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Ah, but that's the trick, isn't it? Too many of these games want to be WoW-killers, or at least aim way too high (1M+ subs -- like Vanguard). If you cost to break even at 100k-150k and make a nice profit at 200k, that should be easy for a quality TES MMO.
I´ve had a discussion with a developer some time ago. He explained the reason for the 100+ MMOs in development everywhere like this:
It´s hard to get international distribution for a SP game by a small developer. It´s not harder for an MMO by the same small developer, but the potential revenue is much higher. MMO middleware is getting more mature, the technology for generated content also gets better. Maintaining an existing MMO can be done with a small team, even with 2 or 3 people if you only want to maintain the status quo and fix a few bugs here and there.
If such a small MMO, which is scaled for let´s say 100k full price sales worldwide and 20k subscribers, hits big time and moves 500k / 100k subs, they will be printing money for years. And even if not - 10k * 10$ are 100k$ per month. That´s a nice income for a small studio, if they break even with retail sales.
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