cory.ok said:
Ail said:
By the way the highest cost of a successfull MMO isn't the servers or the people needed to write the continual expansions.
It's actually the bandwidth cost for the game and the customer support costs ( Blizzard has over 500 ppls working on customer support just for the US and you don't want to know about their bandwith costs....).
The line coming out of the server building isn't your typical DSL line, at the level of Blizzard it's custom state of the art shit ( because the nerds really go crazy when their servers go down even a few minutes, I know I was one of them, typically if the server crash, players crash the forums a few minutes later by checking for updates and then all the gaming sites related to wow start to be real slow as the wow players start all surfing at the same time while waiting for the game to go back up...)
As for comparing with Free to play MMORPGS, lets take the example of LOTR online
They claim to have increased their revenue by a factor of 3 when they went free to play. Except guess how they make money ?
The game is free to play but they charge 15$ a month for VIP pass to get access to some of the more interesting content in the game. So much for free to play..................
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bandwidth.. depending.. lol bandwidth is more expensive for a free mmos than for pay to play, you download everything from a free mmo, with most pay mmos you get disks with most of the content. once a player gets on the game bandwidth usage is significantly reduced.
as an example: blizzard spends like 50 million/year on upkeep (bandwidth, customer support, server maintenance) for wow. theyve been making about 100 million/month from wow. their main cost is not upkeep, but then again i dont know if they release new content much anymore so they might just be banking all the money as theyve put the developers on new projects.
oh and btw, the patch is not 15 gb lol, the patch is like 2.5 gb ish, the rest is an install from disk, which, together with the patch comes pretty close to 15gb of hd space total
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Bandwith costs aren't related to patches but to the running of the game itself ( constant connection by the players to the server)
PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !
PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !
