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StarCraft II Cost $100 Million To Develop
UgLyPuNk writes with news of a report that Blizzard has spent over $100 million developing StarCraft II. Initial development on the game began in 2003, and it's due to be released on July 27th. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick "described StarCraft as one of the company’s seven 'pillars of opportunity' (where each pillar has the potential to deliver operating profit between $500 million and $1 billion over its life span)." The finalized system requirements for the game have been released, and players planning to buy the digitally distributed version can download it now, though it won't be playable until the 27th.
If the crackers find a way to play before the start date.
Wow, $100million dollars and STILL couldn't afford to include LAN play. No worries, someone will do it for them free ;)
Qxe4
Less polished than Brood War 2 weeks after release, or Brood War 10 years after release?
Dear Mr. Kotick,
....You Greedy Asshat.
You've already ruined infinity ward, please dont touch blizzard.
It only took them 10 years to release. If they'd released it 5 years ago, it would have only cost a fraction of that.
where you got the information about Linux requirement? i dont see anything like that on blizzard support. you lie.
Doesn't matter, less polished than the previous version that players have accepted as what is "normal". Following your logic, it's ok that vista sucked compared to xp on release because xp had 5+ years of polishing after release.
Most of that money will have gone into graphics and marketing.
No wonder large companies have to create a top 10 game in order to get their investment back!
If they would settle for 20% less impressive graphics, I bet they'd save more than 50% on the bills. And then they wouldn't have to be so scared about piracy, either.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Starcraft is awesome!!!!
Let's see... .... And what else?
Activision's seven pillars are most likely:
World of Warcraft
Unnamed Blizzard MMORPG
Diablo
StarCraft
Guitar/Band Hero
Call of Duty
They only have a few other franchises to work with.. the LEGO game series, Cabela's hunting games (lol), and Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
As far as I know their contract with Marvel is over, so they might not be able to produce another M:UA game.
None of these remaining franchises seem like 1 billion dollar winners, so what does that leave for the seventh pillar?
I agree about RealID. They only know my real name so I can pay them, and they want to show it to the entire internet?! Hopefully now that they've backed down about the forum thing, they'll rethink the whole concept. I'd like a global unique identifier over the whole internet, but it should NOT have any impact on my real life.
That said...
OMG a beta is far less polished than an expansion to an already released game that has been patched up over years! SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!
I also call bullshit on the $100m figure. I bet there is a lot of 'Hollywood Accounting' going on there.
I also wonder how much it would be without all the cut-scene filler they seem to enjoy spending a fortune on
these days.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I don't think they really care too much about the $100 million. They already have a devoted fan base, and they're tying the game to online play. Both of the factors will turn the cracked/paid ratio to their side. And besides, they make something like $1.2 BILLION (with a B) a year off of WoW alone. They wipe their asses with $100 Million. If you really want something to talk about, how about Diablo III looking like some fucking cartoon. Whoever made that decision really needs to go die in a fire.
I also call bullshit on the $100m figure. I bet there is a lot of 'Hollywood Accounting' going on there. I also wonder how much it would be without all the cut-scene filler they seem to enjoy spending a fortune on these days.
Like you know better than the pros at blizzard what sells games. Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahhaa.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
they SPENT ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS
YOU DOUBT? IT WAS WORTH IT? it was worth 100 million
if that kind of development expense in the private sector doesn't warrant new technology
then exactly does make it worth developing a new type of lock box for?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Actually I think it is the Lego series, those are mega sellers and Activision is miking them to death, just like every other one of their non-Blizzard originated franchises.
rumor has it blizzard hired william steig and charles schultz to do the concept art...
"On the surface investing so much into a PC title seems like an odd move"
I assume they mean $100 million for the entire series (Wings of Liberty, Legacy of the Void, Heart of the Swarm), making it ~33 per game? After all, they're selling them at full price, and mentioned several times that each installment could stand on it's own. Seeing as they're doing this to brag, it seems odd they wouldn't mention that it was just Wings of Liberty if that was the case.
I was in the beta program, and I've got to say I didn't enjoy the game nearly as much as I did the original StarCraft. It's possible that I'm just outgrowing that kind of game, but I really just wasn't enjoying the gameplay so much.
10 years * ~12 developers at $80 000 each gets you close to the figure. Sure the salaries are probably a bit more varied, but there are most probably other costs involved.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Wow for $100 million dollars you think they could design a freaking menu interface. The beta was absolutely terrible, not intuitive at all and you end up with like 3 chat windows for talking with one person. I hope it was 100% remade before launch with some of that 100 million. The gameplay is ok, it feels like Starcraft but with better graphics. So if you are feeling nostalgic, you can drop $60 or just buy an old used copy for probably $5. I'll probably still buy it just to play occasionally online with friends though...
Back when chess was invented, it cost 100 stones to develop (for the pieces and the game board).
You're off by an order of magnitude, but 120 developers on a title like SC2 is not hard to fathom at all for anyone who has sat through a big-budget VG credits screen recently.
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Blizzard knows this, and thus they take their time. A lot of time they spend on their core values (gameplay first, commit to quality, embrace your inner geek, etc) requires constant communication, and adding people makes this worse -- communication channels increase geometrically as people are added to a project.
For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.
Not to mention that new employees require significant training, or else they'll introduce significant amount of bugs and flaws into a program or other creative effort. You can actually end up worse than you started if you have more bugs, gameplay issues, inconsistent storylines, and so forth to fix at the end of the day than the beginning.
This is called Brooks' Law, and was detailed in 1975 by Fred Brooks in the book 'The Mythical Man Month'. Wikipedia article is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
I can think of plenty of situations:
- LAN party in a plane/quote>
I'm tired of all these mother fucking LAN parties on this mother fucking plane!
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
...you're gonna have to buy this game 3 times.
You're a sucker if you buy SC2. Go play something else. Go get League of Legends or something. Don't encourage this shit where you pay $50-60 a pop 2-3 times just to get an entire game.
Paranoia and profits is why you can skip LAN'ing, or even discourage it.
Anything that doesn't have to phone home to function is easily cracked. Roughly ten years ago, I played Starcraft 1 constantly, through single player and dozens of LAN parties, and never paid for it. I never cared much for battle.net.
And unlike 10 years ago, the cases where people cannot phone home with broadband access, or even internet access itself, are rare. Even console systems are borderline dependent on internet access these days. As far as camping/moving/etc goes, most reasonably-populated areas have 3G, and you'll have 3G just about everywhere in a few years.
Therefore, it's rather simple what to do. LANs without internet access are probably only 1% of gameplay these days. Maybe only 1% of gamers won't buy it because of this.
If the game wasn't required to phone home in any manner, perhaps 20% of people will probably just play the game cracked off of bittorrent. The answer's obvious: go with the extra 19% of purchases. Is it fair to those who enjoy LANs? No. Call it tyranny of the majority, call it what you will.
If you want to LAN, you can always play SC1, or just play board games.
7 years, 100 employees, averages salary 100K works out to 70 million. That's probably a lowball for both the number of employees on the SC team and their average salary. Then add equipment, acting (voice) talent, marketing, production, management, and I don't find 100M surprising. Then again, I worked on the smaller D2 team, and I know what our burn rate was there.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
By "these days", you mean every single game released by Blizzard since SC 1 back in 1998? The elaborate cut-scene always been what Blizz does. It isn't some new thing.
Wow, $100million dollars and STILL couldn't afford to include LAN play. No worries, someone will do it for them free ;)
Could someone explain why that's an issue? Is there some sort of central server needed for game play?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Following your logic, it's ok that vista sucked compared to xp on release because xp had 5+ years of polishing after release.
Actually, yes. Not features-wise, but for stability and polish, yeah, the old version
is expected to be less featurefull but more polished, expecially when its such an entrenched
pdoduct...
Why not? Music execs are notoriously bad at picking the music that will succeed. Publishers are bad at picking up the books that will succeed. Quite often Hollywood wastes money on a big flop.
As to games, remember Age of Conan?
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
And they still don't support Linux.
Yeah, yeah, I know, small market share, not enough interest, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, ad infintitum, ad nausium.
Even before that. War2 had excellent cutscenes for its time as well.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yeah, even Warcraft II (maybe even the original Warcraft? Can't remember) had cut scenes in the storyline in glorious grainy VGA. That's how they'd advance the "plot". Every once in a while the Orcs would roll out a catapult and blow something up.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
How would you know how much time and effort Blizzard used to make Starcraft II? The basic facts are that development started in 2003. That mean 7 years of development or about $14 million a year. 50 developers at 80K each would be about $28 million. And that's just the salaries. That doesn't include additional personnel like artists, sound people, management, HR, overhead, hardware procurement, etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
these were 2 major pillars of starcraft that contributed to its success. dont falter on that. if you dont, razor1911 or skidrow will probably fix the lan play issue but you need to give us the chat.
Read radical news here
So, how is someone supposed to magically know if the GPU in his computer is better or worse than the GPUs listed for Starcraft II?
Seriously, Apple has used so few GPUs since they switched to intel, the least Blizzard could do is list all of the supported ones.
Where does the 9400M and the 320M fall in that list? The 320M is more powerful than the 9400M, so we can't even go by numbers alone. Stupid marketing departments with their crazy GPU names.
The linux requirements on their page are a bit ridiculous.. Dual Core 2.5 GHz and Ubuntu only? Jeeze... I'll wait for the fedora rpm thank you.
wtf ?
Which Linux requirements on what page ?
Starcraft II is natively playable on Ubuntu ? => *happy geek*
I though it was a total rumour !
Even WC1 had pre-rendered cut scenes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsBUAnb_NL8
So Windows Vista could have been released in 2002 if Microsoft had only fired all but one member of the Windows development team back in 2001, before the Vista project started? Shit, hold on while I let all of my clients know that they don't need my services anymore—the answer is to fire all but one member of the team!
...or maybe it doesn't actually work the way you say, because the corollary to your claim is that release will happen soonest if no one is ever added to the project (one member is requisite for the project to exist at all). Back to the example: over the years Microsoft grew the Windows team up from 0 members, and I doubt they were doing it to reduce their development capacity.
Honestly, scaling is manageable if the project is broken down into bite sized chunks and the team is comprised of subteams (personal size preference: 4-5 members). Yes, there is added overhead, but hierarchy and management can mitigate such issues; Agile development practices make the overhead as painless as possible. It is naive to think that you need a fully-connected network for an entire (massive) project in order for the team to be able to function.
In summary, "Yes, you can add developers to a project and make it release sooner, so please stop spreading this meme which was only ever applicable if certain naive stipulations were presumed."
PS. There is a finite amount of release speedup available by adding additional devs (Amdahl's Law), but overall release complexity capacity per time unit increases (Gustafson's Law). This is a classical problem in parallel processing. Some dev projects are more serial in nature, others are embarrassingly parallel.
I don't. I bet it's low. When you run a team of 200 for 2 years it adds up to half that just for salary and facilities, never mind marketing, operations cost of running betas and building out server infrastructure, QA... and that's if they're actually doing a reasonably efficient job, which Blizzard is not exactly famous for.
This wasn't a 2-year sprint either, it's been what, 7 years of probably false starts and rewriting tech and toolchains? And Blizzard is known for high production values in their cutscenes. The figure is totally believable.
Hollywood has a really good (well, actually really terrible but understandable) reason to do Hollywood accounting: the producers are trying to screw the people who might be paid royalties. Nobody does game development for royalties, so there's really no reason for Activision to fudge the numbers like that.
Is the download price significantly lower than the retail price? Because if I'm going to spend $60 on a download I might as well just run up to Walmart for their midnight release. Then I get a box and instructions and the full experience of the $100 million spent on development, and if their servers crash from everyone activating the digital copy I'll (hopefully) still be ok.
Plus if I download it I have to wait an extra 12 hours to play:
"Will digital copies of StarCraft II be available as soon as the game is released in stores?
No. They’ll go on sale slightly later, on 07/27/2010 10:00 AM PDT in North America and Latin America."
Whaa...?? Wait until the following day? This download is sounding worse all the time.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The use of realid is optional. There was a brief period during the beta where they removed unique identifiers, forcing people to share email addresses, but it's no more.
CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS!!!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
As to games, remember Age of Conan?
What's your point? For one thing, AoC is still around and kicking, including an upcoming expansion. As far as any of us knows, it may be a financial success by now, even if the player base has shrunk. For Another, AoC is a Funcom game, no relation of Blizzard/Activision. Which of course brings us to your next point...
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far
I think @gravos' sentiment, while badly worded, is correct. Blizzard seem to be really good at what they do and presumably the "cut-scene filler" will actually be something that helps sell the game. As for "pretty good hit/miss ratio", it's pretty darn fucking spectacular, calling it "pretty good" is just about the understatement of the year.
but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
Luck is getting 1 hit game. Smash hit after smash hit implies something more. As for the "hordes of loyal fans", I guess you're implying that no matter what Blizzard does, the "loyal fans" will buy and cheer? Just look at the recent RealID on forums fiasco and outcry on the WoW Forums, fans were certainly not shy about letting Blizzard know it messed up there!
So I don't buy it. I think Blizzard really are good at taking a concept and making a best seller game of it. I fully expect SC2 to both sell well and get good reviews (relative to the dated graphics it uses). My only personal complaint is that the game is expected to sell for I think $50 and will open only the Terran race in the single-player story mode, which means $150 for all 3 chapters and who-knows-how-long-to-wait for the next 2 chapters. To be honest, that's too steep for me, I'm going to sit and wait till prices come down and hopefully parts 2 and 3 are released.
I learn from all my mistakes, I intend to be a genius at the end of my life.
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
Or maybe the attitude to stop poor games from hitting the shelves. Yes, knowing up front if the idea will work out is hard but at the end it can't be that hard to work out what the reviews will be. Having a good reputation means people will preorder and hype it up instead of waiting for reviews to say if it's hit or miss. It's an asset that smart companies get, they could sell one game that was utter crap but every game after that would suffer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Can someone tell me how many dead kittens that equals? I cannot imagine numbers that big.
On a side note, by any other developer having a game in development for 7 years with no screen shots or anything would be a bad omen. It's usually a sign that things had to be scrapped and started over again with and with that period of time they must have had to redo the artwork/animation 2-3 times to keep up with modern expectations.
But I could be wrong.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Then again, I worked on the smaller D2 team, and I know what our burn rate was there.
So, any inside scoop on when D3 is coming out? Now that's one title I'm really looking forward to! :)
I learn from all my mistakes, I intend to be a genius at the end of my life.
The Hollywood Accounting here is that they add all the previous developments into the total, since they use parts of the previous sources.
So, they add the prices of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo 2, and I'm probably missing some others...
Frankly, this is one of the poorest PR I ever read.
If I would have managed a game which cost 100 millions, it would mean that I'm a very bad manager, and I doubt I'll ever find another job.
As an ex-game programmer, I know how much game companies like to announce that their game cost a fortune, but these are lies.
And now, I'm prepared to hear that they'll spend 1 billion on their next game.
I germany there are starcraft advertising at prime time. That can't be cheap. And that is only one country.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...or maybe you should have read the link he included at the end for more details instead of making a ridiculous straw man.
Admittedly, the parent misquoted. He should have said, "You cannot add developers to a late project and make it release sooner". But if you had taken the time and effort to check out that wiki article instead of knee jerking you would've seen the correct quote in the first sentence.
This only needs to be said once. It's the discussion ender...
If they spent $100M on this damn glorified remake of StarCraft then it is time for Blizzard to be shut down because they have lost their talent and management ability. Of course, StarCraft II was Blizzard's Duke Nukem Forever. So, maybe it isn't too far off. But, again... if they spent $100M & anything more than 2 years of full on development time on this game then they need to shut up shop.
But even with 120 developers at (I'll be generous) $100,000 is still $12,000,000.
Lets double that to include executives and veteran staff so its $24,000,000.
Double that again for building, equipment, electricity and other expenses and its $48,000,000.
Throw in another $20,000,000 for assets that were discarded/scrapped and its $68,000,000.
I'll even account for Miscellaneous Expenses, another $20,000,000. Thats $88,000,000 total.
Close but not $100 million.
If all of the added devs were programmers I could see this causing more problems, but if you are hiring more modelers or texturers who are talented and can integrate into the game style relatively easily, this could decrease dev time I'd say.
Once this game has PVPGN support to sort through and bypass all of the new-gen, value-subtracted "features" that Blizzard has added. For example, region segregation, conditional LAN play, tying a key to a single account instead of restricting simultaneity based on use, custom game limits/restrictions, and no doubt others which, for the user, are better not being there than being there -- which is the only metric that matters; the only metric that can matter.
Not only this, but they also have scaled back on the single player game compared to the 1998 Starcraft.
Being a gamer massively inclined to single player for nearly anything multiplayer bar Monster Hunter via Wii it's a bit of a let down when only the Terrans can be played. I liked the story of the original which was well tied in with all three factions explored, and the add-ons that followed expanded substantially but not crucially to the plot and universe.
I mean, you've spent a sum well over an order of magnitude more expensive than its predecessor...and can't help but release Protoss and Zerg campaigns in expansion packs? I guess for people who are willing to spend $80+ to hear the whole saga will buy into it, but anyone with economy in mind should just wait until 2015 or so when Wings of Liberty and the other two campaigns are selling for a cheap $30 combi-pack.
If it's anything like the first one, Battle.net should still have hordes of players five years from now - standing the test of time to use a stale phrase.
If Blizzard simply decided to encrypt the whole thing, and will be releasing the key on the 27th, which will effectively make cracking the game to play before the 27th impossible.
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
Tip: they've been working on it since 2003 or so. You need to get a new calendar.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If you have not gotten torchlight get that it will get you over waiting for D3. BTW the lead designers for it worked on diablo and diablo 2.
Someone is walking around with $80 Million in their pocket.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I was in the beta program too and didn't enjoy it much either. I'd play a game or two and then quit for the evening, whereas with the original Starcraft I'd get sucked in and play for hours (often into the wee hours of the morning and miss out on sleep).
One problem I noticed is that the game moves too fast. The units do so much damage that they kill each other or buildings in mere seconds. There's no time to send reinforcements, cast spells, or even retreat. Well, maybe pro players with 600 APM can do that stuff, but for an average player the battles are over before you even get the alert that they've started.
It is false. Let's say you have a multi-year project and you hit a snag in the first 2 months, a snag which implies that complexity is somewhat increased compared to your initial estimates and would take an additional six months to complete if nothing changes—the project is now officially late. However, you can still release on schedule if you add another 10% capacity to your dev team. This is a very plausible scenario, and only one such scenario must exist for your absolute statement to be disproven.
So, you have to start adding further precise stipulations in order to make the original Brooks' Law even remotely plausible. For instance, the project has to be late but only insofar as it does not represent a fundamental shift in the amount of work to be done (in my example, more work has been "added" to the project). Furthermore, it is presumed that additional developer capacity will never reach breakeven for sunk training costs/bugs/etc before the project would be delivered anyway, which further restricts the number of applicable scenarios.
The communication network scaling factor is a straw man in itself because that is not how developers interact in a non-dysfunctional dev team. It's just retarded, even at a basic level: "Hello, Anne? You work on the kernel-level Windows USB hardware driver team, right? Hi, I am Gavin from the Windows Explorer dev team, and I am working on rendering icon panes for displaying directory contents, so I thought I would call you up—you know, because we have a fully interconnected dev team communication network and I thought I should inquire about your insights on my task." *cough*
The world would be a better place if we killed Brooks' Law and replaced it with understanding of Amdahl's/Gustafson's Law in conjunction with a rational consideration of new dev ramp-up time. Even as an "outrageous oversimplification" Brooks' Law is misleading and very likely harms more than it helps. How many projects were made even later when an appeal to Brooks' Law was used to cut off debate about adding capacity?
I can't back this up (or won't bother to) but I'm pretty sure that the price for 3D rendered video is far cheaper now than it was 10 years ago.
Back in the days of Toy Story, the price of 3D video was measured in millions per minute. But now, even relatively small startups can afford four or five guys who work on that kind of thing in-house.
I recently interviewed for a job at a game studio that has one main product in development. They're cranking out a good bit of nice 3D video for their promotional stuff and it looks as good as anything else I've seen. They obviously have a nice budget for this project, but they ARE a startup.
They already lost me as a customer. That whole business with Real Names on their forums lead me to looking more into Real ID and...I just don't like it. I don't like their reaction. I don't like their words. They are not representing themselves as a company interested in protecting my interests, they don't care about my privacy. They care about my money.
So I'm not letting them get it.
I also call bullshit on the $100m figure. I bet there is a lot of 'Hollywood Accounting' going on there. I also wonder how much it would be without all the cut-scene filler they seem to enjoy spending a fortune on these days.
Marketing can also cost a lot. If I recall correctly, there was an ad during the NBA finals for Starcraft 2 (as "debut" ad), and they've played many since.
The last times they made a second game in a series, they had friggin Warcraft 2 and Diablo 2. They're expecting this to be massive, just like the former second releases in their other series.
This is called Brooks' Law
...which has been proven wrong.
Just because there's a famous book about it doesn't make it automatically correct in every situation.
Proof? Check google. There even was a s
Yeah, I got Torchlight on Steam for $20, too bad it was released a few days later on a weekend sale for $10 :)
But frankly Torchlight is just missing something for me. Maybe it is the limited storyline/questing (practically non-existent), or maybe the small variety of spells and abilities. Or maybe the fact that I finished the entire dungeon in 3 evenings of casual play and the infinite one just bores me. But just looking at some of the frankly kick-ass moves of the D3 mage class for example, you can just see the difference between the two games.
It's definitely worth it for $10, I got a kick out of fishing a lot and turning my cat into various forms. But I think the lack of multiplayer and very limited replay value (at least for me - YMMV) mean that once you finish the end boss for the first time, there's very little reason to go back to the game.
Last but not least, there's a lot to be said for Blizzard's famous adherence to polish and quality. While playing Torchlight I've noticed: weak grammar and outright errors in quest texts ; different items with the same name ; ability to mis-use game mechanics to kill mobs that can't reach you.
These are just the things I remember, there are probably more. You can bet that there won't be those kinds of problems in D3.
So no, I am not "over waiting for D3". Not by a long shot :)
I learn from all my mistakes, I intend to be a genius at the end of my life.
7 years, 100 employees, averages salary 100K works out to 70 million. That's probably a lowball for both the number of employees on the SC team and their average salary. Then add equipment, acting (voice) talent, marketing, production, management, and I don't find 100M surprising. Then again, I worked on the smaller D2 team, and I know what our burn rate was there.
Are you like the rest of your team, and put "made by the makers of Diablo 2" on the box of every game you've worked on (not necessarily designed) for the last 10 years or so?
Starcraft II cost 10 million dollars to develop.
It cost 90 million to market.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Consider that Starcraft, the number one selling RTS which is the leader in esports which has also been available for 12 years, has only sold 11 MILLION COPIES! This is a game which was nice enough to let you play a LAN game with only one gamedisc. I don't blame them for the big fuck you.
"digitally distributed version can download it now, though it won't be playable until the 27th."
My experience of this this of approach is unpleasant. While I talk about steam games, and while this is Battle.Net I am wary. Pre downloading then activating on the day of release for left 4 dead 2 was terrible. It probaly has something to do with time zones as the "27th" will occur a half day before for me(being in new zealand). On that day of release the sun rose, the shops opened and the copies were on the shelf. I was not able to activate for another 24 hours. Some NZ'ers could but not me.
I note battlenet say it is "activatable once it goes on sale in the US". 07/27/2010 10:00 AM PDT
NZ'ers and Australians, remember, copies will have been on the shelf for one day, if that affects your decision to download (BattleNet downloader 3 meg. Starcraft 2 client 8GB). Ports required are ports 3724, 6112, 6113, 6114, 4000 or 6881-6999. so if you are in a restricted environment you will get "Tracker Not Responding"
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Here's the magnet link if you want to use a proper torrent client:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:U4VILVKSFDTQ7WB5N7EKYCVTAD7QNPNA
In case any of the blizzard monkeys read this: please let us limit the uprate ourselves, your stupid downloader sucks at it. Pushing my upload rate beyond what it supports kills my speed in _both_ directions, you're not gaining anything from that either.....
$100 million to develop, but I fear the untold financial damage this game will do to the Korean economy: "In other news, the Korean stock market dropped by 5000 points today. The massive drop coincided with the release of Blizzard's new game, StarCraft 2. Top economists are unsure if there is a correlation..."
starcraft cost $10 after they outsourced it to India. the remaining $99,999,990 goes towards post-patch expenses... -0.
100mill to make a game PLEASE
watch it be crappy too just like hollywood movies are
Why are you making things up?
1. Categorically, no, they are not adding up the costs of previous developments.
2. Just how much source from Diablo 2 do you really think is in Starcraft 2?
So many better engines out there that could render all the content in as little as 133MHz of spare processing in under 24MB of RAM, and yet we see this beast appear more wanting to sell hardware as ID Software's Quake4 and Rage engines. It's obvious now. I remember when StarCraft(:)Ghost was terminated, and I expected that to be nothing more than a blending of Halo and Metroid Prime but with a awesome 3rd POV of Kerrigans sweet pumpkin and fishpot at all times. I recently went to /u/ on 4Chan and I see now why Blizzard may have canceled that; Shamus Aran just got strapon pounded by Princess Peach, and there's not much Kerrigan could do better yet we could get the best of that entire Ghost in just a few pictures without paying anything.
I would expect a free anti-Blizzard title circulated in the likeness of how FreeCraft was 3/4 done to import Starcraft 1 CDROMv1.0 graphics and sound into it's superior engine. Anyone skilled could whip this up in under 2 weeks like how they got the beginnings of StarCraft 1 on a GameBoy DS until Blizzard sent the attornies.
Wait a minute, you were being sarcastic! Damnit, I guess I can't get a "whoosh" now that I've caught that. :(
Anyway, It's not just the #1 RTS of all time... it's the #4 Top Selling PC game of all time (according to this article on Wikipedia.
You bought up a point that's really bothered me. When the original was published, they were smart enough to allow for Spawned copies, so that only a certain number of players had to even own a legitimate copy. They didn't need cracks, just spawned a LAN only copy and they were good to go for a LAN party. Hell, I know that half of the people I played with would have never bought StarCraft, if they had not got hooked on it off the completely legal and Blizzard authorized (and provided) copies of the game, myself included!
The game industry is losing their way, and that includes Blizzard, who at one time were one of the most respected, appreciated, and admired video game companies out there.
Gustafson's law is also an oversimplification when applied to software projects. For example:
1. The amount of serial work is not constant but is in fact related to the level of parallelization. This is true even with mitigations like grouping into teams for communication efficiencies -- which can also increase communications error rates.
2. The "speed" of the individual "processors"; employees; is not constant over time, nor is it independent of the speed of other "processors". I'm skeptical that it's even independent of the number of "processors" or the proportion of serialization vs. parallelization.
What we need to do is recognize the limitations and provisos of all of these so-called "laws". It's inconsistent to throw some away because it doesn't hold for all cases and then replace it with one that doesn't hold for all cases, though I'd accept the argument that Brooke's law in its common form holds too rarely to be very useful.
Gustafson's law applies trivially to projects where the constant terms are truly constant, and all terms are time-invariant; otherwise it requires non-trivial modifications.
I call shennanagins here. I bet that the cost of building battlenet 2.0 was included in this $100 million figure since that is where they are planning to make most of their money. Also this includes almost all of the costs for the two add-ons that are coming and will probably be quite expensive.
Why are you making things up ?
1. How do you know ? 100 millions is more expensive than most Pixar movies. I doubt there is much more movie than in a Pixar, and I doubt the money was spent on the code, or in the gameplay.
2. Probably the keyboard and mouse routines, and the dynamic compression, maybe 2000 lines ?
Brooks Law doesn't really hold when you have a large number of well encapsulated components. Then you can have a number of teams working on each component, almost in isolation, requiring far fewer channels of communication.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Valve has done this successfully, for one.
For another, cryptography has been around for ages. This particular concept is something I could write in half an hour as a shell script -- granted, it'd take a bit longer to build as a native Windows program, and to tie into whatever DRM they plan to use post-launch, but it's still a stupidly easy thing to do -- especially for, as way2trivial points out, a game that they spent a hundred million dollars on.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
ah well. at least I keep $50 and my productivity. :)
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
$100 Million for something I have no intention of buying because they do not have proper LAN play, I don't even plan on buying it when it sells for $10 and hits the bargain bin....
If you aren't young and have perfect eye sight you are screwed, Blizzard continues the proud tradition of not allowing people to set the font sizes in their interfaces.
And no, picking a lower resolution doesn't help - either the game won't allow you to, or (like WoW) it resizes the screen so everything is as small in 800x600 as it is in 1280x1080
Could their motto be "At Blizzard we hate people who don't have perfect aryan eyes" ?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner"
Of course you can.
"For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 - 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication."
Rubbish. Its not a democracy. You have a core who plots the course, and the rest just follow orders or hit the road.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I'm no longer with Blizzard since a little before it was obvious they were going to shut down blizzard north. I can tell you it was in production then, which was 7 years ago at this point.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
When a hundred will get you a thousand, you spend the hundred.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Nope. I do tell horror stories to my current colleagues about working there though.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Who wants to bet that the activation servers will be overloaded or nearly overloaded on opening day? I mean, maybe they've learned their lesson, but it seems like almost every other game released like this gets overloaded for a while, so people can't even play it for a few days.
Seriously $100 million is way out of line with this game. Now if the costs include new server farms for online play then maybe I can see this. The game is not showing $100 million in improvements. Don't get me wrong the 3D graphics are pretty from the screenshots posted online that I have seen. The tweaks and additions to the gameplay are nice from what I hear in previews reported online, but $100 million? Come on...seriously.
-Eric
Oh, really? I suppose that's why that page includes phrases such as "The system requirements for the StarCraft II Beta are ..." and "... the Minimum System Requirements for this game may change over time".
I can't see the Linux version requirements on that site.... Some oversight by the web master? or is there really no linux version?
Why do you say the graphics are dated? I actually hoped the requirements to be even lower. The recommended graphics is 8800GT class, which very few machines have- Especially since most of their target age audience will have laptops and not desktops. I have a 8600M GT which is still a mid range card as far as laptops go, and it is disappointing that it will struggle-- I was expecting something around the system requirements of WOW actually.
Today, I was invited to SC2 Beta with a Battle.Net key. I wonder how come, since the final is almost out! Has anyone else received an invitation today as well? I have not yet downloaded the game, but I tried the key and it works on Battle.Net.
Maybe the reason for not including LAN play is that they want to make it harder to reverse engineer the network code ? they sued the makers of bnetd in the days of starcraft 1 .
Wasn't unpaid royalties the reason for the whole Infinity Ward fiasco?
I just did.
:(
:("
to billing@blizzard.com
bcc wowtech@blizzard.com,
macsupport@blizzard.com,
advertise@blizzard.com,
sitelicense@blizzard.com,
merchandiselicensing@blizzard.com
date Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:38 AM
subject No LAN support in sc2
Template for those that also want to send a mail: (Cleaning up any spelling errors would be appreciated )
--------
In reference to the article posted on slashdot.org
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/07/18/1529218/StarCraft-II-Cost-100-Million-To-Develop?art_pos=12
In the community it is well known that blizzard won't support LAN gaming, without an internet connection.
I quote:
"Blizzard denies the rumors of a LAN-enabled "Professional Edition", but it sure sounds like that's the direction they're heading. On one hand Blizzard claims that "No LAN because Battle.net 2 is just so amazing we can't let anyone miss out!" and then on the other "Okay, LAN play is required but only high rollers get it, not the rest of you, you dirty pirates". Anyone who's played the beta knows how bad and lacking Battle.net 2 is. Yes, it's beta, but the final release is in less than 10 days. It's not like they're going to uncheck the "Battle.net sucks enabled" checkbox the day before.
I want to love Starcraft 2, but Blizzard-Activision is making it so hard
Yes, you do make it hard. Because if its true that you have to connect up to battle.net to play the game in multiplayer it just reeks of greed.
If I buy the game, my thoughts would be: "Some of this money would go to some cheep ass greedy bastard that is so cheap that he won't let me play the game with my friends offline."
The real reason is probably to thwart resellers.
You guys are so greedy, and cheap. It sucks to be honest.
Before you actually gave an option of a free copy. Like if I wanted to play with my friend the game would download to his computer, and we could play multilayer without him needing a copy.
Something like that would be cool! But you greedy ass gets in the way for that....
Baah.. I don't think I even will try to pirate the game. I'll just ignore you and choose one of the gazillion other ways to spend my time.
You greedy ass suck,
sign.
I love how Bobby Kotick is trying to take credit for this. What a tool.
Blizzard did this on their own. Go back to killing Guitar Hero, Kotick. And getting sued by the Modern Warfare 2 developers.
First they exposed how music industry giants tampered the books to make it look like someone selling 50 million albums could still owe the company money (nsync and backstreet boys...) then we saw how harry potter lost money even though they grossed over 700 million dollars, I am sure this is just another one of those things with creative accounting, so that when the sales hit, it will balance out if not lose money, and they will be able to keep some profits...without paying too much taxes.
I got to get myself into accounting!!!
What COULD that cash have done for humanity?
How many clean water wells could have been dug?
How many vaccines could have been injected?
How much training could have been provided to non-schooled peoples.
How many FIFA refs could have been paid off?
Still feeling proud?
no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month
At least I am willing to try!
I suddenly have a urge to punch whoever the marketing jackhole was who came up with that term...
My (admittedly wishful) intent would be to promulgate a counter-meme, "Brooks' Law considered harmful".
When one considers the assumptions made by Brooks, it is apparent that his law is merely a case of Amdahl's Law with certain initial conditions and modeling parameters. I am actually surprised he didn't make a more generalized restatement of Amdahl's Law, because he is clearly referring to a maximum amount of speedup. Why stop with only "late" projects and not make a broader rule for dev projects in general?
If I may posit for your consideration, I suggest that your examples missed the broader point. Everything you pointed out is reasonable, but my suggested replacement for Brooks' Law is to use Amdahl's Law to calculate a hard upper bound on the maximum amount of speedup that could be obtained adding additional devs. The result would be something along the lines of "even if we hired 128 new devs who all instantly acted as as perfect development cogs and assume our project development is embarrassingly parallel, we would still miss the release date by at least 7 months". I contend that such a model would be significantly more useful than Brooks' Law.
If your maximum speedup from adding additional capacity is insufficient by an order of magnitude or more, then it's obviously time to consider alternatives. Contrariwise, if the numbers show a clear possibility of payoff then it might make sense to add capacity; however, this is much more ambiguous than what can be ruled *out* by Amdahl's Law.
Your examples point out how such a model could be abused, much as I allege that Brooks' Law is currently abused. If people turn the model around and start using it to project hard release dates based on dev team size, initial dev complexity estimates, and so forth, then such a model could easily become more harmful than helpful.
I believe we are in general agreement because the feasibility of any such calculation is predicated upon a well-managed, well-instrumented dev team. Ideally, there would be a reasonable amount of historical metrics about dev velocity statistical bands, "initial estimate vs. actual time required" fidelity, team overall velocity vs team size, typical ramp-up time, etc. Perhaps I have been spoiled by working on such teams in the past. Regardless, if you don't have a realistic basis for the numbers you are using, then all of this becomes yet another para-masturbatory exercise similar to the Drake Equation.
PS. In the link I posted above, it is shown that Gustafson merely restated Amdahl's Law via a different formulation—there is only one law.
Speculation isn't proof.
Yeah, right.
WHOOSH. Trollish WOOOSH, but still a WOOSH..
-- dnl
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Your only saying half of the statement. The idea is that you can't add developers late in the development cycle and expect them to speed up development.
If you are talking about adding developers six months or more out from the last update date, then you will indeed see those new developers increase the total speed of the project.
Here is the actual quote from Brooks:
adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
And I wonder where the outrage is compared to COD6 not having dedicated servers and no post made for SC2 on launch day, then I look at the top and right banner ads for /.