Quote:Original post by firemonk3y excuse me for asking, but where did you find your $50 million?
because if you want to have any chance in hell of making "the next big MMORPG" that's what you'll essentially need...minimum.
No offence, but please don't grab figures out of thin air to downgrade someone's idea. I agree, it will cost a lot - more than most individuals could hope to risk on such an endeavour - but it doesn't cost $50M to get such an MMORPG initially up and running. I agree, the money involved would be significant, and out ofrange of most small budgets, but getting one up and running - if good - is possible, and if a really good one, might then be picked up by a current publisher.
Note, I'm not complaining about your stating its going to take a lot of money, more concerned that negative attitudes and rediculous initial suggestions of cost don't help anyone.
Has anyone heard of Amazon EC2? Its alot cheaper to build an MMORPG in todays day and age with scalable cluster/cloud platforms that are currently available.
You have a master server instance which handles player connections and zone connections, and a banking server for items
You then have zone servers which run the maps, they can even distribute and launch servers when necessary. Each has an instanced SQL server for handling the item transactions related to its managed zone.
Cost? Lets say this takes you two 1 unit systems for your alpha for a couple days a month, maybe $20/mo for the first 2 months. ($0.1/hr for running time, maybe 0.5/mo for the S3 hosting , etc). Now during growth sure, you will spend a few houndered a month, but seriously, how is that an "outrageous amount".
Bear in mind, im not talking about the cost of hiring the programmers, artists, etc. But as far as the inde volenteer-esque development goes, the overhead costs are not nearly what they were 5 years ago.
Richard
*NOTE: I have been developing a server architecture already that takes advantage of this platform, and have alot of information related to it. So this is entirely feasable, and not theory.
sorry if it seemed like a very extreme number grabbed out of thin air, but the WoW budget was substantially greater than that, and to be honest, if you want to compete with it, you're going to have to provide a similar amount of content at a similar quality, which definitely rules out a volunteer based game. Another significant factor of course, is the amount of marketing that Blizzard put into WoW.
I'm also sorry if I seemed excessively harsh, and I don't mean to downgrade people's ideas, however I become slightly cynical when they expect that they can get a group of people together over a forum to make "the perfect MMORPG". At this point I generally feel that it would help these individuals more if they can acknowledge that they won't be making the perfect game, but should instead be encouraged to work within their boundaries on a project they're passionate about, and could potentially complete.
I acknowledge that I was a bit harsh, so I'm sorry about that tpop.
sorry if it seemed like a very extreme number grabbed out of thin air, but the WoW budget was substantially greater than that, and to be honest, if you want to compete with it, you're going to have to provide a similar amount of content at a similar quality, which definitely rules out a volunteer based game. Another significant factor of course, is the amount of marketing that Blizzard put into WoW.
I actually agree with you that the majority of projects like the one the OP proposed here don't lead to games, and it's good to acknowledge the scope of the undertaking. I just object to the idea that all online games need to try to compete with WoW. Being a smaller, niche game is valid too.
As to the "perfect" MMO, there really isn't any such beast. The market is too diverse for that now. Of course there is nothing to stop you from forming a group to design an MMO that appeals to the members of that group.
The perfect mmo will be one that will CONSTANTLY have updates due to player interaction. And that'll be hell on our bandwidth and computer.
House burned down 5 miles away from you? Update the house for everyone. Someone killed a king? The whole city is in mourning and a leader is in election.
Of course, the update better not be ones where you have to log out and come back because instead of playing, thats all you'd end up doing.
Well, think about it logically and break it down to the facts, and see where they lead:
1: A good MMO needs a big community. 2: A good community has numerous people playing hours a day. 3: People are only going to play games that are really fun and well made (the game cannot feel cheap). People are NOT going to play a sub-par game when they can play other polished, free, commercial games out there. They might download it and give it a shot, but then never open it again after a week. 4: It takes a lot of talent and manpower to create such an above-par game. A hobbyist game cannot realistically maintain that quality for long periods of time. 5: That much talent and manpower takes very many experienced and motivated people. 6: A group of teenagers are the only people who can devote that much time for free. This group is unlikely to have the technical experience and especially don't have the *management* experience to sustain such a project. 7: The only group that can do it then are older, experienced people. 8: These people have real life needs, and therefore need money. They cannot work multiple hours a day (which is what the game would require) for free. 9: Employees cost a lot to maintain. $40,000 a year per person is on the very, very low end for such a job. 10: Add overhead costs (servers, bandwidth, marketing, websites, etc), and that's another many-thousand extra a year.
In conclusion, it's unrealistic to think about creating a successful mmorpg for free. However, if you were to get a group of friends and attempt it anyways, it would definitely be a good learning experience. If you could even finish the initial engine, let alone get it online and get the first few visitors to play, that would be very impressive. It would not last long, but if you could do that, you would definitely learn a lot, and be prepared to make some simpler games.
However, it's best not to start out like that at all (because I guarantee you won't get far before the thing falls apart). mmorpgs are the pinnacle of industrial video game production, in terms of scale and cost.
So first make a puzzle game, (single player) RPG, or maybe even FPS. Then maybe you can one day get a job in the industry, where there resources will be available to make an mmorpg.
