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Distribution of Monthly Subscription Fee, Any Insights ?
craynlon
Member Posts: 255
Hi
im looking for an inside view, some informative links or even educated guesses on how the monthly fee we play for most mmos (wow, aoc,ddo...) are spend
most helpfull would be some statements, preferably from insiders or interviews that say
"well we spend 10% on servercost, 20% on customer support, 20% on developement and 50% on advertising"
of course the above is a simplified example as money is probably used also to refinance the original developement or just to make earnings for the company
if your bored, visit my blog at:
http://craylon.wordpress.com/ dealing with the look of mmos with the nvidia 3d vision glasses
Comments
For instance, if you were looking to run your own server for your own MMO, it'd cost you the same whether you had 100 or 1000 people probably (assuming your MMO can handle 1000 people per server).
We (and by we I mean the programmers and knowledgable staff, not the Management) at Rapid Reality used to run all our #s based around a user base of around 100k. We had a little over 40 employees up until the layoffs started.
I'd say Server Costs were roughly 5% of our overhead... if not less.
Customer support was about that, and handled solo by one or two people for the most part.
Development was the heavy overhead, as it's also known as "Staff Costs". It would be more like 70 or 80% of the money spent went to staff costs.
Advertising was easy and cheaper then the server costs. I'm not sure how much it cost though.
When calculating staff costs, you should realize the scope of it:
Salaries
Computers (must be upgraded every 2 years basically) are roughly $1500+ apiece
Studio to work in, electricity, water, gas...
Health plans.
Studio Gear (desks, chairs, cubes, couches, pictures, coffee/soda)
It's hard to give a really good answer because the company never really turned the profit (basically never released the game). If the game was successful I would've thought the team would move onto new things and left a few people to add to and improve...
Does paying back the Investors count? Cause that's high on the list of any Studio... I know my investor gives me evil looks every time I sit down for a meeting and say anything about "having problems" or "ran into a roadblock".
- CaesarsGhost
Lead Gameplay and Gameworld Designer for a yet unnamed MMO Title.
"When people tell me designing a game is easy, I try to get them to design a board game. Most people don't last 5 minutes, the rest rarely last more then a day. The final few realize it's neither fun nor easy."
I remember like... 2ish years ago.. maybe one and a half. when CGW did an article on this. Turns out the reason we are seeing a huge number of MMOs being made is they are a goldmine. most of your monthly fee is pure profit. At that time (2 years ago, but still based on a 15$ a month fee) a little over half of the monthly income was profit. that means LESS than half of your montly fee was paying for servers, saleries and the like.
So expect to see a lot more MMOs.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
I read an article on www.gamasutra.com that covered this topic in great detail a while back. Feeling lazy so I'll have to ask you to do the leg work on this one. Saying that, they are not expensive unless of course you go signing license agreements for state of the art software that drives your game. Want to make even more money? Make an asian grind game that is free to play with an item mall. The developers of Star Gate Worlds were talking about how the F2P business model is the way to go if you want to make the real money in the industry.
Fear not fanbois, we are not trolls, let's take off your tin foil hat and learn what VAPORWARE is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
"Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product."
ok and as a little laught.
i know how the cash from wow is spent.
1:server maintenance.
2:food for that brain dead monkey that makes the small patches and pvp balance.
3:booze and whores.
4:once every few moths devs say:ok guys time to work lets give these lifeless bastards a new big patch.
5:once every few moths devs say:ok time to make some extra cash.............
.put out an expansion.
__________________________________
Remember the good old days when devs made games just for the sake of making a great game?
They are forever gone now all they care is about how much they can earn from them, if they can't make millions they won't make that game.
REMEMBER THE OLD DAYS AND REGRET THEY HAVE PASSED.
my own speculation would be that customer support takes a good chunk out of the monthly fee
i know out of my personal experience that i make my 4-6 petitions a month (a lot more when the games is buggy). so if each petition takes a gm 10minutes of his time that makes 1h/month of gm time im using.
if that gm is payed 10$/month that would alreaddy be 2/3rd of my monthly subscription fee
i know the petition rate may be to high but wouldnt you agree that a minimum of 20min/player should be calculated as service time per month ?
if your bored, visit my blog at:
http://craylon.wordpress.com/ dealing with the look of mmos with the nvidia 3d vision glasses
Most GMs don't bother with more then 90% of the petitions/etc that come in. They're not worth it, or have already been documented, or are silly, or whatever.
Chances are that 5 or 6 of your 6 petitions a month are repeat petitions that are quickly clicked through... not 10 minutes, 10 seconds max.
They're good for drinking games though.
- CaesarsGhost
Lead Gameplay and Gameworld Designer for a yet unnamed MMO Title.
"When people tell me designing a game is easy, I try to get them to design a board game. Most people don't last 5 minutes, the rest rarely last more then a day. The final few realize it's neither fun nor easy."
I would say that the majority of the initial income would go to paying back your investors. Most of the development company would have come from venture capital and these guys want a quick return on their investment. The rest will go to server maintenance, employee costs, advertising etc. It's normally takes around 2 years before you see any profit.