The best and cheapest food at E3 is right outside on the street, via the hot dog vendors with their little carts. I can honestly say, those are the best hot dogs I have ever had in my life.
Or having 10,000 spoons, when all you need is a knife...
Re:Where did this term come from?
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The Path to AAA Games
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· Score: 3, Informative
Having recently worked at SCEA, the term is commonly used at Sony to indicate how many copies they sell or intend to sell. If a game sells over a million copies, it is an "A" game. If it sells two million, it's "AA" and so on. With the sales of the latest GTA, Rockstar raised the bar, so now we have "AAAA" games (over four million sold).
Granted, as of March 2005, GTA: San Andreas has sold over 12 million.
Ahh... okay, I see your point. While I somewhat agree about the initial cost of an MMORPG, I can also see where the developers are coming from. Let's say the development studio worked on this game for about three years. That's three years of not making any money. I'm guessing that $40-50 initial cost of the game is to cover those years of development, while the monthly fee covers the cost of maintenance and updating.
However, I would think that over time, the monthly fees would decrease. Everything from servers to bandwidth continue to drop in price, so perhaps our monthly fees might drop as well.
Alright then, go ahead and start building a server farm to host the tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of users who will be playing online at once. Take over the development necessary to improve gameplay and add new worlds/zones. As the game becomes more popular, pay for even more rack space and servers to load balance the MMORPG.
What you don't understand is, all of this requires money. Money to pay for rack space at a Network Operations Center, money for the servers, money for the huge amount of bandwidth, money for the sys admins, money for the developers to improve the game, etc. If you can provide all of that for them, I'm sure they'd be all for no monthly fees.
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Nintendo put playable N64's with Super Mario 64 at Toys R Us before it was available to purchase.
The best and cheapest food at E3 is right outside on the street, via the hot dog vendors with their little carts. I can honestly say, those are the best hot dogs I have ever had in my life.
Or having 10,000 spoons, when all you need is a knife...
Having recently worked at SCEA, the term is commonly used at Sony to indicate how many copies they sell or intend to sell. If a game sells over a million copies, it is an "A" game. If it sells two million, it's "AA" and so on. With the sales of the latest GTA, Rockstar raised the bar, so now we have "AAAA" games (over four million sold). Granted, as of March 2005, GTA: San Andreas has sold over 12 million.
Ahh... okay, I see your point. While I somewhat agree about the initial cost of an MMORPG, I can also see where the developers are coming from. Let's say the development studio worked on this game for about three years. That's three years of not making any money. I'm guessing that $40-50 initial cost of the game is to cover those years of development, while the monthly fee covers the cost of maintenance and updating. However, I would think that over time, the monthly fees would decrease. Everything from servers to bandwidth continue to drop in price, so perhaps our monthly fees might drop as well.
Alright then, go ahead and start building a server farm to host the tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of users who will be playing online at once. Take over the development necessary to improve gameplay and add new worlds/zones. As the game becomes more popular, pay for even more rack space and servers to load balance the MMORPG. What you don't understand is, all of this requires money. Money to pay for rack space at a Network Operations Center, money for the servers, money for the huge amount of bandwidth, money for the sys admins, money for the developers to improve the game, etc. If you can provide all of that for them, I'm sure they'd be all for no monthly fees.