I'm looking for resources regarding start up costs for small Game Software Developement company. The average cost for software, and hardware. The average number of people needed to create a big MMORPG project such as FFXI and Everquest.

Well a decent PC can be bought for about £800 in the UK, with windows and MSWorks (yuck).
If you want more than a few you can get them wholesale though and for a business deduct VAT. It's not really cheaper to buy components and build yourself these days especially when putting them together is time=money. But I'd imagine to develop on you could get a PC for £500 which would be fine (especially if you just want a 17"CRT nor flatscreen or dual-monitor). To test on you'd need a more varied set of systems though.

Then software - VisualStudio.net or just C++.net professional edition are both pricey but I don't know how much - check online. Again, no tax which helps. You'll also need something like MS Sourcesafe.

Then artists need fancy expensive things like paintshop, 3dMAX etc which are hideously pricey AFAIK.

For such a large project, it all depends on how good the people are you can get. But better skills = more money, but you'll need fewer people.

The average studio for such a project would be 15-50 people. Probably a two year project at 50K upwards per person.

Rent for such a group, depending where you are in the world: 2500-25000 USD per month.

Software: about 1000 USD per programmer and 5000USD per graphic artist (Maya or Max).

If you do consoles: 10K per dev. kit per console. (You probably need 2-3 per console).

PCs and equipment: 1000USD for programmers minimum (medium graphics card) and 2000USD for artists. (Meaning no fancy SGI equipment)

Then then are taxes, licenses, music licenses, etc. etc.
For example, for PS2 you'll very likely need to buy an engine license at 50K USD upwards per title.

Total, about 1.5-5M. USD, which will really depend on how large your team is. But make it too small and you may not be able to finish your project in less than 2 years, which again bumps up the cost, etc.


Mark

Quote: Original post by Mark Tanner
Total, about 1.5-5M. USD, which will really depend on how large your team is. But make it too small and you may not be able to finish your project in less than 2 years, which again bumps up the cost, etc.

Mark

That is a very small budget for a MMORPG. Most of the companies getting into the field are budgeting in the region of $10-15 million. In addition to development equipment there are massive back-room costs as well.

FFXI?
That game is huge and probably up there with some of the top most expensive games to make..

Realistically I think you could 'startup' for a lot less than 15 million.. The fact that Warhammer got pulled because they wanted 30 mil to do the game was completely and absolutely absurd. I say give yourself 2 million USD to start up, develop a good game and then find a publisher to take over the rest.. If you have a good product and you have already developed the game your chances of getting picked up by a publisher will increase exponentially

Quote: Original post by netflow
Realistically I think you could 'startup' for a lot less than 15 million...

..... I say give yourself 2 million USD to start up, develop a good game and then find a publisher to take over the rest.. If you have a good product and you have already developed the game your chances of getting picked up by a publisher will increase exponentially

What experience/information do you have to back this up? $2 million isn't even enough to develop a standard PS2 triple A (single player) game, let alone a MMPOG. I just spent the last few months budgeting a triple A PS2/Xbox game and that cost in excess of $3.5 million. There are plenty of post-mortems and articles out there that show the cost of a MMPOG and it is in the 15 million region.

$2 million would possibly get you a working prototype but unless you have proven industry experience (and a team with the same) then no publisher is going to invest an additional $10-13 million. They wont even invest $3,000,000 into a start-up these days unless they have a track record that makes the Indy500 look like a drive around the block.

Yeah, but you have to consider games such as Ragnarok Online which appear to have had a very small budget (I believe Gravity only had one translator for the whole project). I don't think you need $3.5 million to create a multiplayer RPG that could be successful. For instance, an online RPG with a playerbase of 3,000, with 400 people at any given time, might not qualify as "massive", but I'm sure such a game would not cost as much as your standard, mass-market MMO to create.

Quote: Original post by zircon_st
For instance, an online RPG with a playerbase of 3,000, with 400 people at any given time, might not qualify as "massive", but I'm sure such a game would not cost as much as your standard, mass-market MMO to create.

Yes, well, that exactly proves my point then. You can't prove that a MMPOG can be produced cheaper by pointing to something that ISN'T massive. The vast majority of the technical problems associated with a MMPOG and the huge cost of back-end equipment are due to the very fact that it is massive and must support a huge number of simultaneous connections. Remove the massive and you reduce the problems and the cost requirement.

Conclusion
You could make a MMMPOG (Mini-Massive Multiplayer Online Game) for less than the figures above but as the original poster specifically sighted FFXI and Everquest that isn't what he is aiming for.

[Edited by - Obscure on July 22, 2004 11:19:57 AM]

Well, there's a market for more boutique-style MMOGs, as long as you don't go head-to-head with EQ2 and SWG. A Tale in the Desert is an example of an MMOG that attracts users outside the usual MMOG crowd, at significantly lower cost of development than most AAA titles.

Having spent a lot of time talking to Korean MMOG developers, most of them develop games at a fraction of the cost SWG's developers spent.

There's a couple of reasons for this:
- most MMOGs have no retail copy, but rely on a freely downloadable client, a free trial period, and subsequent per month/per hour charges). This radically improves the break-even point.
- marketing is usually viral and net-based; western MMOGs spend a lot of money on adds and store-front roll-out. It gives them a bigger foot-print, but once again makes the break-even harder to reach.
- lower cost of development: the games tend to be smaller, the content is more narrow, and the game is usally not intended as "eternety games" (asian gamers typically go through MMOGs quite fast, while there's still a decent chunk of UO's original users hanging in there). This is partially driven by the growth of MMOG "portals" (aggregators), which give the players access to multiple MMOGs for the cost of one.
- different infrastructure: it's more common to split development and hosting/managing the MMOGs. Portals will often run the games of independent developers, paying them a fixed fee up front, and royalties of subsequent profit. (This helps fix one of the really bad problems with Western MMOGS: gamer developers aren't the ideal people to run a 24/7 service, and frequently fubar customer service, community management, billing and stability). The portal spreads it's bet among a basket of titles, and reduces the hit/miss nature of MMOGs.
- Different Genres: not every MMOG needs to be a SF&F RPG. There are korean games that cater specifically to housewives (online shopping/chatting), young males (pretty explicit content, both in terms of sex and violence), school-girls (MMOGs closer to NeoPets than to EverQuest), etc. This helps to grow the market, unlike the current crop of western games that mainly cannibalizes each other. http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html

There are other differences (consumer interest/ integration with popular culture, grants and incentives available, etc), all of them making the asian MMOG scene very different from the US/Europe one. Korean games are currently charting high in most of eastern asia (exporting mainly to China, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore). In many cases, Korean developers are also quite keen on licensing technology to outsiders, since the internal market is saturated and intensly competitive.

So it IS possible to make and launch MMOGs for significantly less than the USD 30m mentioned, though it does require the developer to understand the market, and think a bit outside the box.

Best of luck, and please don't make another EQ close. Please.

Allan

If rumors are true, when Verant finally got SOE's backing for Everquest, they'd put about $100,000 into it. It costs something like $10 million to hit retail, and then has some annual maintenance costs (server bandwidth, GM pay, live team, etc.).

I'd say it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to expect a MMORPG to cost you between $10 and $20 million before you start to see any profit.

MMOGs are probably the most expensive genre of game to make.