Ok I got on to www.star.net.uk and have had a chat with them about prices.

SDSL isn't available in my area and there are no plans for it either. But if I could have it the 2mb up/down would be roughly £500 a month, a leased line is roughly £600 a month, but theres a fairly substantial installation fee to pay (didn't ask). They also mentioned the possibility of hosting in their data center, I've asked for a technician to chat with me about the specifics. I'll update you on prices / features once I've had the call, sometime this week.

Youch! £500 a month would chew through my budget fairly quickly, especially considering colocation provides equivalant bandwidth for a lot less.

That said, easy physical access to the network, which can be handy from a support point of view is not an option if the colo centre is not local (stateside or London).

Redstation.com look pretty good for a dedicated host. Have to give them a ring and see what sort of sustained bandwidth they can cope with, but for an unmetered service they're not too expensive.

I just specced out the following as a nearly the best they've got:

Dual Xeon 3.0Ghz
4 Gb Ram
2 x 142Gb SCSI hdd's in raid
2x hotplug Power supplies
Dedicated sonicwall firewall
Fedora Core 4

£549 + vat per month
Their entry level box is £79 per month. (Plus VAT)

Minimum contract is for 12 months tho.

Might be worth a look if you're being quoted nearly the same just for the pipe at home.

Guys, now is not a good time to launch a MMORPG - competition is rich, serious, market places are taken, etc.
Moreover, games like MapleStory are even free (but if you can do a 3D nice-looking game, and spend a lot on advertising, hmmm, who knows :) )

Without something new to offer the genre, I agree, if a substantial market share in the same market place is the objective. I do contend that the indie MMO market and the typical commercial MMO market are not the same.

If a large investment in hardware and support infrastructure needs a return, then launching another MMO into an already saturated market is not the best of ideas. However, indie developers usually do not have investments of the scale which a large company production has. As such, they do not require an immediate, comparitively large market share, or rapid off-the-shelf sales to counter production costs. They can start at a much smaller scale (one or two servers) servicing only a few subscribers.

Scale aside, there is the issue that even an indie MMO has to support itself, and provide revenue for growth. Indies can't easily compete with the production values of a commercial MMO in terms of volume or indeed quality of graphic content (we simply can't afford to pay as many artists), but we do have one major advantage over a commercial studio - in that we do not have a long line of investors expecting a return. Often the game development is not our 'bread and butter', so we don't have to worry about getting fired if something doesn't go right. This gives us the advantage of being able to try new things - be they procedural universes on an MMO scale (nods Ysaneya), reactive world simulation, bizarre settings, rulesets, or genre-mixing.

Each of these are unlikely to be seen in commerical MMOs in the immediate future, simply because they represent an unknown factor in the success formula of the product. Investors do not like unknown factors in the products they are funding, and commercial scale MMOs require a LOT of investment. This also directs indies very much in the direction of the niche markets in order to make profit. The mass market is already saturated with games aimed at the casual and power gamer crowd. There's nothing that is aimed specifically at hardcore roleplayers or sci-fi geeks, those markets are considered too small to generate the return required by large-scale investors.

The disparity between the products can be seen from this thread:
Commercial scale release (30,000 subscribers capacity) = $22,500 PER MONTH
Medium indie release = (3,000 subscriber capacity) = $1,100 PER MONTH
Edit: It must be noted that the commercial capacity for concurrency in a single shard environment is substantially larger - expect 5,000-10,000 concurrent connections to the shard, compared to a maximum 1,000 for the indie shard.

We'll assume approximately 30% concurrency to subscriptions (30% logged on at any time) and an open source DB architecture on both. This may be a little high, I've heard figures of 20-25% being thrown around - I guess it depends on the target market.

In any case, the indie needs to reach a substantially lower takeup than the commercial venture - you need to bear in mind that salaries, building rental, and many other costs have to be drawn from the commercial turnover. How rapidly this takeup is reached before the money runs out depends on advertising and the target market. Specifically targetting special interest publications for your target audience can rapidly increase your takeup ('Dragon' magazine for roleplayers for example). It can be worth the money to take out a quarter-page colour ad if there's nothing else around tailoring to that market.

Quote: Original post by proveren
Guys, now is not a good time to launch a MMORPG - competition is rich, serious, market places are taken, etc.
Moreover, games like MapleStory are even free (but if you can do a 3D nice-looking game, and spend a lot on advertising, hmmm, who knows :) )

I think there's room for an innovative game, with great customer service and even just decent interaction with users. There are opportunities here, but you're right that they arent easy to execute - and there is stiff competition.

The solid state storage used by Eve online can be done quite cheaply now. Please see these links for cheap solid state storage solutions. The first one holds 8GB of storage and the second one can hold up to 16GB. I would think it would be rare to exceed these capacities, in which case you could just use more than one or put them in RAID. Thoughts?

~$200
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

~$700
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20051205/index.html

The HyperOS ($700) there was tested using an UltraATA/100 interface. The new version supports a SATA interface, but the larger drive in the benchmarks consistantly underperformed compared to the Gigabyte device ($200).

Both of these come unstocked - that is you have to put your own DIMMs in, but the Gigabyte variety has the edge on bandwidth (SATA interface), which is the issue. Both of these are reliant on battery power to keep the data safe in the event of power down, so for reliability, backup synching to a normal disc is probably a good idea, although the Gigabyte device draws power from the PCI bus directly, so is powered as long as the machine is plugged in.

That said, if database storage bandwidth becomes an issue - both of these devices can act as a cheap 'cached' db. My personal preference would probably by with the Gigabyte option, partly out of price, and partly out of brand recognition.

In the event that an indie product hit a bandwidth bottleneck on data retrieval, a RAID'd pair of these is a good option to bump performance without massive additional expense - of course, you'd have to have a colocation or home setup with your own machines, or you'd get charged a fortune by the hosts...

Great piece of info I_Smell_Tuna, thanks!

Thanks. Being a technology whore pays off. For the price the performace of those can't be beat. The battery backup on the boards doesn't last long but who would run a server that isn't on a UPS anyway?