The Shrine

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>City of Heroes: God damn, this is a fun MMORPG! Very casual friendly, tons of character customization, balanced and diverse power sets...this is gonna be a hell of a sleeper hit, I think.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>A sleeper hit MMORPG can't be a good thing.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Explain how a MMOG that hasn't been eternally hyped throughout its development cycle and turns out solid is a bad thing, please?</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Hey, you're the one that said sleeper hit, I know nothing of this MMORPG. I just figured, sleeper=lower population=less fun.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Thank you for making my point for me.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>MMORPG need a critical population to be enjoyable, and more importantly, to be profitable. Depending on how well WoW turns out pretty soon there might not be anymore *small* MMORPG left on the market</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Given how many people I'm seeing in beta and how much fucking positive word of mouth this game is getting, I'm not forseeing this game having population issues. But you know, if you guys want to focus on the entirely wrong point of my post, feel free, it's contributing nicely to this discussion.</div>

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>Tort you gotta remember. This is the vaul.....shrine</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>You don't need to get so hostile....I was just voicing my opinion sheesh...</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>*Smashes Eric in the head with a shovel* That will teach you to ever open your moth on Mohavalarpg's ever again!</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Profitability spawns more new servers, which spawns added costs, which spawns the need for profitability. You CAN have an small MMO and be profitable; just use less servers. Remember that the MMO universe does NOT include every single person logged, because they are seperated by servers.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>Is the beta open and free? This sounds like one i could like (of course i always say that, though).</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>There's an open beta going on now but the beta shuts down on the 22nd to prepare for launch. You still have to sign up for it, though, and I dunno if they're still adding people. Go to www.coh.com and sign up for an account.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>There's just too much overhead cost with MMORPG... most games try to shoot for 100K at least and it's not just being greedy</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Okay, describe this overhead cost. Please.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>i'd like to know why the small guys seem to disappear so fast, too. Myabe they dont go under but just survive behind the scenes with a small fan base? Is E&B still running and other less popular games?</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>MMORPG are really complicated games. They require a larger staff than even the average game (which is already getting too big), and server maintenance/cost is significant too.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>MMORPG need budget on the order of millions. At 5000 X $10 month you'll never recover the cost. They don't make money on the box because of additional support costs (CS, GMs, server, etc)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>And if you got my point, I said that if you have a low population, you will need fewer servers. I call bullshit on your "millions" quote, too. People ran MUDs on infinitely less of a budget.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Yeah, so is that old ass EQ game.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I'm sure that's why out of all the MMORPG that's ever released you can only buy something around 5 of them anymore? Everyone just don't get how to run it with 'infinitely less budget' that was obviously so easy to run and still be profitable? Get a clue. These games are very expensive to run.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It's really hard to survive in an environment when you've the biggest subscriber base these days! UO is running too. If you got at least 100K people playing it's probably worth keeping the game running. Problem is only 5 or so MMORPG has ever sustained those numbers (DAoC, EQ, UO, SWG, FF11)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>100,000 is a lot when it comes to these types of games. It is much more common for regular console games to sell over 2 million than it is for an Online RPG to sell over 100,000. That's 100 million dollars for the console game, but at 10 bucks a month in addition to the initial amount received through sales, it would take approximately 8 years to receive the types of revenues you'd get from a console game selling about 2M copies (and there are games like Zelda, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Mario, etc... which are always expected to sell above 4 million total). The major difference is that console games have smaller worlds, and likely have a smaller development cost, and also have no maintenance cost; now after 8 years, the maintenance costs have probably built up to quite high a level, (my numbers assume support from 100,000 people throughout the duration of that 8 years). Now I am not even going to begin to guess maintenance or development costs, but I can imagine that they would be quite high.

With lower numbers, like 40,000, 20,000, or even 5000, there's not going to be much or any profitability there. At 5000, it would take a very very long time to break even by anyones estimate, probably several decades with a nice solid userbase (which is an unrealistic estimate, likely players will quit). It's just not worth it.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>On the note of games with a budget that'd make Greenspan shit a brick, I can't see why a game with a smaller population couldn't cut back their servers and related equipment, thereby cutting back (some of) their overhead and turn a nice profit.

A problem I DO see, however, is if that game becomes popular quickly. Server crashes, anyone?

Or maybe I'm insane, whatever, I'll probably pay for resisting the Don. :)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Speaking of Utopia, I've played it almost as long as I've gone to the Shrine. I like it because it only requires a few minutes a day, if that, and since I am usually online every day with school work and research anyways, it's not at all a hassle to play it. I've built my way up to leading the most powerful Alliances in the game (Legacy, Absalom, AR, ES, Family, etc...) and having other people do all the work for me =P

But I think my Kingdom is the only decent one in the game that doesn't cheat, and we are among the best in the game =)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>If you're aiming for a bare-bones game then yes you can probably make do with even thousands. But such games really aren't marketable, and most companies aren't satisfied with merely 'getting by'. Utopia is more like MUD and if you don't have a graphical interface that alone cuts out a lot of the development cost. And if you're not aiming to make a lot of money, why make a MMORPG? MMORPG type games have the highest overhead compare to any other game. If you take a generic EQ clone it is certainly no simpler than a RPG, but you also need to worry about stuff like networking issues (lag mostly), compatability (MMORPG tend to run on lower technology than games of the same era to help retain customer base), and you need to pay for the servers and the CS. You pretty much either make a lot of money or not much at all with MMORPG. There just isn't a middle ground for 'kind of okay'.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>You pretty much named off every MMO except AO and Shadowbane, both of which had severe problems with gameplay.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://www.scs.unr.edu/~ericf/C_D_MMORP ... RPG.swf</a>

Sounds a bit like this one which has been kicking around for a few years</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Someone compiled a list of MMORPG on one of the EQ boards and there's like at least 100 of them counting the ones in the works. You just never hear about the other 90 because they no one plays them.</div>