MMO budgets and development times

[Dash]

I doubt this exists but is there any list of estimated budget and development times for the larger MMO's out there?  Similar to the subscription graphs and such.

Does anyone believe a good, modern, solid, polished top tier MMO can be made "on the cheap" or in a short development cycle?  Maybe on the cheap is not the best phrase, how about for significantly less (i.e. half or so) than WoW spent or in a shorter time than they took.

[Murgos]

No.  Looking at TR and other recent dogs, I don't think spending half of WoW's budget even gets you out the starting gate in good order.

[Draegan]

I think an analogy would be like creating a summer block buster film  vs. creating a movie for that goes straight to DVD.

[schild]

I hesitate to even say that any of the old guard could even create a good, modern, decent MMOG. I love those guys but man, their game development skills are approaching prehistoric.

Just because you understand the process doesn't mean you don't suck giant ass at it.

[eldaec]

[Margalis]

Does anyone believe a good, modern, solid, polished top tier MMO can be made "on the cheap" or in a short development cycle?  Maybe on the cheap is not the best phrase, how about for significantly less (i.e. half or so) than WoW spent or in a shorter time than they took.

It could be done but would have to be somewhat different in approach. WOW is already "on the cheap" in terms of graphics. You could make a solid, polished MMO for cheaper but not following the same formula. You could do a Second Life type of thing or an MMO racing game or MMO Animal Crossing or whatever...but you aren't going to produce a game like WOW for a much lower cost.

[Trippy]

I doubt this exists but is there any list of estimated budget and development times for the larger MMO's out there?  Similar to the subscription graphs and such.

Does anyone believe a good, modern, solid, polished top tier MMO can be made "on the cheap" or in a short development cycle?  Maybe on the cheap is not the best phrase, how about for significantly less (i.e. half or so) than WoW spent or in a shorter time than they took.

It could probably be done but you would need the right group of people working on it otherwise you end up with games like EQ2 which was made for about half of what WoW cost to develop. Less time is not going to happen unless it's a radically different game design than your (now) traditional raid-oriented Diku MMORPG like Margalis said above.

[Venkman]

Dash, the genre has fractured so much that the sort of baseline you seek is somewhat impossible, without more definition. It's also something of a competitive advantage for companies, and as such, a fair bit of proprietary information. But, there is enough info out there that we could guesstimate a few things. And maybe a few red names would be willing to chime in.

What is it you're looking to understand? To help answer that, as a place to start here's some stuff off the top of my head (qualified so some can dispute it ;) ):

• 3D virtual world graphics (EQ2 on high end, WoW on middle), 2D Flash (Club Penguin, Dofus), 2D bitmap (old UO)- (type of art drives different types of costs)
• Licensing a graphics engine (Unreal, ala Vanguard) versus buidling one (err, I think WoW?)- (recurring fees, renewals, etc)
• Full persistent public space environments (EQ1) or instantiated (most everthing since, including later EQ1)- (affects server tech)
• Licensing server tech and middleware tools versus building (not sure why you'd do this of course)
• Size of projected accountbase
• Projected concurrency during peaks and valleys
• Fully player-customized experience (SL), mostly player-customized within a game-directed framework (SWG), mostly game-directed RPG-esque experience (GW)

Some quick numbers:

• EQ2 was stated to have a development budget of $25mil, two years before it launched. Some of the stuff built for EQ2 has been extended for use on other games in the SOE library.
• Club Penguin was stated to cost roughly $3mil. They licensed the Smartfox server system, built it in Flash. They got bought this year for $350mil (with another $350mil if they hit certain performance metrics).
• WoW had a $75mil development budget. Then above and beyond for marketing, sales, localization, etc. (and no, they don't collect 8.5mil * $14.99/mo, but are still burning money for heat)

Hope that helps get ya started.

[Trippy]

WoW had a $75mil development budget. Then above and beyond for marketing, sales, localization, etc. (and no, they don't collect 8.5mil * $14.99/mo, but are still burning money for heat)

That's wrong and will continue to be wrong no matter how many times you guys repeat it.

[Venkman]

Your response is uninformative and will continue to be uninformative no matter how many times you think just saying "wrong" is enough.

[Trippy]

I've talked about the cost to develop WoW many times in the past. You just ignore all facts that don't fit with your view of things.

[stu]

I doubt this exists but is there any list of ... development times?

I've always wondered about the production schedules dev teams keep. How often do MMOs release when they are originally expected to do so? Seems to me, it never happens. Is there an example of a Massively Multiplayer Game that released on time, rather than going by a "It will be ready when it's ready" state of production?

[geldonyetich2]

Tabula Rasa was most recently quoted in the New York Times as being at least 20 million and an older article in the Korean Times thinks it's more like 100 million.  I'm honestly not sure which it is, but it's interesting when considering Tabula Rasa was over six years and one complete scrapping to neigh nothing when they decided that multi-horned unicorns probably weren't going to sell.

Bah.  If you ask me (and why would you) it's not about the money, it's about the talent.  Getting distracted by the dollar signs is the road to ruin any kind of art, games included.  Runescape was neigh free and it doesn't seem to be wanting for players.

[stu]

I agree with that last part, but I'm pretty sure the current talent pool is mostly stagnant.

[Venkman]

Currency difference resulting in such a wide spread? Or maybe one number was development and the other included everything else (though that's quite a broad split to account for marketing and distribution).

And the money brings the talent. It doesn't need to always, but you're not getting a TR for $3mil no matter who you have on the credits roll.

I've talked about the cost to develop WoW many times in the past. You just ignore all facts that don't fit with your view of things.

No. I just don't have the luxury of refreshing the board all the time. Glad I can hit it when I can because I usually learn something. And usually I can learn something from you. Often though it's a noise thing.

[UnSub]

My rough, unsourceable understandings of MMO costs range from $14 million for CoH, $20 - $30 million for a number of other MMOs and up to $85 million for WoW (which Trippy can provide a link to disprove if he wants).

I can't remember the name of it, but one MMO was developed and published pretty much entirely from one guy's house. That probably would have been a lot cheaper than the above examples, but also a lot more limited.

It seems that most MMOs take somewhere between 3 and 5 years to come out from announcement to launch, but that's not a guarantee and pre-production can add a lot more time to a project. (Also, imo MMOs shouldn't launch websites proclaiming their existence until they are 90% content complete and a month away from the external beta.) My non-dev mind finds it hard to consider that MMO development taking more than 3 years as being a good thing, since every three years sees a large difference between hardware, software and infrastructure from when the game was mapped out.

In order to cheapen / shorten the development cycle, you'd probably have to either buy out an existing MMO and revise the content as you see fit and / or rely on third party MMO middleware. These things are only just starting to happen in the genre.

[Venkman]

On dev time: depends on how much you dedicate to testing it and at what stage (constantly tune a good system at Alpha, toss the system for a new one to start over, just add content to a system pretty much done, etc)

I can't remember the name of it, but one MMO was developed and published pretty much entirely from one guy's house. That probably would have been a lot cheaper than the above examples, but also a lot more limited.

Sherwood Dungeon was stated as being developed by one guy. I don't know what server tech he used, but the game client is Shockwave.

[Trippy]

My rough, unsourceable understandings of MMO costs range from $14 million for CoH, $20 - $30 million for a number of other MMOs and up to $85 million for WoW (which Trippy can provide a link to disprove if he wants).

The cost to launch WoW in NA and South Korea was around ~$65 million. This includes development costs, all the server farms, network operations, billing and other CS infrastructure and so on. This is straight from a top ex-WoW team member who was initimately familiar with the budget. I'm estimating just the development costs to be roughly $50 million (it's probably less than that since setting up 3 separate server farms is not cheap) as you can tell from my post above comparing EQ2's development cost with WoW's.

[geldonyetich2]

And the money brings the talent. It doesn't need to always, but you're not getting a TR for $3mil no matter who you have on the credits roll.

It's true that money might bring talent but, sadly, money seems unable to create talent - no matter how much the suits wish this were the case.  If the history of MMORPGs has taught me anything, it's that investors can't tell the difference between a game artist or a game hack even to save their pocketbook.  (I could be fair and say that gamers are fickle, but where's the fun in that?)  That's why would-be developers tend to talk fast and hope nobody notices.

[Venkman]

The cost to launch WoW in NA and South Korea was around ~$65 million. This includes development costs, all the server farms, network operations, billing and other CS infrastructure and so on. This is straight from a top ex-WoW team member who was initimately familiar with the budget. I'm estimating just the development costs to be roughly $50 million (it's probably less than that since setting up 3 separate server farms is not cheap) as you can tell from my post above comparing EQ2's development cost with WoW's.

So before heading to bed, I decided to do a quick search to see where you've talked about the development cost. Found this one from Aug 2006 where you say pretty much the same thing.

But I felt then the same way I feel now: how can you decouple the cost for developing the game itself from whatever was invested for the technical backbone? Most companies aren't SOE where they can "flip a few switches" to roll in a new MMO to a robust billing and CSR infrastructure. So everyone has some amount of "all the server farms, network operations, billing and other CS infrastructure and so on." We could go further and start guesstimating spend on marketing and advertising, localization, the licensing program with other companies, the sorts of things, again, everyone has to do in some form.

At this level nobody just get's a pallet of cash to go build a game, so you can't just focus on the tools and talent that built the game when comparing "what it cost" different companies to make them.

Well, ok, you can, but I don't think that's as useful within this particular thread. Dash seems to want to know what it would cost a company to "make" a game, and "making" a game is, well, I already said it.

Edit: and yes, I know this deviates the same way I usually deviate from the one single datapoint you usually like to talk about. I do it because that is how things are.

[Margalis]

The talent pool is not stagnant as much as the people hiring the talent are.

Most devs developing MMORPGs today are also-rans who have a track-record of faiure. The funny thing about Blizzard devs is that many of them had no track record (for MMOs) at all. Yet that turned out swell.

A good developer is going to trump a bad MMO developer, every time. Maybe the one or two guys doing the fundamental server work need to have very relevant experience but the rest don't.

You don't need MMO experience to program a graphical client, an auction house, quests systems or anything like that. The distinction between an experienced MMO developer and a vanilla developer is vastly overstated.

[Dash]

Thanks for the replies.

I just find it difficult to believe that people would expect to make a MMO competative to WoW in quality for less money and in less time.  I'm not saying you need to emulate WoW in every respect but should you expect to make a game of the same quality and depth in basically the same mold (raid DIKU MMO) for 20 mil in 3 years when WoW took say 70 mil + and 5 years?

I assume companies are thinking "No, we're not" and are looking to make simply good games in the traditional development model (read: buggy, incomplete) and for a piece of the pie that Warcraft made so big.  I guess what I'm saying is budget and dev time set my expectations. 

[Murgos]

I just find it difficult to believe that people would expect to make a MMO competative to WoW in quality for less money and in less time.

They may expect to but recent history shows pretty conclusively that they can't.  No one is even within an order of magnitude of WoW's sub numbers.

[Venkman]

Here's one thing to keep in mind about WoW's numbers though: afaik they span a lot more territories than most other MMOs we talk about here hit. I think that's important because it shows that while any one company beating them worldwide is probably impossible for any of the games on the radar, that doesn't mean they can't best them in one territory, and be deemed a "winner" because they are only in that one territory.

It's kinda like some analysts (like this guy from Merrill Lynch) in 2006 talking about the console war. Some actually felt Xbox 360 could win the worldwide console war simply by winning North America alone, due to sheer number of units sold.

You don't need to beat WoW everywhere in order to be beating WoW at all. So it's not a total loss if you don't have more money and more time. imho anyway.

[SnakeCharmer]

I've always wondered (these days) why dev studios don't start with smaller (well done) game worlds, then expand consistently with new planets/areas/content.  Less focus on making 15 worlds/areas 'different' initially, and instead have 5 well done worlds.  Shorter dev time, build more solid game systems, get to live and continue development of content and other systems with incoming revenue.  You'd have to have flexible engines/tools to do it, but hell, that should be the focus to begin with.  You can somewhat pace advancement by tinkering with xp rewards as you go along.

Hardcore players will *always* outpace your content, and be screaming for more, so why worry about them?

[CharlieMopps]

They are all being a bit dumb... they are trying to create a $30,000,000 MMO that will pull in 8,000,000 customers. It's not going to happen. It's very very hard to have that broad of an appeal. Better to make dozens of lower development cost games (EVE for example) with dozens of different themes. Use the same engine, scripting tools, billing infrastructure for all. Then you can save on development costs and hit every corner of the market at once.

[Simond]

Thanks for the replies.

I just find it difficult to believe that people would expect to make a MMO competative to WoW in quality for less money and in less time. 

Part greedy/stupid, part MMO-dev snobbery: "Well, those RTS developers over at Irvine managed to throw together an EZ-mode mmog with crappy graphics for X tens of millions, surely we hardcore MMOG veterans can put together a better game with bleeding-edge graphics, traditional MMOG gameplay and more content for X/2 tens of millions. After all, we've done it before!  "

[Dash]

Yeah thats the other thing though.  I remember Brad saying he was proud to get 35 mil or whatever it was for Vanguard since that's a lot of cash for an MMO, yet still way behind WoW.  Then they decide to throw every system known to man in, plus new ones.  Housing, naval combat, flying mounts, diplomacy, leet graphic stuff, etc etc.  Let's forget management, could that possibly have worked? 

I think Vanguard could have had a good base, but no chance of competing with WoW because it was too buggy and clunky, whereas a LOTRO was smooth but lacked depth.  I think WoW is so smooth it's Console-like, i.e. it generally "just works", and thus is mainstreamed. 

[CharlieMopps]

No... about 10 years ago Brad made a game... through blind luck it was an awesome game.

He relied on the same luck with Vanguard. He found out the hard way, lightening doesn't strike twice.

[Ratman_tf]

When I win the lottery, I'm going to make the best MMOG ever.

[CharlieMopps]

When I win the lottery, I'm going to make the best MMOG ever.

Stop stealing my dreams.

[Venkman]

No... about 10 years ago Brad made a game... through blind luck it was an awesome game.

He relied on the same luck with Vanguard. He found out the hard way, lightening doesn't strike twice.

The genre evolved. He guessed wrong, on what people would want and on what was capable of being built in the time frame he had. And no, I don't believe another year would have made a difference. The focus was alway on more cool shinies rather than on making what was there already polished.

When people talk about "quality", that's what they're talking about. You need to stop inventing at Alpha and focus on polishing through to launch. At this point, you're only going to get credit for what works.

[shiznitz]

You are being too kind. Brad is clearly an inept manager who cannot separate what he likes in a game from what makes business sense. That doesn't mean he doesn't have good ideas, but, as many have written here over the years:

Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.

[DrewC]

Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.

QFT

[Moorgard]

Keep in mind that many of the big-name MMOs currently on the market have undergone major redevelopment during their production schedules, in some cases completely scrapping years of work that had already been done. Needless to say, this adds significantly to the final price tag for these games.

The MMO industry is still really young, and no matter how many cautionary speeches are given at conventions by those who have been through the process, it's still really easy for a company to misjudge the scope of what it's trying to do. This can result in the cutting or reworking of significant amounts of code, art, audio, and design. Not to mention the fact that gameplay and marketing assumptions made early in the development process might change during production, and someone high up in the company could come along and decide that the product needs to change its focus considerably.

That said, it's possible for a company to plan and execute an MMO without such hindrances; it's just often the exception rather than the rule, especially when big-name publishers are involved.