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CChaos on 16 October 2010
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Slimebeast said:
CChaos said:

All I'm reading when I go through that Blog post is sour grapes. Give me a friggin' break.

"It's going to do terrible because I'm an ex-employee! Everything is bad about my former employer because I was fired! Whine, piss, moan!"

Last I checked, the guys from Infinity Ward didn't much like Activision after the crap they pulled, but Activision is doing just fine. I mean, really, what's going to happen? Hate rays from the ex-employee are going to infect the current working body and make the game fail horribly?

First off, the bloody thing is Star Wars. It has a built in fan base that will snatch up anything that has Star Wars on the title. It's going to sell like hotcakes no matter what. The game could be in ASCII and have text that tells you what's happening, and it would still sell.

Second, it's Bioware. When, exactly, have they ever had a game that actually failed? Ever since Baldur's Gate, they've had games that people have enjoyed again and again, because they know how to make a very decent game. Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Knights of the Old Republic...can anyone honestly say that any of these games sucked? Their stuff basically transcends the console war. The stuff they make is good, simple as that.

And third, $300m budget. Yeeaah, you know how much WoW makes per month? True, 12 million subscribers, but off those 12 million, they make around $160 or $170 million a month. Not counting initial sales of the game, which I assume will be around $50, even if they managed to nab a million members at their likely $14.99 a month price point, that's still around $14.99 million a month. Honestly, it's NOT that big of an amount to a company that can afford to make it back. Couple this with the sheer amount of advertising and such about the game and they're going to get a pretty good initial cash out. The person in the blog just wants desperately for them to fail because, again, sour grapes.

Anyone who seriously compares Warhammer's little foray into MMOs (the game has always been niche) to The Old Republic (a central and extremely well known property) has a few bats in the belfry.

The well of bitterness runs deep. That's all this appears to be.

lol you comparing with WoW numbers?

Let's see, if it's true its development cost is in fact $300 mill.

Boxed copies sales revenue will be peanuts. Say 3-4 million copies and $15 revenue per copy (no, PC games never give $50 in revenue per copy or anything near that). That's only around $50 million.

If this game gets 1 million subcriptions as a stable number in the long run, then it will be considered a big success. Yet $6 per month per subscriber (remember that half of revenue will go to post-launch support) would only give $72 million per year in revenue that can be used to pay the development cost.

So it would need four years at that level of subscriptions - 1 million paying subscribers on average over 4 years - before it breaks even. It's not gonna happen.

 

My comparison to WoW numbers are simply because it's currently the big boy on the block. No other reason except that, really. A simple illustration of what an MMO is capable of in a best case scenario.

I'll give you that on the boxed numbers though. I was simply considering the full cost of the box price against alledged budget of the game, but you're right, there's a lot of other things that need to get paid off. Game development is a Medusa like structure and everyone needs a bit...

Considering it now though, I still agree with my original statements, that the person is probably some bitter jackass employee who just wants the game to fail out of sour grapes, I'll adjust my forecast: if EA was stupid enough to actually spend $300m on the game, then, yes, it'll definitely fail. However, considering that the most expensive games ever created right now manage to scrape the $100m mark, barely? I think they're exagerrating to make the companies sound a little more moronic than they actually are. EA isn't that good with their money, but they would have been out of business years ago if they made decisions THAT bad.

So, I'm still of the impression that this could do quite well...if they spent a reasonable amount on the budget. Otherwise, they deserve what they get.