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SOE to Sell Content Additions to EQII
Gamespot is reporting that Sony Online is going to be adding content to Everquest II in the form of adventure packs, essentially mini-expansions. From the article: "The first part of the adventure pack will come as a free download. All of the game's subscribers will be able to sink their swords into a new zone, fight new enemies, and so on. There will also be some new quests in this area for all players. [...] If players want to continue down this story path, they will have to pay what's been described as a "small fee" to download the rest of the adventure pack's content and continue on." Basically they're going to be following the City of Heroes model, but making players pay for part of it.
I'd assume it would be for the level designers and scriptwriters and artists and stuff.
The way I understand it (someone can correct me if I am wrong) is that the $15/mo or so actually goes towards the upkeep of the server hardware, paying the sysadmins and the in-game support team, and for bugfixes of the sort. The actual game-running team is a seperate team than the programmers/artists that designed the game and it's content.
- probably at least 50 employees to run and maintain the game. Average $50,000/year for each, you're looking at $2.5 million.
- cost of bandwidth. I would imagine that the bill is $5000+ per month. I suppose a DS3 or 2 would work. Anyone care to theorize?
- Cost of keeping the servers running at 99% or more. Think of the bill for the datacenter, rack space, electricity, etc.
- Cost of running the billing system. Maybe that could be counted in the 50 employees, maybe not
- Cost of marketing -- that's still factored in because you want new purchases
You still want to make a good profit after all of that. Now, all of what I mentioned could still be way lower than their monthly intake; maybe someone with more reliable cost figures could elaborate.