I guess it's more of an idealism/political thing to me... I also feel $50 is too much for the average game too. There are a million and one factors into this that would have to change for it to happen though. Almost everyone in my generation is just so damn apathetic and willing to do whatever these overgrown corporations tell them, that the few of us that do care have little say in the matter and that really pisses me off.
If it comes out that this guy didn't have the right to sell Dos to them, then all Microsoft's subsequent OS's could see some additional legal issues coming up.
Thank you for replying and not being an asshole about it like most of these other guys. You run your own MMORPG...you do know much better the costs than I. It looks like I was way off in my Bandwidth estimates, but they were just that....estimates. However, you say that it cost around $30million to make the game...in my post I say it probably took about 10, and then at the end say that even if my figures are 3 times that (ie..30mill) then they're still over charging. I may have made some mistakes in my figures, but it was just a guess, and obviously it wasn't all wrong.
WoW was designed to work on old phone modems too from what I've seen (my little brother is a WoW addict and plays it just fine on a 26.4k connection). If you can charge just $10 a month, I don't see why Blizzard can't too...as your numbers and requirements increase, so do your profits. It's a scalable business model.
Also to clarify...I have no problem in paying a subscription, I just think $15 is crossing the line. Now if they gave the game itself away for free and then charged you $15 a month, I'd be okay with that as well. I go into more detail on this here. Business is alot like gambling...you're going to try to raise your "bet" as high as you can with consumers...I'm just calling their bluff.
I really like alot of your ideas. Having the territory change hands is a very nice one. They could, set it up so that on this day, at this time there will be a planned battle between horde and aliance. Your character will be allowed to enter the battle only once, no respawning and then going back. The victor will gain this portion of land in the next patch or immediately even (depending on how hard it is to code). They could have one of these events like once a month or so and it would certainly make choosing which server you play on much more interesting.
First, thank you for making one of the few sane replies to my idea there. It was just a guess people...
You are very right about the market dictating what an appropriate price is. I was simply trying to make my case on why I, personally, do not want to pay that much for an online RPG each month.
How much would I pay? Well, I do like how Blizzard offers the game at a cheaper price if you pay for larger portions. I think $12 a month should be the limit though, and then they could have $11/month for 3 months, and $10 for 6.
I also think it would be in their best interest to let people download the game for free with like a 3 day trial, and then you just pay a monthly fee after that. And you could buy it in the store with a manual for like $10. If they took that route then I could maybe understand the $15 a month.
"roughly a 486" and "about 1 meg of ram per player, i.e... 16 Megs for 16 players" so if you have 1,000 players on one server, that's about a Gig of RAM. And if a little 486 (we'll say about 100Mhz) can handle 16 players, then 1,000 players would take roughly 6.25Ghz[intel style] to handle.
Now, I know you're gonna say that's an unfair comparison, but I don't really think so. You have to take into account that a FPS is a much faster paced game and has to refresh everything probably about 10 times as quickly as an RPG would require.That was also assuming that the server is only keeping track of character coordinates, items and stats. Someone pointed out the fact that most current MMORPG's do alot more than just that to keep down cheating. This was not part of my original estimate, and I think there could be better ways to take care of such a problem.
Now, I don't know how many characters (player and non-player) are on a WoW server at once....it could possibly be up to 10,000 even...which would require 10 times the processing power of course. So, I don't think a machine with 4 opterons (roughly 16Ghz[intel] of power together) should have much trouble with this. Then again, most games have a seperate server for each "zone" and of course a seperate dedicated server for the database too.
But, then again...I did say at the end of my post that "I may be off", and then I even caluculated for if it took 3 times as much money to run. It was an approximation, an estimate, a guess.
"You have to determine who can see what. Otherwise you'd be sending the entire game state out to - well, everyone! That's not really feasible."...and so on.
If an algorithm was designed well enough you could get away from this brute force protection scheme. Just because no one has figured one out yet, doesn't mean it's not possible.
Krusty: "You do understand (in response to your journal entry) that these comments have nothing to do with Blizzard but instead are about your narrow view of enterpise level hardware and the inability for your 3k dollar..."
Me (in earlier post): "This is just an estimate..." & "...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"
Me (in original post): "Now, the publisher is going to take a big cut of course..." & "Now I'm sure the publisher takes anywhere from 50%-80% of the profits for themselves..."
Me (in later post): "Well I worked at EB for 3 years and generally they were lucky to make more than $10 profit on any games in there. That's why they push the used games on you so hard along with all the guides and accessories."
Some Dude: "You're talking about the retailer. The costs of the Publisher aren't in your $10."
Me (again): " Will you people please!!! please!!! read my entire post before you tell me something I already know!....jeez."
Do I really have to say it again...
[-1 Redundant,Troll,Unpopular_Ideas].....go ahead, waste your mod points again.
You honestly think that the WoW servers have 16 processors? If they code it properly, a dual opteron system would be fine....maybe 4 at most. All the server has to do is keep track of their coordinates, the database with their current stats and items and a few other basic things. Most of the heavy processing is done client side. We're talking about a MMORPG here, not scientific computing or anything...
Well I worked at EB for 3 years and generally they were lucky to make more than $10 profit on any games in there. That's why they push the used games on you so hard along with all the guides and accessories.
"the developing company is only going to get around $15 for your average $50 box"
Did you even read what I wrote? lol.... that was talking about total profits for both blizzard and their publisher(s)...
And at the end I mention I that may be off...remember it was just a rough estimate....and even if it cost them 3 times what I figured up, they're still making over $100 Million in profit. Once again "they" being both Blizzard and Vivendi, etc.... although now that I think about it...it's probably more like $45 to those guys and about $5 to the retailer...but it's still an amazing pile of cash regardless...
$10,000 for a server? If you can't build a bad ass server for under $3000 you must of gotten a Dell;)
You don't find $160 million a little excessive? Like I said before....I've got no problem with them making some bank, but that's ridiculous... If my figures are even remotely correct they could charge $10 a month (I'd gladly pay that) and still be making plenty of profit. Plus, don't forget that the majority of the cash goes to their publisher, not the developer... If they cut out the middle man and sold it directly from their website it could be even less...
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...
I usually don't reply to posts like this, but I make plenty of money, being able to afford it is not my issue. I truely see this as overcharging, plain and simple. But I guess you'll be happy to pay $60+ for the next generation of games...
Well, maybe Itagaki isn't the best one to do it, but the Tekken series definitely deserves a little critism these days. I haven't played Tek5 yet, but as for 4 it was a huge let down. It didn't really offer much new that wasn't already in Tekken 3, which I would say was the peak of the series. The graphics weren't that hot either... the new one looks a little better, but what can you expect running on the slowest of the 3 consoles? Maybe Namco should let Tekken sit out for a few years... maybe even come up with a whole new game? (doubtful)
Are you on crack..lol? MK2 was the best one in the series....although that doesn't really say much. When they took the story into left field with 3 it just felt much cheezier to play it. All the ani/friend/baby -alities sucked too. Most people I know would play MK3 long enough to see all the *alities and then never play it again. c'mon man... but I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion.;)
MK4's gameplay was slow and clunky, but looked nice at the time. The new ones play a little better now, but there's too much going on to enjoy it. We don't need 3 different fighting styles for each character... why can't anyone "Keep It Simple Stupid?" in the gaming world anymore.
While I'm here... the original Mortal Kombat Movie was kinda cool...but Annihilation blew complete ass;)
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I guess it's more of an idealism/political thing to me... I also feel $50 is too much for the average game too. There are a million and one factors into this that would have to change for it to happen though. Almost everyone in my generation is just so damn apathetic and willing to do whatever these overgrown corporations tell them, that the few of us that do care have little say in the matter and that really pisses me off.
If it comes out that this guy didn't have the right to sell Dos to them, then all Microsoft's subsequent OS's could see some additional legal issues coming up.
Thank you for replying and not being an asshole about it like most of these other guys. You run your own MMORPG...you do know much better the costs than I. It looks like I was way off in my Bandwidth estimates, but they were just that....estimates. However, you say that it cost around $30million to make the game...in my post I say it probably took about 10, and then at the end say that even if my figures are 3 times that (ie..30mill) then they're still over charging. I may have made some mistakes in my figures, but it was just a guess, and obviously it wasn't all wrong.
WoW was designed to work on old phone modems too from what I've seen (my little brother is a WoW addict and plays it just fine on a 26.4k connection). If you can charge just $10 a month, I don't see why Blizzard can't too...as your numbers and requirements increase, so do your profits. It's a scalable business model.
Also to clarify...I have no problem in paying a subscription, I just think $15 is crossing the line. Now if they gave the game itself away for free and then charged you $15 a month, I'd be okay with that as well. I go into more detail on this here. Business is alot like gambling...you're going to try to raise your "bet" as high as you can with consumers...I'm just calling their bluff.
I really like alot of your ideas. Having the territory change hands is a very nice one. They could, set it up so that on this day, at this time there will be a planned battle between horde and aliance. Your character will be allowed to enter the battle only once, no respawning and then going back. The victor will gain this portion of land in the next patch or immediately even (depending on how hard it is to code). They could have one of these events like once a month or so and it would certainly make choosing which server you play on much more interesting.
First, thank you for making one of the few sane replies to my idea there. It was just a guess people...
You are very right about the market dictating what an appropriate price is. I was simply trying to make my case on why I, personally, do not want to pay that much for an online RPG each month.
How much would I pay? Well, I do like how Blizzard offers the game at a cheaper price if you pay for larger portions. I think $12 a month should be the limit though, and then they could have $11/month for 3 months, and $10 for 6.
I also think it would be in their best interest to let people download the game for free with like a 3 day trial, and then you just pay a monthly fee after that. And you could buy it in the store with a manual for like $10. If they took that route then I could maybe understand the $15 a month.
Well I don't know about a HL2 server, but for example here are the requirements for a Quake 2 server. Bare with me now...
"roughly a 486" and "about 1 meg of ram per player, i.e... 16 Megs for 16 players" so if you have 1,000 players on one server, that's about a Gig of RAM. And if a little 486 (we'll say about 100Mhz) can handle 16 players, then 1,000 players would take roughly 6.25Ghz[intel style] to handle.
Now, I know you're gonna say that's an unfair comparison, but I don't really think so. You have to take into account that a FPS is a much faster paced game and has to refresh everything probably about 10 times as quickly as an RPG would require.That was also assuming that the server is only keeping track of character coordinates, items and stats. Someone pointed out the fact that most current MMORPG's do alot more than just that to keep down cheating. This was not part of my original estimate, and I think there could be better ways to take care of such a problem.
Now, I don't know how many characters (player and non-player) are on a WoW server at once....it could possibly be up to 10,000 even...which would require 10 times the processing power of course. So, I don't think a machine with 4 opterons (roughly 16Ghz[intel] of power together) should have much trouble with this. Then again, most games have a seperate server for each "zone" and of course a seperate dedicated server for the database too.
But, then again...I did say at the end of my post that "I may be off", and then I even caluculated for if it took 3 times as much money to run. It was an approximation, an estimate, a guess.
"You have to determine who can see what. Otherwise you'd be sending the entire game state out to - well, everyone! That's not really feasible." ...and so on.
If an algorithm was designed well enough you could get away from this brute force protection scheme. Just because no one has figured one out yet, doesn't mean it's not possible.
Krusty: "You do understand (in response to your journal entry) that these comments have nothing to do with Blizzard but instead are about your narrow view of enterpise level hardware and the inability for your 3k dollar..."
Me (in earlier post): "This is just an estimate..." & "...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"
What part of "estimate" did you not understand?
Me (in original post): "Now, the publisher is going to take a big cut of course..." & "Now I'm sure the publisher takes anywhere from 50%-80% of the profits for themselves..."
Me (in later post): "Well I worked at EB for 3 years and generally they were lucky to make more than $10 profit on any games in there. That's why they push the used games on you so hard along with all the guides and accessories."
Some Dude: "You're talking about the retailer. The costs of the Publisher aren't in your $10."
Me (again): " Will you people please!!! please!!! read my entire post before you tell me something I already know!....jeez."
Do I really have to say it again...
[-1 Redundant,Troll,Unpopular_Ideas].....go ahead, waste your mod points again.
Will you people please!!! please!!! read my entire post before you tell me something I already know!....jeez.
Messed up on math for server/bandwidth....only gave rate for one month instead of one year...bump that up to about $700,000 or so...
You honestly think that the WoW servers have 16 processors? If they code it properly, a dual opteron system would be fine....maybe 4 at most. All the server has to do is keep track of their coordinates, the database with their current stats and items and a few other basic things. Most of the heavy processing is done client side. We're talking about a MMORPG here, not scientific computing or anything...
I guess some of us view video games as more of an artform instead of just a business proposal.
Well I worked at EB for 3 years and generally they were lucky to make more than $10 profit on any games in there. That's why they push the used games on you so hard along with all the guides and accessories.
"the developing company is only going to get around $15 for your average $50 box"
;)
Did you even read what I wrote? lol.... that was talking about total profits for both blizzard and their publisher(s)...
And at the end I mention I that may be off...remember it was just a rough estimate....and even if it cost them 3 times what I figured up, they're still making over $100 Million in profit. Once again "they" being both Blizzard and Vivendi, etc.... although now that I think about it...it's probably more like $45 to those guys and about $5 to the retailer...but it's still an amazing pile of cash regardless...
$10,000 for a server? If you can't build a bad ass server for under $3000 you must of gotten a Dell
You don't find $160 million a little excessive? Like I said before....I've got no problem with them making some bank, but that's ridiculous... If my figures are even remotely correct they could charge $10 a month (I'd gladly pay that) and still be making plenty of profit. Plus, don't forget that the majority of the cash goes to their publisher, not the developer... If they cut out the middle man and sold it directly from their website it could be even less...
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...
I usually don't reply to posts like this, but I make plenty of money, being able to afford it is not my issue. I truely see this as overcharging, plain and simple. But I guess you'll be happy to pay $60+ for the next generation of games...
World of Warcraft was $13 a month. You'd think after 800,000 players just in the US, they could drop the price a little. But then again...we've discussed this before ;)
The DVD will be out in April ...It's also not too hard to find on file sharing networks ;)
Well, maybe Itagaki isn't the best one to do it, but the Tekken series definitely deserves a little critism these days. I haven't played Tek5 yet, but as for 4 it was a huge let down. It didn't really offer much new that wasn't already in Tekken 3, which I would say was the peak of the series. The graphics weren't that hot either... the new one looks a little better, but what can you expect running on the slowest of the 3 consoles? Maybe Namco should let Tekken sit out for a few years... maybe even come up with a whole new game? (doubtful)
Are you on crack..lol? MK2 was the best one in the series....although that doesn't really say much. When they took the story into left field with 3 it just felt much cheezier to play it. All the ani/friend/baby -alities sucked too. Most people I know would play MK3 long enough to see all the *alities and then never play it again. c'mon man... but I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion. ;)
;)
MK4's gameplay was slow and clunky, but looked nice at the time. The new ones play a little better now, but there's too much going on to enjoy it. We don't need 3 different fighting styles for each character... why can't anyone "Keep It Simple Stupid?" in the gaming world anymore.
While I'm here... the original Mortal Kombat Movie was kinda cool...but Annihilation blew complete ass
I'd rather just buy my stuff in FLAC format from Mindawn or something like it....
The problem is that most CD's coming out these days have between 10-12 tracks and cost close to $20. Not even taking into consideration quality.
http://www.thecorporation.com