I ran across this forum posting, and found it to be invaluable to anyone intersted in starting their own gaming company. I consider this to be required reading. I am re-posting it below:
This is good information. In the 5 years I have been developing Visions, I would wager 99.9999% of the advice I got was “that’s impossible” or “you can’t make an MMO without a big budget” or “You can’t make a game unless you are a programmer” and a myriad of other “pipe dream” type comments that were meant to discourage me from trying. I am really happy to see that you DO in fact want to encourage people, and that you are just trying to help them tackle this GARGANTUAN sized project with open eyes. It is refreshing.
I would like to throw out some numbers that I’ve put together on my own in the last few months. For those who are hoping to not only recruit a team (us non-programmer types really truly do need at least a small team earlier in the development cycle than what you have listed in this article - but it CAN be done!) but to also hire a full time team might want to run some numbers before they go seeking funding. Not to discourage anyone from seeking funding, I am hoping to find funding for our project at some point also. But to give people a better idea of exactly HOW MUCH funding they are going to need. Again, approach the problem with eyes wide open and then you won’t be quite as surprised by the obstacles along the way.
A little background about my team, to give you some perspective. I started writing the design for Visions about 6 years ago, in 2003. I recruited my first volunteer in 2004. I’ve had a small team of volunteers consistently ever since. We have changed engines three times, due to encountering impassible road blocks. We are finishing the final stages of porting to TGEA 1.8.1 right now, so our game world looks very empty again. Changing engines is NOT an easy decision to make. It is demoralizing, time consuming, and tedious. But sometimes you reach a point where it’s either switch or quit. And we didn’t want to quit. So we bit the bullet and made the switch. Don’t underestimate the power of morale though, the punch in the belly feeling often causes people to take a break, refocus their attention on other things in life for a while - or maybe permanently - and the team structure often takes a morale hit too. We all find ourselves wishing we had funding, a paycheck, even wishing we could work on this FULL TIME instead of after hours and on weekends when we’re already tired. Those who are truly dedicated to the project don’t want the project to end, they want it to go faster.
And indeed, faster is imperative. We took a break from working on Visions directly for about 19 months while we created a small racing game called Chariots. The reasoning behind creating Chariots (as opposed so a dozen other game ideas we had) was that we could then turn around and incorporate code from Chariots back into Visions when it was done and our time wouldn’t really be lost. And in the mean time, it was hoped to be a morale boost for our team to see that we REALLY CAN make a game! And we did. And overall I believe it helped. But I would do it differently if we were to make that decision again. Because time is of the essence, and we’re running out of time.
I’ve looked at how long it took us to make Chariots, one tiny little fraction of the Visions design document, and if we continue at the same pace to complete all the components for Visions, it is going to take us roughly 125 years to finish Visions. We need a full time, full scale team if we are going to finish in this lifetime. 10 hours a week just isn’t going to cut it. So I started looking at funding options. There are no grant opportunities for profit-oriented companies. And Angel Investors are about as rare as divine angels themselves (though not impossible, highly unlikely to find one!). Loans are out of the question because unanimously, business loans require payback to start in 30 days. And it will take at least 2 years to finish Visions even with a full scale team of 180 people.
How much does a full scale full time team of 180 people cost? About $20 million a year. That’s for average wages at the current Oregon salary standards found on this website: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/State=Oregon/Salary The cost of running a full scale team, JUST IN SALARIES ALONE is over $12 million, and this is a conservative estimate.
If you want to offer competitive salaries to retain employees, the cost will be higher. Here is my breakdown for 179 staff:
1 Producer - $99,000
2 Executive Assistants - $58,000 per year per employee
1 Receptionist – $35,000 per year
1 Accountant - $58,000 per year
5 HR Associates - $60,000 per year per employee
1 Art director - $70,000 per year
6 Lead artists - $67,000 per year per employee
55 artists - $60,000 per year per employee
1 Programming Director - $99,000 per year
5 Programming Leads - $96,000 per year per employee
50 Programmers & Scripters - $89,000 per year per employee
1 IT Director - $89,000
8 IT Network Engineers - $60,000 per year per employee
1 – Senior Service Manager - $60,000
6 – Customer Service Managers - $57,000 per year per employee (Plus 15 to 25 – CS Volunteers)
1 Marketing Director - $77,000
2 Marketing Managers - $67,000 per year per employee
10 Marketing & Web Developers - $60,000 per year per employee
1 Quest Writer Director - $67,000
3 Quest Writer Managers - $60,000 per year per employee
15 Quest Writers - $57,000 per year per employee
3 Researchers - $57,000 per year per employee
= 179 Total Skilled Developers. $12,129,000 in total annual salary projections.
Then you need office space, and the costs associated with that. This area I am the most unsure about my estimates, as I have never actually operated an office of this size, and my numbers might be too low. There are likely additional hidden costs and if possible a cushion should be added to buffer this number. But it is important to have a starting point, and this is what I came up with:
6500 Sq Ft. x $23.40 per SF per year = $152,100 per year lease
Stage 2 Office Supplies $45,000 per year estimated
Stage 2 Computer Equipment $445,000
-Office stations, conference tables, chairs, Filing systems:
Stage 2 Office Furniture TOTAL $5,683,220
=TOTAL Stage 2 Office Expenses: $6,325,320
Utilities and services add up real fast, particularly with bandwidth costs which can run over $25,000 a month for an MMO if you’re not careful. These are some numbers that I came up with, based on inquiries to local utilities and other business people who are familiar with such expenses.
Legal Services cost $150,000 per year estimate
Business Insurance cost $12,000 per year estimated
Janitoral services $65,000 per year estimate
Phone Service $12,000 per year estimated
Internet $180,000 per year estimated
Power $24,000 per year estimated
Groundskeeping $12,000 per year estimated
=TOTAL utilities and services: $455,000
If you want to upgrade to an engine that is ACTUALLY DESIGNED for an MMOG, like Hero Engine or BigWorld, that comes at a high pricetag. If you can get funding for it though, it could save you many months of development required to modify a single player FPS engine that was never really meant to be a MMOG engine. If you’re happy with your current engine, you can deduct $1 million from this group. The rest of the technology licenses are estimates, and likely to vary depending on your team’s particular needs.
MMOG (Hero or BigWorld) Engine $1,000,000
Site Licenses for Photoshop CS4 $60,000
Site Licenses for Max $80,000
Site Licenses for MS VS C++ $25,000
MoCap Editor Software License $50,000
MoCap cameras & equipment $150,000
Server Software Site Licenses $5,000
Audio Software licenses $10,000
Sound Equipment $50,000
=TOTAL Technology Expenses: $1,380,000
If you want your game to reach players, SOME amount of marketing is going to have to be invested also. The more you can put into marketing, if it is spent wisely, the higher your chances of success will be. These marketing estimates are VERY conservative. For example, if a person wanted to put a full page ad in a Gamer magazine, it will cost upwards of $250,000 for one issue. Sure there are free marketing opportunities too, blogs, social networking, letters to editors, article authoring, etc. But everything takes time, at the least you will need to spend time writing articles instead of developing the game for a while. There is always a cost somewhere. Weigh the balance carefully.
Ads $100,000
Promotional products $50,000
Conference Fees $25,000
Travel expenses $75,000
=Total Marketing Expenses: $250,000
So as you can see, I am not exaggerating when I say, it costs over $20 million a year to run a full time team on a conservative budget. If you need to add in relocation packages to get your team members moved to your headquarters location, add additional funding estimates for that. There is a lot to consider. And I hope that this post resoundingly confirms that making a MMOG is not so much about making a game as it is about building a business. I don’t particularly like the business side of it, but it is necessary for the game to happen. Making a game is not all fun and games. But it can be rewarding.
My video card totally burnt up Friday while playing STO!
I had a 4 month old EVGA Geforce GTX 260 Core 216. I have played everything at max settings with no problems since I bought it. Card temperature was 65C under load while playing STO. It was NOT over heating. It started artifacting during STO, then shortly after the card died and caused blue screen errors. It then would not reboot, and had artifacts on the screen in the bios.
I took the card out and installed an old spare one. PC booted up fine. The verdict is that graphics card, optimization, and performance bugs in STO caused my graphics card to redline without any warnings. This damaged the card and caused it to fail.
If you buy Star Trek Online you should be VERY careful. It can destroy your graphics card and possibly more of your PC!
Today I found this post in the STO forums:
Yeah,…there is a bug that will heat some video cards.
Quoted from another forum…..
“If you havent manually set your FPS with /maxfps command; then you are redlining your card without even knowing it. Apparently STO has a huge bug where it sets your GPU to try and attempt an infinite framerate which bottoms it out. Even if you arent running hot you are still doing damage since its redlined.To fix this serious problem log into the game and type /maxfps if it comes up 0.000000 then you have been running redline for days most likely. Just type /maxfps(space)# between 30-60 for fps. Then type just /maxfps to make sure it took.
The /showfps command may still show zero but thats bugged so dont pay attention to it. After you set your maxfps you should notice markably increased performance, less heat if you were running crazy hot like me, and the ability to set more stuff to max if you were unable to before.
LAST TIP VERY IMPORTANT. Dont forget that every time you log in you must set your fps again or it will go back to 0.00000.”
The game hasn’t even officially launched yet. As of this writing its in “head start” phase for people that pre-ordered. However the game has been down more than its been up. Overall STO performed better when it was in Open Beta than it does right now. Not to mention the login que. That’s right. The game is only available for people that pre-order it, and there is already a huge login que. Some people have been in que for 2 hours with only slight movement.
Below are a few posts from the STO General Gameplay Feedback Forum:
“Every MMO has extensive downtime”?, no **** sherlock, its part of the MMO parody that the servers go down alot in the first few days/weeks, we get that so dont use it as a arguement. What we dont get is a veteran MMO company like Crypic screwing the pooch on a liscence that they KNEW was going to generate alot of players.
If they had even considered for one micron of a second of the number of players, fans or not, who would scramble to this game for whatever reason, they’d be ready for it.
And before you open your mouth about me being some kid, or someone with no experience off MMO’s out, or the lovely insults you’ve thrown at people who dont agree with you, here is some reading for you..
I am a veteran of Dark Ages, Star Wars Galaxies, City Of Heros, World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, i took part in the Closed Beta and Open Beta on Galaxies AND Age of Conan and the early start on Star Wars Galaxies (given to Closed Beta testers for the hell we went through) and Age of Conan.
NONE of these games had the lackluster start that Star Trek Online has had, in Beta for Galaxies we went down for 2 months!, when it came back it was running smoother, still had its issues. Conan was the same, come early start for Galaxies, servers were up 20 hours a day with 4 hours of downtime, Conan was the same after a single day of stop-starts.
Come release for Conan there were issues with server loads, these were fixed in EARLY ACCESS within a day. World of Warcraft had a week of issues due to it being the first MMO title for that developer.
In Star Trek Online, we’ve had server issues, crashes and downtime during the open beta (and i am sure during the closed beta), but the big difference is that the other titles didnt have as many massive issues as this game has got, so close to store release…This is unacceptable for a veteran MMO developer like Cryptic.
We’re officially (by date) only 3 days into the early start program, and already things have gone from bad to worse when it comes to the servers stability.
Are people angry about that? You bet your backside they are.
Are people angry at the lack of communication from the Developers/Mods? You bet your backside they are!
And are people sick and tired of folks like you putting them down for sharing they’re opinions and feeling?
You bet your backside they are!
Alot of folks here have pre-paid for a product that isnt ready for launch, no matter which way you slice it people have the right to be angry. Those who’ve paid for lifetime subscriptions to this game want to to work, those who’ve paid for twelve month subscriptions want it to work, and those who have paid just for the game itself want it to work…
The only things we dont want are to be left in the dark about the current state of the game….and to be told by people that “all MMO’s are like this” when clearly, many have not been.
Thats all from this tired old man, sick of little kids telling others what to think and do….
And another…
Where do you see STO in one month ?
I see me at position 600 in the queue from 1000 if I am being optimistic.
I see crashes daily with nothing but streams of complaints in the forums.
I see a steady decline of players over the next 30 days and then a sudden drop
I see the servers eventually finding a balance point where enough people have left that it remains stable
I see the server and game shutting because Cryptic pull the plug due to lack of subscribers
Finally, I see the death of any chance of an STO MMO being made for several years.
And another…
I have tried to be optimistic about everything. Now I am just ****ED.
If any other business was run the way Cryptic is running this games launch, heads would roll, and roll fast.
I mean the most basic of failures, both in open beta and headstart. Its not bugs we are dealing with, its not enough server capacity. I mean come the FRAK on.
Here I am hoping to spend all weekend trying to make Lt. Cmdr. before everyone logs in on Tuesday, and I have gotten to play all of 8 hours since Friday.
And now this Queue horse$***. WTFrak. Moved ten spots in 20 mintues. After I had gotten in when servers went back up, just to be booted again 20 minutes later, then in and out 20 minutes later again.
I know this i one of a hundred such posts but the people at cryptic really need to be replaced. Sorry, but its true.
Before I get started let me say that I do like this game. The space combat is really fun. I pre-ordered from Amazon, and do not plan to cancel it.
Now for the meat:
A lot of people are saying this is a re-skin of Champions Online. Honestly I never played Champions Oline, but after so many references to it, I decided to look it up on YouTube. I was totally appalled. All Cryptic did was re-skin the CO UI with Star Treky colors and slap an STO label on it. They could have at least made it look different… Now granted I am playing in the open beta so they may have UI changes in store for the official release. Look at the videos below for a comparison of the Champions Online UI and the Star Trek Online UI.
Champions Online UI:
Star Trek Online UI
As far as the MMO “feel” of the game…Other than seeing other people in sector space, talking in zone chat, and doing fleet actions this game feels like a single player game. The constant load screens are ridiculous, tiring, and irritating. If anything Cryptic has shown others how to totally NOT make an “MMO”.
I do really enjoy the space combat. With that stated it is an awful lot like Starfleet Command. Since SFC source code was released to the player base when the company that made it (Taldren) went under, I am forced to wonder if maybe Cryptic got a hold of it and used it as the base of the space aspects of this game.
Starfleet Command Gameplay
Star Trek Online Space Gameplay
With all that stated…I am willing to dismiss all those gripes with the exception of only one. I am greatly disappointed with this developer for a total lack of vision and creativity with the community aspects of the game. The horrendous over use of instancing in this game is going to kill it. I highly recommend they find a way to make it a more open world, and find a way to facilitate the community feeling of the game.
Recommendations:
Instances: The only thing instanced should be starbase and starship interiors and planet surfaces.
Starbases: Everyone can be at the same starbase AND see AND interact with one another. None of this multiple instancing crap.
Sector Space: Remove instance loading when going from one sector to another. Open it up so that its all seamless. If there is a starbase…be able to orbit and board it from sector space (What is the point of an instance in an instance like at K7 and Earth Spacedock? It just makes for load screen after load screen. Seriously who the hell thought that was a good idea?) While I don’t mind sector space, I recommend it be redesigned to make it feel galactic. The premise is nice, but it makes the entire world feel too small. Perhaps expand the size of sector space, remove the “map” theme you have, and add in actual star systems with planets (all explorable) and stars so that people can actually transit trough a system while you are doing a mission (Think Eve Online for star system scale, but maybe not that big.).
Star Trek Online Sector Space:
Planets: Make planets explorable. I mean you can fly up to a planet and you can beam down to any point on the planet. Imagine a UI where you can use your mouse to pick an exact point on a map to beam down to. Each planet should be the size of a planet from Star Wars Galaxies (I am talking old days before it was screwed up. I haven’t played it in years though). On these planet you should be able to explore and even find missions from NPC’s on the Planet. There should be HUB worlds that each have large capital cities that you can visit (Note that these planets should be large explorable worlds outside of the city) To further flesh this planet use out, a player should be able to completely level from exploring planets and doing ground based missions. Likewise the leveling should be the same for space based missions. To even spice this up a bit…make some planets with hostile environments that require your crew to wear environmental (EVA) suits. To add to this even further, if sector space was huge and each star system has multiple planets (1 -10 planets per system) you could even allow player structures on the planets. Furthermore by expanding sector space to scale like it should be, you would even have room in space to allow fleets to construct their own starbases.
Starships: They should be fully explorable. Hell it doesn’t have to be elaborate. Its a starship so all you have to do is create faction oriented interior sections and repeat them as needed. Also key areas such as the bridge, ready room, captiain’s quarters, etc. should be open to decorating by the ship captain. This would facilitate a fleet meeting on their admiral’s ship, for example a fleet briefing room or a ship’s bar.
So Modern Warfare 2 has been released. Only its missing it most important part: Dedicated Servers. For all of those that loved CoD4 on your PC for its multiplayer, you are going to be greatly disappointed. This version has nowhere near the multiplayer game of the original. The only multiplayer it offers is peer to peer, with max players being 16 or 8 vs 8, which means unless you have a LAN party or connect to a friend over the net, you are out of luck. All of you dreaming of recreating those great matches you knew in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare are gone.
For all intent and purposes this game is a single player game. The developers REALLY dropped the ball on this title. Everyone should know that what makes a great shooter game is its online multiplayer.
I won’t be buying this game. If you really liked the multiplayer in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, I don’t suggest you buy it either. You’ll be greatly disappointed.
WoWGuideOnline.com is having a contest to give away a Grunty Marine pet for World of Warcraft! A random winner will be drawn from forum members that have posted at least 30 times! For those interest, head over to WoWGuideOnline.com and click on the Grunty banner or click this link for contest details: Contest Information & Rules
Patch 3.3 is going to be the last major content patch for Wrath of Lich King. This patch will introduce three new five-man dungeons and one new 10/25 man raid. With this being the final content patch, speculation that Cataclysm will be released around February to April seem to be correct.
I have been having problems with WoW freezing up after a few minutes. At first I thought maybe my graphics card, an EVGA Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT, was overheating. I thought it would be unlikely, but I ruled it out by monitoring the temperature.
Then I remembered I had updated my graphics drivers. So I began testing drivers out. This is what I’ve discovered:
All drivers listed on Nvidia’s website that are the 18x.xx series will cause WoW to freeze. In order to get access to other drivers, you have to look at their Beta and Archived Drivers page and search for drivers based on your video card. I am currently using driver 178.13 and WoW has not locked up once.
If you are having freeze up issues with WoW, I suggest you use the 178.13 driver.
Blizzard is there something with the game that you guys can look at to fix this issue for Nvidia card users? Its obvious that WoW and the 18x.xx driver series do not work well together.
UPDATE 6-12-2009:
After a couple of days of running fine the freezing problem came back. Since then I have noticed that the game may run fine if not minimized or ran in windowed mode. If I launch the game in full screen, and never minimize or change it to windowed mode, it seems to run without issue…mostly. If I change to windowed mode or minimize the game eventually it will freeze. The audio may or may not continue or get stuck in a loop when this happens. This looping audio also applies to Ventrillo when WoW freezes. I’m going to keep testing.
UPDATE 8-6-2009:
The freeze up problem got horrendous last night, so I thought I would try a different approach. I went into the device manager and completely uninstalled my Nvidia video drivers. I then restarted my computer. I then installed the latest drivers from Nvidia, the 190.38 driver. All my problems stopped. So obvious it was a corrupted driver that was causing the problem. I suggest anyone else having this problem do the same as I did.
UPDATE 9-16-2009:
The problem remains…I uninstalled the drivers and the card in the device manager screen, then rebooted in safe mode and ran a driver cleaner. I then rebooted and did a fresh install of the drivers. Ran fine for a day or so. But the problem came back. I have no idea whats causing it. I’m about ready to order a new card…
UPDATE 9-26-2009:
Problem solved. I ordered a EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked. My game has not frozen once since I installed it a week ago. I’ve come to the conclusion that the Geforce 9500 GT is a piece of crap. Don’t buy it.
I woke up this morning and got the same thing. Needless to say I knew better than to click any links. I knew something was fishy about it. For one thing, the email address the stupid F’s used is not the email address I use with my WoW account. That means they lifted that email address off my website. Gang of stupid bastages…you gotta do better than that if you want to trick me!
I’m pasting my copy below. Blizz, you guys need to send out something immediately, post in the forum, or post something in game to tell people to not click on this stuff. I promise you someone is gonna get hacked by this crap.
Here’s the email I got:
Subject: World of Warcraft - Account Notification
From: noreply (Add as Preferred Sender)
Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2009 10:46 pm
To: ***************
Account Action: 3 Hour Suspension
Account Offense: Violation of EULA and Terms of Service - Transfer of Account Ownership
Details: An investigation of your World of Warcraft account has found strong evidence that the account in question is being sold or traded. In accordance with EULA section 4, Paragraph B, listed below:
World of Warcraft -> Legal -> End User License Agreement
and Section 8 of the Terms of Use:
Blizzard Entertainment -> Legal -> Terms of Use
A 3-hour probationary suspension is pending on this account, awaiting confirmation from a specialist. A warning has been issued. The investigation will be continued by the Account Administration team to determine the any further suspensions. If the account in question is found in violation of the EULA and Terms of Use, further action will be taken. Be aware that any additional inappropriate actions may result in the permanent closure of the account.
Thank you for respecting our position on this matter.
=========================================================
** We request that you verify your legitimate ownership of the account here:
—Fake link removed so you don’t click it—
=========================================================
Any disputes or questions concerning this account action can only be addressed by Account Administration. To learn more about how Account Administration is able to assist you, please visit us at http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowaa/.
Account security is solely the responsibility of the accountholder. Please be advised that in the event of a compromised account, Blizzard representatives typically must lock the account. In these cases the Account Administration team will require faxed receipt of ID materials before releasing the account for play.
Please visit the World of Warcraft Policies and Terms of Use Agreement: (http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowgm/?id=agm01712p) and (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/termsofuse.shtml) for further information.
Regards,
Billing & Account Administration
Blizzard Entertainment
http://www.blizzard.com/support/accountadmin/
Today I noticed that Blizzard has teamed with Swagdog.com to offer customized t-shirts! This is great to all you WoW players out there! I went over to the Swagdog’s site and checked it out. They off a lot of personalizing options such as server, guild tabard, character name, class, and race. I even toyed around and made my own t-shirt! Check it out below!
