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

Meaningless Results

[wan-fu]

If you look at the results, the voting percentages were very similar in each poll. And this is no mistake. Most people will not invest in more than one MMORPG and few will play two at any given time. Even fewer will choose to play three simultaneously and once someone starts one, they are unlikely to switch to another. Thus, it seems like a lot of the voting was simply based on what people were familiar with via word-of-mouth, their experience with their game of choice, etc. With limited knowledge, it obviously makes it hard to vote properly on the various categories and people will be apt to simply vote for their own game as they haven't seen many of the others in action. The results probably reflect the MMORPG split-up of RPGdot's voting base and nothing more.

Re:The monthly fee, again

[Psychochild]

The problem is that exact numbers aren't easy to get. If you want to see the nitty gritty, then I'd recommend Developing Online Games as a good book to take a look at. I'd quote from it, but I don't have the book handy right this moment.

But, let's talk about some holes in the numbers you came up with.

First, box sales are a completely different issue from subscriptions. You're lucky to see a third of the money from the box sale; most of the rest is eaten up by retailer margins, "promotion fees" at the retail end, cost of making the boxes, etc. Remember, this is also a one-time income item. Yes, there are expansions, but not everyone will buy them. Also, expansions have a cheaper price point than $50.

Second, not everyone that buys the box actually signs up, and very few of those people will actually play a full year. We have what's called a "conversion rate", which is the rate at which people will become paying subscribers after their free month. We also have what's called "churn", which is a comparison of the number of people that sign up compared to the number of people that cancel an account. This means that you're not going to have that full 800k paying. Dave Rickey, an experienced developer, estimates that out of those 800k, you'll probably have 442,800 to 543,152 people per month, on average once you count conversion rates and churn.

Third, as you point out, people aren't going to all pay the full $15/month. Some people will be paying less if they sign up for more accounts. Ignoring discussions on the future value of money (take Econ 101 if you have a burning desire to hear more about that), this reduces income by several percent.

Already we see that the number is going to be considerably lower than your 800k x $15 equation.

Next, your estimation on the cost of the game's development cost are off by a considerable sum. I've heard it said that Blizzard spent $30 million on the game. Unfortunately, I don't have a reliable source to link right now, so you'll have to take my word for it. This is 3-6 times what you estimated. Hell, traditional single-player games have budgets that approach $10M; I don't even think you could make a game for only $5M anymore and expect to get it published on a console. It costs a lot more to make an online RPG like this because not only do you have to create assets and the game, you have to create more art assets (for a wider variety of player avatar options), a server, and hire network coders. Yes, single-player games sometimes have servers as well, but it's the difference between an elementary school baseball field (a few dozen people simultaneous) and a baseball stadium (tens of thousands of people simultaneous). Even if Blizzard got to keep 33% from each box sale (which is a crazy high number), they would have only made $13.3M, less than development costs.

Okay, now we come to bandwidth. Here's some numbers for you: Meridian 59 uses 1 kilobyte per player per second. Remember, this is for a game designed to be played on 14.4k modems on the client side; a game like WoW is going to require much higher rates. But, let's assume that players play an average of 10 hours per week (quite low, "hard core" players usually go 20-30 hours per week), there's 4 weeks per year, and use the numbers from Dave Rickey above, rounded to 500k to make my math easier.

1 kilobyte/s/player * 500k players * 40 hours/month * 60 minutes/hour * 60 s/minute = 67 Terabytes per month.

M59 currently spends about $3/GB per month. That puts bandwidth costs closer to $200,000 per month, four times your number. Keep in mind that 1) WoW probably uses more bandwidth per player per second , and 2) this bandwidth usage is constant, not bursty like most network traffic is. This means you're going to be filling up fat pipes easier and longer than most other server types will. A