I was looking at the credits for SWTOR: Rise of the Hutt Cartel because the server's not up yet. This retails for $10 if you're subbed and $20 otherwise. It covers level 51-55 so assuming it takes you 5 hours to get a level you're looking at like 20 hours of gameplay to hit 55 and then something like 5 hours of gameplay at 55 because you got to factor in the guys who never raid or do PvP seriously. The price suggests it's a relatively lightweight expansion so I figure the credits must be pretty short right? Well after 5 minutes and at least 1000 names scrolling past the screen I decided to hit escape instead of seeing the list of names will ever end. Obviously there's a lot of auxiliary stuff like the EA Legal team or the 150 voice actors they have (David Hayter is Jedi Knight male, never knew that). But let's stick to guys who sounds like they'd be involved in the game itself. I counted about 30 guys with the 'Designer' title, at least 50 guys on the 'graphics' section, and another 50 guys on the 'engineering' section. What are designers? They're guys like you or me that talks about what would be good in a game that turns out to be wrong most of the time. Certainly SWTOR's track record suggests the design team doesn't particularly know what they're doing, but there are 30 of those guys. The graphics guys I guess are probably needed. I have no idea what the engineering section means. I guess that's the actual programmers so apparently you need about 50 guys to program something on a well-known engine while not doing anything particularly ground-breaking.
So lots of people = lots of money, but what does the expansion retail for? $10-$20. I guess it's this cheap because they figure people will continue to sub for $15/month and lured by the expansion, even though history suggests people aren't this dumb and usually they'd just play the expansion for a month and then quit again because that's what people do in virtually any MMORPG. And then we'll probably hear about how SWTOR loses a ton of money because 2000 people worked on an expansion that sells for $10 that lasted for 2 months of subs at best and then we'll hear about how the industry is doomed because $50 million just doesn't get you what it used to and you can't get any programming done with less than 500 people.
But this is silly. EverQuest's designer staff is like 2 interns who are trying to pad their resume as a MMORPG designer. It's arguably not any worse in terms of game design compared to any MMORPG (sometimes the interns happen to be brilliant guys, and sometimes they are not, the same way other MMORPG designers are). Yeah EverQuest is horribly out of date, but it's probably still profitable. WoW's overhead cost is something like $50 million an year and I'm pretty sure that includes its programming staff. That's a lot of money but obviously still very small compared to the money WoW makes. A game having just 500K subs making $100 an year off each sub (which is pretty low) can get $50 million, and that's enough to pay for all the overhead costs of the most profitable MMORPG in the world, so I'm not exactly feeling sorry for the guy who can't manage on $50 million.
So lots of people = lots of money, but what does the expansion retail for? $10-$20. I guess it's this cheap because they figure people will continue to sub for $15/month and lured by the expansion, even though history suggests people aren't this dumb and usually they'd just play the expansion for a month and then quit again because that's what people do in virtually any MMORPG. And then we'll probably hear about how SWTOR loses a ton of money because 2000 people worked on an expansion that sells for $10 that lasted for 2 months of subs at best and then we'll hear about how the industry is doomed because $50 million just doesn't get you what it used to and you can't get any programming done with less than 500 people.
But this is silly. EverQuest's designer staff is like 2 interns who are trying to pad their resume as a MMORPG designer. It's arguably not any worse in terms of game design compared to any MMORPG (sometimes the interns happen to be brilliant guys, and sometimes they are not, the same way other MMORPG designers are). Yeah EverQuest is horribly out of date, but it's probably still profitable. WoW's overhead cost is something like $50 million an year and I'm pretty sure that includes its programming staff. That's a lot of money but obviously still very small compared to the money WoW makes. A game having just 500K subs making $100 an year off each sub (which is pretty low) can get $50 million, and that's enough to pay for all the overhead costs of the most profitable MMORPG in the world, so I'm not exactly feeling sorry for the guy who can't manage on $50 million.
