Best RPGs / MMORPGs of 2004

The folks at RPGDot and MMORPGDot always run "game of the year" polls among their readers and staff members to determine the best interactive RPG experiences of the year. They've now run their course, and all the awards have been given out. For RPGs, they have the categories of Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game (mm...Torment 2), Best Console RPG, and Overall Best RPG of the Year. Vampire: Bloodlines, the dark RPG from the late, lamented Troika appears to have garnered many of the top honors. As for Massive Games, the categories included Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game, Best Expansion, and Best MMORPG Overall. World of Warcraft pretty much swept the categories for the genre.

Comments

Worst...Poll...Ever...

[Pinkoir]

And you thought the Oscars were bad...

What a popularity contest. I do not see any signs that this was anything other than an exercise in people voting for the game they were playing at the time they took the poll. The clincher for me was the comparison between the results for "Best Overall MMORPG" and "Biggest Dissapointment". It would seem that while EQ2 is the second best MMORPG of the year it is also the biggest dissapointment and WoW while being the best was the runner-up for biggest dissapointment...hmmm.

Possibilities:
-Voters have absurdly high expectations and even awesomeness is not good enough for them.
-Voters are die-hard partisans and vote against the enemy for the negative award.
-Voters have never heard of any MMORPG other than EQ2, WoW or CoH

I think it's the last option. The hype machines for those three games pwn all and in a popularity competition it isn't even about popularity anymore, just hype.

Anywho, there are other MMORPGs out there. If you are interested in a well developed, balanced, mostly bug-free game with a superb market-driven economy and the kind of meaningful PvP that WoW and EQ2 only dream about then I suggest you give EVE a look-see.

-Pinkoir

Re:Worst...Poll...Ever...

[C0rinthian]

I agree that Eve is much more complex than any other MMO. However that is both good and bad.

Running a production corp of about 50-75 active members from both the US and Europe for the better part of a year, as well with dealing with alliance politics/BS ended up being more work than I did at WORK getting paid. Eve forced me to learn a LOT of stuff in Excel I never thought I'd know. Problem was it became all management. I'd never actually play the game. I'd log in, do corp maintenance and paperwork for an hour or two, and log out. It stopped being a game and started becoming a job and I simply burned out on it. The simplicity of WoW is a friggin relief after Eve. I get ehough of real life in real life. I don't want it in my games too.

However, my 3 accounts are still active and training, in case the fire sparks back up. :)

Re:The monthly fee, again

[ZephyrXero]

Ok, first...I made a mistake with my first post...they charge $15 a month, not $13 (that's only if you buy it in a 6 month chunk).

Until you throw some numbers up, I can't just take your word for it. Bandwidth isn't cheap, but it ain't that expensive! I'm fine with them making some money, I'm all for it...but this is ridiculous.

Here's some basic math based purely on the estimated 800,000 users in just the US. The game costs $50 ($80 for the collectors edition, but we won't even worry with that). Then you pay $15 a month. So, each user pays $230 to buy the game and play it for one year. So over the course of a year, if everyone continued to play, blizzard would be making $184,000,000 in one year. Now there are other factors to take into account, but we're just estimating here.

Ok, now let's look at how much money Bliz needs to keep the game going. Let's say that blizzard spent $5,000,000 to make this game, hell...let's say $10 million...a more than generous guess. So that means that just the box price alone has paid for the cost of development and publication with the $40,000,000 they made. Now as for upkeep, let's go as bold as to say they pay $1000 a month for bandwidth on each server, and lets say they have 50 servers...I don't think they have quite that many, but I want to make sure we're giving them benefit of the doubt. So that comes to $50,000 in bandwidth each month. Then lets say they spent $2000 on each server, that's $100,000. That lump sum should cover the cost of any additional parts that may need to fixed or replaced. So then lets say each server has 1 guy over it...now they probably have a team that covers all of them, but lets just say this for arguments' sake. So that's 50 guys for upkeep and maintainance, in game fixes and events... and lets say each guy is getting paid well for his job, lets say $50,000 a year, so that's $2.5 million a year right there. So then we have the actual core development team which is probably about 20-30 people... We'll say they all got paid $70,000 a year (there are probably only a small number of them still working on the game now that it's out, but once again I'm trying to make this as fair as possible. And there may have been up to a hundred people off and on during develpment...) So that's another $2.1 million (and at 3, no lets say 4 years of development...that's only $8.4, so I'd say the 10 mill said earlier more than covers their original expenses). Now, let's see....is there anyone we're leaving out....well the publishers and whatnot want their cut, but they probably just get a percentage of the profits; we'll calculate that later on.
Let's add it all up:
1 year of server use, plus initial cost: $150,000
1 year of upkeep guys wages: $2,500,000
1 year of developers wages: $2,100,000
Game's original Development: $10,000,000

So that put's us at about $14,750,000 Now that's a pretty generous estimate, could be more, but most likely isn't even that high...and remember only $4,750,000 is for actual upkeep of one year.

Now, the publisher is going to take a big cut of course, but lets figure up their costs first. CEO of company $10,000,000 for one year of "work"...wait, let's leave him out of this. Ok, we'll say that they spent $5,000,000 on marketing and advertising (including saleries). Now it's about what? $5 for each actual printed game's production including box and instructions...possibly less. So that's $4,000,000.

And that put's it at $23,750,000 for the game's release and one year of upkeep, including development of new content and publishing. I'll even throw in an extra million or so to make it a flat $25,000,000 for anything I left out. And we said the game made $184,000,000. So that's $159,000,000 of pure profit! Hell, even if I was off by 3 times that and the game cost 75 million to run/produce, that would still be well over 100 million in profit! Now I'm sure the publisher takes anywhere from 50%-80% of the profits for themselves....but needless to say, these guys are filthy rich! Please feel free to do your own figures, and you may use my rant for your own personal use if you want. Have fun guys! Just remember both Rouges and Blizzard/Vivendi do it from behind...