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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
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.
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 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.
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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.
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...
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.
Hookers, blow and blackjack?
I guess there was some pizza and mountain dew too.
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
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
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.
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
That's an issue because Blizzard loses control.
What blizzard realized was that a significant part of the games played on starcraft and war3 were played between people who know each other.
It's far from being the majority but it's a significant amount.
If you let these people play on Lan, they do not connect to battle.net, so:
A. they are more independant and your power over their lessens.
B. You can't feed them with your advertising.
Ultimately I don't understand how this wasn't more stressed as an issue. I mean the RealID was a mess, complete PR failure and terrible idea, but this is much more relevant to the gaming part of the matter.
Anyway Blizzard keeps on going that slippery slope they stepped on with WoW : good game bad practices.
I suppose it's OK for now, but when you measure how much free battle.net made for their image and the success of their games you really don't get how they could let such stupid limitation alter this image !
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.
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:
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...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.
Apparently you don't understand. It's very simple really. It's Starcraft. S-T-A-R-C-R-A-F-T. Everything else, such as life, liberty and pursuit of (any other kind of) happiness, is secondary.
(And no, I'm not a real fan, and I have no current plans to play or buy the game, just saying...)
...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.
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.
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.
"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.
I'm sure they are putting money into marketing, sure. Also, I have reservations about what I've heard about this game's DRM and I'm waiting to see how this will be handled at launch.
However, there is absolutely no denying that a lot of work went into this game. A tremendous number of man hours and assets were involved. If you truly believe that this is nothing but marketing hype masking a shallow cheap production, then you are either delusional or have your head up your ass.
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.
The main reason that I would suspect a distinct pre-release cryptographic mechanism is that such have been seen before(I believe some Steam titles have used them) and that they are so utterly trivial yet so functionally unbreakable.
You would simply take the release installer, and encrypt a copy with a key known only to you(and probably stored on a securely-locked-away air-gapped medium, to prevent leaks.
Add a little stub program that does nothing but check your website for the key, decrypt the installer binary, and start the installation.(Because a key doesn't need to be all that long in order to be functionally unbreakable, it is even practical for those without web access to type a suitably encoded version of the key in manually).
Absolutely no "innovating" needed. Basically any encryption method that isn't declared "deprecated" will work, and implementations of most of them are available under pretty much any license you want. The total implementation time will be a few hours for a competent programmer(and it need not be a competent programmer who has any knowledge of the project, this is quite a generic thing), possibly a man-day or two if the decrypter needs QA on 15 different Windows localizations and some attractive splash-screen art. And yet, despite the ease of implementation, even three letter agencies won't be able to get to it until you release the decryption key.
Aside from the fact that it is easy and robust, the main reason to use a separate system for the "release date control" vs. whatever DRM is used post-release, is that market research suggests that the financial damage of having your DRM cracked tapers off fairly rapidly post-release. Having would-be early adopters downloading pre-release cracked copies instead of buying $150 "platinum packs" with a couple of useless trinkets is financially painful. Having cheapskates a year from now picking up off the Pirate Bay rather than Ebay is virtually irrelevant. In between, the value falls over time, fast at first, and gradually tapering off.
If the installer binary is encrypted, would-be DRM-hackers don't even get to look at the DRM until release day(whereas, if you depended on the release-DRM, they would have the extra 10 days of hacking done before the game is even supposed to be released). This means that the chance of a pre-release pirate version(barring a penetration of your systems by hackers or inside guys) will be impossible, and the time-to-working-crack will be 10 days longer than it otherwise would be...
Hmm, interesting, that has not been my experience at all. Perhaps the problem comes from dragging players who are far more biased toward FPS or RPG into playing an RTS. Not that battle.net has been doing any better in that regard lately, but I've found it to generally be impossible to balance teams completely on LAN play.
Fear is the mind killer.