Someone1,

StarWars Galaxies isn''t released yet, not even in beta. And it will probably cost more than 9.99, since even EverQuest raised subscription prices to $13/mo recently. It''s high improbable for anyone on this site to make a reasonable estimate of the costs of those commercial games. Without intimate knowledge of the backend systems used by the company supporting the game, you can''t just make blanket estimates about their costs. Everyone says that EQ raked in ~$4mil/mo when they were at $9.89/mo price. Sony was NOT making a profit at $9.89, and I''d be surprised if they are now at $13....

Fingh

"Disclaimer - the thoughts contained herein are wholly my own observations/opinions and there is nothing official about them whatsoever."

quote:

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Original post by fingh
Sony was NOT making a profit at $9.89, and I''d be surprised if they are now at $13....

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Heh. That''s kinda funny.

Don''t you believe it. Sony made (and almost certainly still makes) profit-galore with EQ. That they could absorb the profit into other business areas and use it as funding for other products/projects/infrastructure doesn''t mean that EQ wasn''t profitable. Just that they have good accountants.

As for the recent price increase, that''s more of a marketing move than anything else. With Yahoo Games now offering a $9.95/month package, EQ and similar "high tech" games could (and probably should) jack their prices to continue to represent the "cutting edge" of entertainment. You can''t be "cutting edge" if you cost the same as someone as technologically unimpressive as Yahoo Games.

There are 2 primary costs in MMORPGs: bandwidth, as has already been discussed, and customer service. 1 customer service call can easily wipe out the profit margin on his own monthly fee, as well as the monthly fees of about 3-5 other players.


DavidRM
Samu Games

I''m pretty sure the raise in price for EQ didnt have anything to do with Yahoo Games. They forced players to pay for 1 year or more at 9.98 or continue paying by the month at 13 because new PIGs will be coming out by the ton in the next year and they want to keep their [stroke]players[/stroke] money.

Some interesting posts here;

some of you (fnagaton, JonStelly) had bandwidth budgets per player. I was wondering if there''s any posts (or articles) giving actual bandwidth budgets from any of the big MMOGS (primarily EQ, DAOC, AO, AC, or any of the big Korean ones) ?

Thanks,

Odin

The bandwith budget is based mostly upon what a 56k modem can do. Under good conditions, a 56k modem gets about 4kB/s. Thats the maximum, so probably most the time you'd want half that or less. 1-2 kB/s is probably what you want to aim for. EQ gets about 1-4 kB/s on average. In very crowded areas where alot of fighting is occuring it can spike alot higher, especially if you have server-side filtering off.

[edited by - Z01 on April 25, 2002 10:24:51 PM]

Everybody here is talking about bandwidth per player, but from what I''ve read about people making non-commercial MMOG (or trying to) and my own common sense says that in general, bandwidth is per player per player; bandwidth varies with players squared. With 5 players that can see eachother, each player has to know about eachother, so information about 5 players is being sent to 5 players (assuming server sends info about the client itself, otherwise it would be infor for 4 players being sent to 5 players), so if you support x players, then your bandwidth has to be enough to send information about x*x players. Of course, you normally dont expect too many players to interact with eachother (or need to have information about eachother) so that number can far be reduced from the number of total players to some constant that you should plan for, such as assuming that on average, each player will see 5 other players and need information on them. Of course, if a bunch of characters got together for any reason, you game would start to lag because you dont have enough bandwidth for all that information being sent. Just 20 players able to see eachother means you have to send information for 400 characters between those 20 characters. Double that number to 40 and you quadruple the bandwidth requirements - information for 1600 characters needs to be sent. Obviously, you dont want players to need information on many other players so you need some way to limit the transfer. A good rule is to only send information about a character that can be seen. Then you need to use tricks to limit visibility of other players. Maybe characters a certain distance+ away wont be considered visible.

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"I believe; therefore, it is." -True Perception
"The Requested Information Is Unknown Or Classified" -Anonymous

Well... I was interested in feedback from anyone doing commercial MMOGs..

As a general rule, you''ll have a bandwidth budget for a given level (a level designed for max 255 player might say a max of 250 kb/s), since you pay by peak-usage.

You then scale bandwidth usage to fit that budget (so that with 100 players on, each player is allocated 2.5 kb/s max transfer rate), reducing updates (and gracefully deteriorating into lag)as you get closer to your max bandwidth limmit. You can prioritize characters inside the visible set based on distance from player (so that the guy 500m away is only updated every 5 seconds, while the guy 5 meters away is updated every 1/2 second).

The question (which is probably best placed in a seperate thread anyways) was;

"what is the worst-case, and common case, bandwith-cap allocated per player for commercial MMOG games?"

Thanks,
Odin

For a game of the type you''re talking about the worst case bandwidth per user should be 10Kb/sec (when a group of 70 players go to kill the big nasty dragon) and the average case is 3Kb/sec (when a player is fighting in a small group of 6 players or is running through a city).
For comparison the minimum case, when the player is sitting all alone in a large tunnel with nothing around, can be as low as 200bytes/sec. The player may still be a member of a chat channel or two for example that causes some bandwidth to be used.
Generally speaking if you''re having to use more the 10Kb/sec per player for an MMORPG then you''re doing something wrong.

DavidRM, glad you got a laugh out of that. Yes, EQ funds more than the 6 current announced game projects (announced officially or games that the community has heard about unofficially - e.g. EQ2). The company is not profitable (as I said), and that is why EQ prices were raised. Don''t kid yourself into thinking they don''t need the money.

Extrarius, there are ways to get around sending data about every player to every single other player. You made a good observation in that bandwidth requirements is not necessarily a linear function of the number of players.

Don''t kid yourself into thinking they do need the money. Hell, if they really did, why didn''t they just axe one of the six projects they''re supposedly funding? That seems like a better idea to me.

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