Interplay - Starts Internal Development

[Moriendor]

I've stopped paying much attention to the numbers any more, but $300M doesn't sound like enough to finance a WoW-killer, and I can't imagine Zenimax aiming much lower. Once you factor in the cost of advertising, I wouldn't be surprised if there are already a few single player games that have hit to $300M mark.

Nah, $300M is a lot of dough . And there are no single player games that have come even close to that figure. Just a little while ago some (hopefully pretty knowledgable) guy from Midway said that Stranglehold (that John Woo action game) might possibly be "the most expensive next-generation game in development to date" when Midway announced investing $30 million in the title. From past developer/publisher comments, I believe that ~$10M - 15M is right about the average sum for a "regular" AAA (i.e. high production value) cross-platform single player title so even $30M is rather impressive.

Secondly, it is doubtful that Bethesda is aiming for a WoW killer. The myth of a "WoW killer" is just that in my opinion. A myth. I think we've had this discussion just very recently in another thread around here and I'm still convinced that any serious developer/studio (i.e. NOT delusional people like Garriott or Koster or some nutjob like that ) knows exactly that WoW is a phenomenon of its own. The goal of most WoW competitors is to grab a fair share of the ever growing (a growth that is resulting from WoW's success to a large extent, of course) online market but not necessarily to kick Blizzard from the top.
In fact, I believe that if anyone were to make a "WoW killer" it could potentially result in suicide rather than a killing . Remember how much Blizzard had to struggle to get the WoW onslaught under control in the beginning? They were forced to hire people like mad and to expand their server capabilities very rapidly. The whole thing seemed rather unstable for a while but then Blizzard was lucky to be able to adapt relatively quickly (within three to five months past launch) due to a monumental effort to adapt to the rapid growth of their customer base. But if the issues would have persisted, there would have been a pretty good chance of the whole thing imploding IMHO.

Anyway, $300M still seems pretty astronomical to me. The only way they could spend that kind of money would be if they built their own glass/marble palace with jacuzzis in every office and a six-football-fields large nuke shelter protected server farm in the basement with 24/7 liquid nitro cooling or some crazy crap like that but for building up a "normal" studio with ~60 to 80 people, a three to four year development cycle and then renting the servers from one of the well known MMO providers who host most MMOs (like AT&T) it seems way over the top. They must be planning on something really big like developing several MMOs in parallel. There's no way (IMHO) that this is just for the TES MMO. On the other hand, I don't remember if a time span was mentioned. If it's $300M over x number of years or something like that then it would seem much more realistic, of course. Or if the anticpated costs of a very major license/acquisition were already included in the total sum of $300M.