Yes, I know, sounds stupid. I have this guy that has a history in financing projects (and with history I mean history - working for Goldman Sachs, for example) and which I got in contact with two years ago through a customer of ours (for whom he was organzing financing). Anyhow, two years ago I mentioned to this guy that sort of one of my really lofty nice "if it ever turns out possible" things to do would be to get up and going on a MMORPG. Was more like a joke, though I am regularly iterating over the plan for real, more to find out how the things have changed out there than for anything else. Anyhow, this guy sort ofgot fired on the topic. You need to understand that he is a financial pro with some "user" experience on computers, but no deeper insight. Give him numbers and he works miracles (and I do mean miracles) for investor presentation (ever seen a business plan in excel with 50 pages of interactive graphs?). But as I said - no clue about the busines per se. Well, comes I meet him today because he basically arranged to spend the weekend where I live, as even after half a year of VERY sparse contact he really wants to move this. Well, peopel deserve a chance :-) I will give him green light for this, given that we have a budget of at least EUR 2 million (preferably more) as low number, telling him costs may run up to 5 million EUR - just as ballpark starting figuresd. Get me right here - I have no real push intention here, this is more along the line of "of he gets things going, perfect - if not, maybe even better". So, point taken - I want to be able to feed him some material and numbers in the next week to get him starting. I am colelcting some hyperlinks right now about what is and what is not possible (the usual "10 reasons why you do not want to run a MMORPG", for example). But what I am muissing is some sambple MMORPG business plan. Some reference for him to what the parameters are. I am pretty good in planning projects and can outline the costs for development pretty well, but my numbers in the operational side are totally shaky and all I could get into is my experience on the side of being CTO for an ISP (in regards of user/support call numbers, for example). I want togive him a realistic chance (get me right here - I somehow am unsure, but he IS a pro, and he KNOWS investors. So, when he DOES get going, things MAY happen) and if some investor signs up, I want to have numbers in the game that are somewhat base don realistic expectations. So, anyone has a reference or some tips? Maybe some published existing business plan? Regards Thomas Tomiczek THONA Consulting Ltd. (Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)

One place you could look is at the IGDA Online Games White paper.

You can get it here:

http://www.igda.org/online/

Anthony



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http://www.micromadhouse.com | http://www.darkvisions.co.uk

VERY nice. Definitly a great start.