I guess I just don't understand how gaming companies got there in the first place, making games like World of Warcraft. Blizzard had Warcraft and Starcraft before WoW, but those two were pretty large games, too, and I doubt if they were cheap to develop (though I'm not sure if Warcraft and Warcraft II would also require a large budget).

Check this out: http://us.blizzard.c...d-retrospective

It's a video about the history of Blizzard, which reveals that they did in fact start small and without a big budget. Remember that this was back when a handful of skilled people could feasibly create a published console game without it taking a lifetime.

It's harder to start a game studio targeting the mainstream games market these days - the man-hours spent on creating the art assets alone for a major game can be phenomenal. The barriers to entry are much more formidable. I'm no expert, but I imagine that nowadays a new studio creating "big" games is more likely to emerge as a result of a group of experienced people from an existing studio deciding to go off and start their own business. In a sense they have a head-start with at least some members of a ready-made team and existing contacts within the industry. Otherwise, like frob said, you'll need to start small and get noticed over time.

It's harder to start a game studio targeting the mainstream games market these days - the man-hours spent on creating the art assets alone for a major game can be phenomenal. The barriers to entry are much more formidable. I'm no expert, but I imagine that nowadays a new studio creating "big" games is more likely to emerge as a result of a group of experienced people from an existing studio deciding to go off and start their own business.

Depends on your definition of "mainstream games".

I know a lot of people who play free web games all day. It is still a very active growth area. I'd also call that mainstream. Quite a few of those little flash games are inexpensive hobby work.


Yes, it certainly helps to have experienced people when creating a console game. You'd have a tough time getting a publishing deal without it. It is not impossible, just difficult.

Quite a few moderate sized studios today started out by making relatively cheap and mildly profitable DS and GBA games. They gain experience, they gain profit, and they end up slowly hiring people who do have experience on those consoles, until eventually they have enough of a team and enough money to make the multi-million dollar investment in a major title.

Well, maybe a more appropriately worded bout of questions would be:
1. "Is it a realistic approach towards success to make a demo and ask for investments?"
2. "Have any existing successful games been lead to their success by making a demo -
3. in other words, is it even worth trying?"
4. "How do gaming companies make their first game if they don't get investments - especially if their first game requires millions?"
5. I guess I just don't understand how gaming companies got there in the first place, making games like World of Warcraft. Blizzard had Warcraft and Starcraft before WoW, but those two were pretty large games, too, and I doubt if they were cheap to develop (though I'm not sure if Warcraft and Warcraft II would also require a large budget).

Much better!

1. It depends on what you're trying to do. What is your business idea? (I'm asking you what your business idea is -- what will your business do, is it publishing or developing or what, and what is your monetization plan? What platform? What scale and scope? Are we talking iPhone apps or MMOs?

2. Yes, absolutely.

3. Read FAQ 66.

4. A company's first game usually doesn't require many millions of dollars. Most companies start smaller than that.

5. Read, then. Do research!

The "massively multiplayer" part is where it becomes nasty and prohibitively expensive.

You can have a small persistent world pretty easily. There isn't much of a difference between supporting 4 or 10 or 32 concurrent players. A single dedicated machine with a good hosting plan should be able to handle the processing and data requirements. Games with low bandwidth and little server work, like text based MUDs, have been around for a long time.

Once you get into the hundreds of concurrent users, or thousands, or tens of thousands, the situation changes dramatically.

Even at a hundred or so concurrent players you're going to need a small cluster of machines that are running a wide range of software, and some hefty Internet connections.



Game companies get to making the multi-million dollar games by starting small. They may start with just 2-3 people on a hobby team, or the studio owner may get extra mortgages on their home to fund it. Then they need to be profitable. As they become profitable they grow. As they grow they can negotiate bigger publishing deals, hire more people, hopefully succeed and become more profitable, grow some more, etc.

By concurrent users, do you mean all playing in one room at the same time or all just simply 'on the game' at one time? I'm designing an FPS PvP and also an MMORPG, but I was planning on trying to 'take action' with the FPS before anything else, since an MMORPG would most likely require a much larger budget. Would the FPS with at most 16 players in one 'room' at a time be OK, even if there are thousands making different rooms and playing in different rooms?
I know FPSes only use around 8-16 players at a time in one room because it requires so much 'effort' to keep 16 players accurately playing an FPS game.
Another reason I thought the FPS would be better to start with was because it would A) not have a huge amount of maps, characters, models, and programming involved and wouldn't necessarily be MMO, as there would only be around 16 players in a room at one time. Am I mistaken to think this way? I did want the game to have a single-player mode, but that could always be implemented in a later version of the game, maybe if the first, PvP-only version gets somewhere and makes money. The game was supposed to be online with the option of paying for more equipment and such.

[quote name='GHMP' timestamp='1300987999' post='4790023']I guess I just don't understand how gaming companies got there in the first place, making games like World of Warcraft. Blizzard had Warcraft and Starcraft before WoW, but those two were pretty large games, too, and I doubt if they were cheap to develop (though I'm not sure if Warcraft and Warcraft II would also require a large budget).

Check this out: http://us.blizzard.c...d-retrospective

It's a video about the history of Blizzard, which reveals that they did in fact start small and without a big budget. Remember that this was back when a handful of skilled people could feasibly create a published console game without it taking a lifetime.

It's harder to start a game studio targeting the mainstream games market these days - the man-hours spent on creating the art assets alone for a major game can be phenomenal. The barriers to entry are much more formidable. I'm no expert, but I imagine that nowadays a new studio creating "big" games is more likely to emerge as a result of a group of experienced people from an existing studio deciding to go off and start their own business. In a sense they have a head-start with at least some members of a ready-made team and existing contacts within the industry. Otherwise, like frob said, you'll need to start small and get noticed over time.
[/quote]
Thanks, the video was interesting and helpful.

[quote name='GHMP' timestamp='1300987999' post='4790023']
Well, maybe a more appropriately worded bout of questions would be:
1. "Is it a realistic approach towards success to make a demo and ask for investments?"
2. "Have any existing successful games been lead to their success by making a demo -
3. in other words, is it even worth trying?"
4. "How do gaming companies make their first game if they don't get investments - especially if their first game requires millions?"
5. I guess I just don't understand how gaming companies got there in the first place, making games like World of Warcraft. Blizzard had Warcraft and Starcraft before WoW, but those two were pretty large games, too, and I doubt if they were cheap to develop (though I'm not sure if Warcraft and Warcraft II would also require a large budget).

Much better!

1. It depends on what you're trying to do. What is your business idea? (I'm asking you what your business idea is -- what will your business do, is it publishing or developing or what, and what is your monetization plan? What platform? What scale and scope? Are we talking iPhone apps or MMOs?

2. Yes, absolutely.

3. Read FAQ 66.

4. A company's first game usually doesn't require many millions of dollars. Most companies start smaller than that.

5. Read, then. Do research!
[/quote]
In response to the questions in "1.":
Developing the game. I would be the designer of the game, provider of the GDD, and level designer - I'll probably end up picking up more talents along the way of learning the entire process. There would be the necessity of having servers hosting the game online, probably on a website, as it would be a PC game. I could also update the website and keep track of it, as I've had my fair share of blogs and such in the past. If you mean 'how will you make money' by monetization plan, then probably just giving players the option of paying money to get more features in-game, or to not have to work as hard to earn in-game money and buy what they want. Not an iPhone app, but also not an MMO. As I said above in this reply, a PvP FPS with maybe 10-16 players in a 'room' at one time, playing either arena-style or AoS style with allied and enemied NPCs/structures to war with (if you've ever heard of Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth).


---
Thanks for all of the replies, help and patience. Sorry if I'm just asking the same questions everyone else does.

So you're saying that the business plan you'll present to your investors is: your company will develop and self-publish one game on its own website. The monetization method is microtransactions.

Can you name any other companies that do business that way? Only one game, hosted on their own website and servers?

[quote name='frob' timestamp='1300990613' post='4790054']
The "massively multiplayer" part is where it becomes nasty and prohibitively expensive.

You can have a small persistent world pretty easily. There isn't much of a difference between supporting 4 or 10 or 32 concurrent players. A single dedicated machine with a good hosting plan should be able to handle the processing and data requirements. Games with low bandwidth and little server work, like text based MUDs, have been around for a long time.

Once you get into the hundreds of concurrent users, or thousands, or tens of thousands, the situation changes dramatically.

Even at a hundred or so concurrent players you're going to need a small cluster of machines that are running a wide range of software, and some hefty Internet connections.



Game companies get to making the multi-million dollar games by starting small. They may start with just 2-3 people on a hobby team, or the studio owner may get extra mortgages on their home to fund it. Then they need to be profitable. As they become profitable they grow. As they grow they can negotiate bigger publishing deals, hire more people, hopefully succeed and become more profitable, grow some more, etc.

By concurrent users, do you mean all playing in one room at the same time or all just simply 'on the game' at one time? I'm designing an FPS PvP and also an MMORPG, but I was planning on trying to 'take action' with the FPS before anything else, since an MMORPG would most likely require a much larger budget. Would the FPS with at most 16 players in one 'room' at a time be OK, even if there are thousands making different rooms and playing in different rooms?
I know FPSes only use around 8-16 players at a time in one room because it requires so much 'effort' to keep 16 players accurately playing an FPS game.
Another reason I thought the FPS would be better to start with was because it would A) not have a huge amount of maps, characters, models, and programming involved and wouldn't necessarily be MMO, as there would only be around 16 players in a room at one time. Am I mistaken to think this way? I did want the game to have a single-player mode, but that could always be implemented in a later version of the game, maybe if the first, PvP-only version gets somewhere and makes money. The game was supposed to be online with the option of paying for more equipment and such.
[/quote]

if by rooms you mean servers, then yes, its not a problem to have 8-16 or even 32-64 players per server like most FPS games do (Allthough a higher playercount does require better server hardware or a more optimized server software), as long as you're not hosting all those servers yourself. (what you should do is host a master server that only keeps a list of all other active servers and then let your players host their own servers, you might need to throw up a low number of servers yourself to get things started).

The difficult part of an MMO is that you will inevitably go far beyond what a single machine can handle so rather than having one server hosting a game for lets say 64 players or 10 servers hosting 10 games for 10x64 players you need to figure out a way to get multiple servers to host a single game for a massive(the first M in MMO) number of players, if you are going for a large open world this is challenging.

I suggest reading up on distributed simulations or that you think of a design that lets you split the game into multiple independant simulations. (WoW for example uses instances which are limited to at most 80 players for their action heavy parts (IIRC the biggest instance in terms of player count is the Alterac Valley 40vs40 battleground) while the rest of the game functions more like a traditional mmo)

So you're saying that the business plan you'll present to your investors is: your company will develop and self-publish one game on its own website. The monetization method is microtransactions.

Can you name any other companies that do business that way? Only one game, hosted on their own website and servers?

Well, I hadn't thought much of the 'business' part. I've noticed that there are sites that do that, too. AdventureQuest, for example - the game is pretty horrible in itself, and they just host it on their site and ask little kiddies to beg $20 out of their parents to ... well, pretty much to pay for the other 90% of the game, or just to have their character made better than other characters by giving them imbalanced gear. Of course, that wasn't what I'd planned on doing, but...
Also, there would be ad revenue coming in on the site, but that probably wouldn't be a huge amount of money, and would probably be donated to maintaining servers and buying new servers.

There would be other games hosted eventually, but you have to start with one before moving on to two, right..? Unless you suggest developing two or three and hosting them across the website?
After the first was developed, the next would be moved on to, I suppose.
But what I was thinking was you get investments to pay for hiring a team and then once the game is developed, the team disbands and you move on to the next...?
Then there's also keeping that team and making the next game, which would be making the company, I suppose.

[quote name='GHMP' timestamp='1301006049' post='4790156']
[quote name='frob' timestamp='1300990613' post='4790054']
The "massively multiplayer" part is where it becomes nasty and prohibitively expensive.

You can have a small persistent world pretty easily. There isn't much of a difference between supporting 4 or 10 or 32 concurrent players. A single dedicated machine with a good hosting plan should be able to handle the processing and data requirements. Games with low bandwidth and little server work, like text based MUDs, have been around for a long time.

Once you get into the hundreds of concurrent users, or thousands, or tens of thousands, the situation changes dramatically.

Even at a hundred or so concurrent players you're going to need a small cluster of machines that are running a wide range of software, and some hefty Internet connections.



Game companies get to making the multi-million dollar games by starting small. They may start with just 2-3 people on a hobby team, or the studio owner may get extra mortgages on their home to fund it. Then they need to be profitable. As they become profitable they grow. As they grow they can negotiate bigger publishing deals, hire more people, hopefully succeed and become more profitable, grow some more, etc.

By concurrent users, do you mean all playing in one room at the same time or all just simply 'on the game' at one time? I'm designing an FPS PvP and also an MMORPG, but I was planning on trying to 'take action' with the FPS before anything else, since an MMORPG would most likely require a much larger budget. Would the FPS with at most 16 players in one 'room' at a time be OK, even if there are thousands making different rooms and playing in different rooms?
I know FPSes only use around 8-16 players at a time in one room because it requires so much 'effort' to keep 16 players accurately playing an FPS game.
Another reason I thought the FPS would be better to start with was because it would A) not have a huge amount of maps, characters, models, and programming involved and wouldn't necessarily be MMO, as there would only be around 16 players in a room at one time. Am I mistaken to think this way? I did want the game to have a single-player mode, but that could always be implemented in a later version of the game, maybe if the first, PvP-only version gets somewhere and makes money. The game was supposed to be online with the option of paying for more equipment and such.
[/quote]

if by rooms you mean servers, then yes, its not a problem to have 8-16 or even 32-64 players per server like most FPS games do (Allthough a higher playercount does require better server hardware or a more optimized server software), as long as you're not hosting all those servers yourself. (what you should do is host a master server that only keeps a list of all other active servers and then let your players host their own servers, you might need to throw up a low number of servers yourself to get things started).

The difficult part of an MMO is that you will inevitably go far beyond what a single machine can handle so rather than having one server hosting a game for lets say 64 players or 10 servers hosting 10 games for 10x64 players you need to figure out a way to get multiple servers to host a single game for a massive(the first M in MMO) number of players, if you are going for a large open world this is challenging.

I suggest reading up on distributed simulations or that you think of a design that lets you split the game into multiple independant simulations. (WoW for example uses instances which are limited to at most 80 players for their action heavy parts (IIRC the biggest instance in terms of player count is the Alterac Valley 40vs40 battleground) while the rest of the game functions more like a traditional mmo)
[/quote]

By a 'room' I meant an instanced map that's chosen by the player. For example, every player can make a game of their own using an existing map, choose if they want to play AoS or arena style, and then 'make' the game and wait for other players to join before starting the game. All players in that 'game' would then be brought to a seperate instance of the map which is specific to them. Though other players might be seeing this similar map, each map would have it's own players determined by the players that were in the game when it started (and maybe other players that join after the game starts). Either they could make a game (game, room, whatever you prefer) with their chosen in-game map (stage) and settings, or join someone else's game that they want to play.
It's pretty much just like Warcraft III, Genesis A.D., etc.

So there would be both managing the players who aren't currently in a game, who would be seeing the menu where they join or create a game, and those who are each in their seperate instanced map with other players in the same game.

Well, I hadn't thought much of the 'business' part. I've noticed that there are sites that do that, too. AdventureQuest, for example - the game is pretty horrible in itself, and they just host it on their site and ask little kiddies to beg $20 out of their parents to ... well, pretty much to pay for the other 90% of the game, or just to have their character made better than other characters by giving them imbalanced gear. Of course, that wasn't what I'd planned on doing, but...
Also, there would be ad revenue coming in on the site, but that probably wouldn't be a huge amount of money, and would probably be donated to maintaining servers and buying new servers.

1. Throw together crappy game
2. ???
3. Start charging kiddies $20
4. ???
5. Sell company to publisher

Before even thinking about business it's important to understand that 2 and 4 are not only a big deal, but 2 alone kills 99 of 100 attempts at starting a company. There is no good or bad, quality vs. crap in business.

A company selects or discovers a business model, usually by tailoring the product to market demographic. If done correctly, revenue will exceed expenses. Otherwise, people go bankrupt.

Do you know, really know, what about "crappy game's" business model works? Do you know which type of advertising is used and why, what the rates and fees are, the conversions rates, how they handle legal aspects, who does their accounting, how much they need to pay in taxes, who wrote the contracts and the rest? Or how they sell logoed T-Shirts and plushies. And so on...

There would be other games hosted eventually, but you have to start with one before moving on to two, right..?[/quote]Sure. Assuming you are 1 in a 100 that manages to break even. Then the problem becomes growing the company. Are you making enough profit to grow enough to invest into branching out?

$20 may sound a lot, after all, you'll have tens of thousands of users. But in the beginning, you will have zero users. Meanwhile, your merchant account and payment gateway-related fees, protection from credit card fraud, anonimization services and basic customer support will be costing you $1000/month - before you even launch.
Then there's accounting, taxes, legal advice (did you know that privacy laws in Europe will make it illegal to use cookies on websites to track EU citizens), registration of the company and about 3.4 million other tiny details. Similar to how coders need to keep many details in mind, this is what business people need to know about their domain.

But unlike coding, where making a mistake simply causes a bug, mistakes here will simply result in fines.

After the first was developed, the next would be moved on to, I suppose.
But what I was thinking was you get investments to pay for hiring a team and then once the game is developed, the team disbands and you move on to the next...?[/quote]Sure, if you can manage the turnaround. After working with the same people for 2-5 years, knowing them inside and out, having learned the business, having gotten to know each other, becoming a well-oiled machine, you can obviously dump them and start from scratch, recruiting complete unknowns, training them, getting their buy-in, assembling from scratch. It depends.

Then there's also keeping that team and making the next game, which would be making the company, I suppose.[/quote]That is another way, where the people you work with are employed, you pay their salaries, insurance, health, taxes and they get to count on your for personal growth, so they can raise a family, move out of dorm into own apartment or house and can put their mind at ease, knowing that tomorrow they will still have a job. This way they won't need to moonlight on the side, perhaps even keep a copy of your game on home machine, just in case tomorrow they find themselves out of work and need to sell the source to some shady blogspam or flash site so they can afford to pay the bills.

1. Well, I hadn't thought much of the 'business' part.
2. Also, there would be ad revenue coming in on the site, but that probably wouldn't be a huge amount of money, and would probably be donated to maintaining servers and buying new servers.
3. There would be other games hosted eventually, but you have to start with one before moving on to two, right..? Unless you suggest developing two or three and hosting them across the website?
4. But what I was thinking was you get investments to pay for hiring a team and then once the game is developed, the team disbands and you move on to the next...?
5. Then there's also keeping that team and making the next game, which would be making the company, I suppose.

1. See, I guessed that. And I think you're starting to get the point: investors won't give you money if you don't think about the business part. They want to get their money back, and then some.
2. Figure out how much ad revenue you plan on earning -- your investors won't give you money if you can't plan this.
3. My point was that a one-game business is not a good plan. Figure out a plan for what it is your business will do. It's going to develop and self-publish GAMES (not just one game), and it'll make the investors' money back in what way, and how soon will the investors get their money back.
4. And what happens to the investors' money under that plan?
5. Now you're starting to suppose. How about thinking about the business and planning instead of supposing?

"Is it a realistic approach towards success to make a demo and ask for investments?"

Yes but only if you fit the criteria necessary for an investor. You need a team with proven experience and a management team with proven management/industry experience.

"Have any existing successful games been lead to their success by making a demo - in other words, is it even worth trying?"[/quote]
Almost all publisher funded games started with a demo pitched to the publisher.

"How do gaming companies make their first game if they don't get investments - especially if their first game requires millions?"[/quote]
They make a small cheap game which they self fund to prove they can make something good. Or they do outsource work for another developer to earn enough money (and build a proven track record), then pitch their idea (inc all the necessary documentation and a demo) to a publisher.

I guess I just don't understand how gaming companies got there in the first place, making games like World of Warcraft.[/quote]
By not making games like World of Warcraft. To see how a games company starts don't look at the big successful games they are making now, look at the small cheap games they made before they were famous. id didn't start off making big 3D games, go and find out how they started. DMA Design (now Rockstar North) didn't start out making Grand Theft Auto 3 and Westwood Studios didn't start out with Command and Conquer.

Unless you already have a proven track record making $20 million games no publisher or investor is going to give you $20+ million to make a game. Sorry but that simply isn't how the industry works. You will need to prove yourself on smaller projects or gain proven industry experience working at a big game developer before anyone will trust you with that sort of investment.

Read about how games get signed up - http://www.obscure.co.uk/articles-2/the-video-game-acquisitions-process/
More about demos - http://www.obscure.co.uk/articles-2/preparing-a-game-demo/