years. Make it 30M for 70 people and figure 20M for Overheads/everything else could be doable, but really idk. Give me 50M and I'll be willing to try

Jysin said:

I would only make one argument here.. and that is perspective. Complaints like original EQ being "low res" is silly and unfair to compare to today's market. For it's day, EQ was developed when most people didn't have internet and fancy 3D video cards were rare and extremely costly. It was being coded and built from what, 1996? The game was groundbreaking, massive, and pretty damn cutting edge for its time.

One could argue that it was a bigger gamble then vs today.

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I shouldn't have brought up graphics my main reason was to say they cut a lot of corners with the graphics. Which was smart and necessary.