Aventurine have stated in 2 separate interviews their development cost for DF was under 10mill euros. there's a thread on the front page that argues for 18K subs for DF now. at a 50% retention rate (quite high), that's 36K units sold. at a 30% retenton rate, which is probably more realistic for DF, that's 60K units sold.
60K units @ 42 € == ~2.5mill €, so a 1/4 to a 1/3rd of their devel cost upfront already. 18K subs @ 12 €/month = €216K/month
i'd think they would be pretty happy with those numbers. they still haven't spent anything on regular advertising, so they must be pretty happy.
if the US server sells out as fast as EU did then they will have recouped 1/2 - 2/3rds of their development cost.
what about taxes (was around 25% for companies in 2008), bills, vages and server rent?
or is that free in DF happyland?
salaries, server farm rental, offices, insurance, utilities... you know, the normal stuff associated with running an online game and/or business. plus interest on loans (how long ago were those taken out?)
but when it all boils down to it -- no one is playing. why do people think that EVERYONE is waiting for an NA server to open? seriously, where's all the non-NA subs? where's all the people who should be WANTING to play on the EU server?
how much % of monthly subs IS going for overhead? if they have LOANS... what kind of interest are you talking? i mean, if someone wants to make it sound like darkfall is generating tons of cash... let's look at it realistically.
javac, what clan/alliance are you part of? i'm just curious...
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
i dont think aion has anything to do with the target audience of DarkFall playerbase LOL
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE-------------------------------------------------- $OE - eternal enemy of online gaming -We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
I believe, what Phlecher tried to say, was: Vanguard was one of the last attempts to build a full MMO world. I myself played Lotro and Vanguard after WoW. While I felt a Deja Vu when playing Lotro (WoW with Frodo), it is a big tragedy what happened to Vanguard - this game could have (some say it even does now) blown Lotro, EQ2 and some more MMOs out of the water. Maybe to some degree VG is/was for the PvE crowd, what Darkfall is for PvP.^^
Its kinda sad really.... Vanguard has superior PvP when compared to Darkfall.
Vanguard is a pretty good game but I still doubt if it had a smooth release if it would ever hold more than 250,000 players since casuals make up the vast majority of gamers and at the start Vanguard was going to be as tedious as EQ1.. Heck after 2 months of solid playtime I only had a level 19 Paladin / 21 Weapon Smith character.
vanguards release was PITIFULL, but I stuck w/ it, and it got a lot better. I really really liked vg, but quit, as i so often do when i got bored of end game grind. It seems every mmo I play has some kind of lame end game grind. I hope aion is a lil better!
Loke, Do you realize that an MMORPG with 100,000 subscribers is considered a reletive success..? That very few mmorpg's over the last 12 years have had sustained subs in that realm?
World of Warcraft is the only anomaly. You don't need 400k people in a MMORPG to have a success or for to survive. All of these latest releases have been chasing the wow business model... don't you understand this? That is why they are falling way short of expectations. Normal MMORPG's start off with 200k strong, taper off to about 125k and stay there for 4 or 5 years, then dwindle to about 40k-50k for the next 5 years.
First of all, I don't play Wow, my favorite PvP game is Guildwars.
But lets not get personal here.
Anyways, a 100K players for a game that costs so much to develop is really not a success. Most MMOs do need a lot of players just to keep running, the companies do need to get in cash to pay for bandwidth, servers, development costs, salarys and more. The fact is that MMOs costs a lot more than any other game to make.
DF did not costs as much to make as say WAR (I seems to heard the number 20M dollars for DF but that was here so it can be totally off) but they still need enough players to keep it running and updated.
Large companys like SOE can keep a game with a smaller population up and running because they have enough cash and share many resources among their different games but small companies can't afford that.
As for Wow being the most succesful game, that is not truth either, Perfect world have 10 times the players and make more money than Blizzard, but since almost all of them is in asia you don't hear so much about it.
WAR do need 250K players to not lose any money. It costed more than DF to make do even if half the money from the subs go into keeping the game running DF still will need a lot less subs. But I still don't think it is actually less than a 100K.
DF have less than 20K, and so does everyone here agree, what I sad is that no MMO can be runned for that money without loosing a lot of money every month. This have nothing to do with battlenet, carebears or anything else, it is just simple economy. They cant continue losing money all the time, if they don't get those 100K players or whatever their number is to stop losing players the game will be gone.
Yeah DFs number (to go even) can actually also be 75K or 125K but it must be somewhere around that, it costs a lot of money to run a game and a company like AVI cant do it just for fun while losing money.
And do I have to point out that you sad that "normal" MMOs start of with 200K players? If DF did that the game would be doing rather good. It do however have less than a tenth of that.
Lengthy, I'm sorry! I don't plan on posting for a while :
The sustainable subs rate is entirely based on the business model in which the Developer designed the game around. What server technology is used, developmental cost, Country, distributor... are all factors that determine how sustainable a MMO is. Based simply on the red line.
Most of us understand this^^, but many younger players are unable to decern cheap free2play / budget type games, from real games (:ie classics) -or- Unable to decern the bargain bin, fast assembled marketer's dream. The younger players just don't see the driving force behind these games and are suckered in due to excessive marketing. Some of these games are so lucrative, they are now being made bye Gold Sellers. No wonder these type of budget games are being released like bunny rabbits. These WoW clones have become a plague, they have saturated the market with pisspoor quality developers.
Full features MMORPG are designed around a higher calling. They creating an entire World. One wracked with so many detailed ideas and story telling, you become part of a fantisful role playingling experience. That playing everyday, is driven by the desire to take an idea (Wealthy, obsure, blacksmith, jerk, leader, feared, King, assasin, map maker, adventurer, carpenter,,etc)and see how far or where that idea leads. Within the contex of being a tangable entity or actual Force within the world, explicitly...!
Thats why these MMO's in general are gaining in popularity. Most's first timers are slowly being addicted to that emotional tug we can have on our characters...! Not neccesasrily graphically (that too!), but also connecting with his own player's history and personal acheivements. No matter how small.
To the many people, that^^ is what World of Warcraft touch on so dearly. The ability to roleplay, albeit at a low level, as WoW's contraints were too limited. As, arcade'esque-style mmo's just aren't worth investing any time on. In semi-shallow games like WoW, the emotional reward is/was just toooo constricted or funneled.
The difference between the massive influx of WoW'ites and the Veteran gamer is time, except the elder player has had history on their side. Having been able to test every game over the last 13 years, as they were released. Veteran's players are armed with incredible knowledge and has more a fundlemental grasp on things.
We can see things as they are... very few mmorpg's are good and some of the best (EQ, SWG, etc) have been so modified (by their developers changing Game & Business Model, to chase the 11 million fish swimming away from World of Warcraft) that today even Everquest has been ruined and people today will never-ever get to expeience what a near-perfect game was.
Everquest is just a shadow of it's formal self and I am ashamed of SOE for loosing it's roots. As almost everything has become trivialized. (travel, money, death, levels, etc) ..!!
None of these pinzi-panzy games that have came out in the last 6 years are even challenging.
Not some gimmick mmo, that uses CGI trailer's to tell a story, but an actuall story told by your travels within content driven world. These games cost millions to make, years to develop and depending on server structure, enormous amounts of money to operate and maintain. (ie: server farm).
So....., when talking about Darkfall or Vanguard, all of these things have to be taken into perspective and discussed BEFORE you can realistically discuss arbitrarily points, components, features, mechanics, or business model of these games. That is where Darkfall fans or fanbois really loose all credability when discussing this (or any) game"s success, it's just to unbearable to hear auch vasts amounts of ignorant banter. Why is it so hard to stop and just listen?
War & AoC, Aion were last stab attempts at the King's throne and the industry is now learning what the veteran's have been screaming since WoW's beta.... Blizzard mastered the "marketing" aspect of the industry..!!
Along with knowing how criticle a release is and offered an extremely olished and well oiled release ..!
(IE: AoC, War, or even AIon), All will be shutting down within a few years. Their shelve life was designed with a limited life span, as they were aimed at dollars, not players.
Newbies typically loose all contex in which Darkfall was Developed, what they attempted vs what they delivered really does matter from a quality standpoint. Understand, the business model Aventurine/Razorwax decided upon, was 7 years ago. Aventurine is now operating under a failed business model and the game is simply a collasal flop. The reason is duofold, but the same. They changed their business model too many times and the game suffered horibly because of it. At the last moment they went FPS heavy (easy and cheap to do) vs RPG depth (encompassing, deep and expensive).
It's hard to do it right! Vanguard was the last attempt to try and do it right, letting the love of the game and the creativity lead you.
Anyways, things like seemless world mmorpg's REQUIRE greater subscription numbers, because designing and hosting those types of game worlds(shards) REQUIRES top-teir server clusters & tech, etc. One game server could cost as much as $150k, where as a single -World of Kung Fu- server would be $11k.
It's all about return on investment (ROI). That is why the bigger, more elaborate game's business model's are based on YEARS of player activity (ie: years of continuous monthly revenues), where-as these arcade'esque, Free2play / Budget MMOs don't care about how long a person plays their game, just if you leave a few buck behind.
Because, even $5 bucks from 0.0001% of the 11 million World of Warcraft refugees, will make these fake MMO's developer's wealthy.....!!!
Quick explanation:
Most newer Players don't know or understand these things, though it's probably because they had never thought about them. Or possibly because they just don't think of the business aspect of Producing such games. They just see onslugh of advertising and hype meters... and get caught up in the marketing and game trailers, not the actual gameplay. Look at all the games that have come out in the last 2 years. It completly dwarfs all the games released in the previous 10 years.
Some of you people think that is the norm, it's not. They are just chasing the 11 million wow refugees that are in limbo and ignorantly tossing $$ around trying to find their next game. These Developers are banking on the fact you'll try their game and spend a few months there. Some are even offering games that allow you to advance really quick (AoC) and reach the end-game within months. Making these newbies feel like the've accomplished something with their character and are somewhat special. Thus, they continue playing feeling like more is to come and unable to put the character down, because "theve come so far already..."
It's phsycological and humorious to see. But when you look back, the gameplay was ho-hum, yet your advencment was increasingly fun, but also trivial. Leaving you empty and seeking yet another MMORPG with the same challenges as WoW that got you so hooked in the first place.
Again, newer MMORPG players (mostly from WoW) got hooked and are not showing restraint, are just fueling all these low budget and crappy games. <--- That is what I was talking about.
jeesh... why is this so long..?
Now... Real world mmorpg's exist to provide and create a playable fantasy novel, etc. These Classic's histories and influences are important. Older games like EQ had certain technical limitations, but seeing a developer's design philosophies change over time, gives you deep perspective of the industry.
So, understand that MMO's that use zones, instancing, battlegrounds, cheap server technology/hardware are very cheap and easy to make (You can make these types of mmorpg's in as little as 8 months). Most Asain free2play -or- WoW "knock-offs" utilize these cheap technologies. Along with other tried and true cheap, cost saving measures, hidden in plain site..!
Therefore, these pseudo MMOs developmental & Operating costs are dirt cheap..>! So they can easily survive or even flourish on just 2,000 ~ 20,000 plus subs/month.
World of Kung Fu, Jade Dynasty, Perfect World, etc... are all examples of fluff over substance with TONS of marketing to get people to play their fake mmo... these games are based on people being lured into their games by awsome graphics and colorful animations and "eww" and "ahhs". But deliver very little actual gameplay and always hide that fact behind PvP or some "special feature" that keep you busy looking in the wrong direction.
These are basically ARCADE GAMES, not traditional character building games, that keep you enthralled for years and years. Budget games just more about Pac Man than Oblivion.
Darkfall... has never had more than 8k subs/month..! Aventurine has had a very high turn-over rate since releasing the game 4 months ago. I highly doubt that Darkfall total sales was more than 18,000 downloads (Virtual boxes of the game). We use 18k to humor the fanbois, but this game is just not that succesfull and there is no indication of anything greater than 15k plus.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
Comments
what about taxes (was around 25% for companies in 2008), bills, vages and server rent?
or is that free in DF happyland?
salaries, server farm rental, offices, insurance, utilities... you know, the normal stuff associated with running an online game and/or business. plus interest on loans (how long ago were those taken out?)
but when it all boils down to it -- no one is playing. why do people think that EVERYONE is waiting for an NA server to open? seriously, where's all the non-NA subs? where's all the people who should be WANTING to play on the EU server?
how much % of monthly subs IS going for overhead? if they have LOANS... what kind of interest are you talking? i mean, if someone wants to make it sound like darkfall is generating tons of cash... let's look at it realistically.
javac, what clan/alliance are you part of? i'm just curious...
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
18k with Aion coming out lol thats bad.
i dont think aion has anything to do with the target audience of DarkFall playerbase LOL
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
Its kinda sad really.... Vanguard has superior PvP when compared to Darkfall.
Vanguard is a pretty good game but I still doubt if it had a smooth release if it would ever hold more than 250,000 players since casuals make up the vast majority of gamers and at the start Vanguard was going to be as tedious as EQ1.. Heck after 2 months of solid playtime I only had a level 19 Paladin / 21 Weapon Smith character.
vanguards release was PITIFULL, but I stuck w/ it, and it got a lot better. I really really liked vg, but quit, as i so often do when i got bored of end game grind. It seems every mmo I play has some kind of lame end game grind. I hope aion is a lil better!
First of all, I don't play Wow, my favorite PvP game is Guildwars.
But lets not get personal here.
Anyways, a 100K players for a game that costs so much to develop is really not a success. Most MMOs do need a lot of players just to keep running, the companies do need to get in cash to pay for bandwidth, servers, development costs, salarys and more. The fact is that MMOs costs a lot more than any other game to make.
DF did not costs as much to make as say WAR (I seems to heard the number 20M dollars for DF but that was here so it can be totally off) but they still need enough players to keep it running and updated.
Large companys like SOE can keep a game with a smaller population up and running because they have enough cash and share many resources among their different games but small companies can't afford that.
As for Wow being the most succesful game, that is not truth either, Perfect world have 10 times the players and make more money than Blizzard, but since almost all of them is in asia you don't hear so much about it.
WAR do need 250K players to not lose any money. It costed more than DF to make do even if half the money from the subs go into keeping the game running DF still will need a lot less subs. But I still don't think it is actually less than a 100K.
DF have less than 20K, and so does everyone here agree, what I sad is that no MMO can be runned for that money without loosing a lot of money every month. This have nothing to do with battlenet, carebears or anything else, it is just simple economy. They cant continue losing money all the time, if they don't get those 100K players or whatever their number is to stop losing players the game will be gone.
Yeah DFs number (to go even) can actually also be 75K or 125K but it must be somewhere around that, it costs a lot of money to run a game and a company like AVI cant do it just for fun while losing money.
And do I have to point out that you sad that "normal" MMOs start of with 200K players? If DF did that the game would be doing rather good. It do however have less than a tenth of that.
Lengthy, I'm sorry! I don't plan on posting for a while :
The sustainable subs rate is entirely based on the business model in which the Developer designed the game around. What server technology is used, developmental cost, Country, distributor... are all factors that determine how sustainable a MMO is. Based simply on the red line.
Most of us understand this^^, but many younger players are unable to decern cheap free2play / budget type games, from real games (:ie classics) -or- Unable to decern the bargain bin, fast assembled marketer's dream. The younger players just don't see the driving force behind these games and are suckered in due to excessive marketing. Some of these games are so lucrative, they are now being made bye Gold Sellers. No wonder these type of budget games are being released like bunny rabbits. These WoW clones have become a plague, they have saturated the market with pisspoor quality developers.
Full features MMORPG are designed around a higher calling. They creating an entire World. One wracked with so many detailed ideas and story telling, you become part of a fantisful role playingling experience. That playing everyday, is driven by the desire to take an idea (Wealthy, obsure, blacksmith, jerk, leader, feared, King, assasin, map maker, adventurer, carpenter,,etc) and see how far or where that idea leads. Within the contex of being a tangable entity or actual Force within the world, explicitly...!
Thats why these MMO's in general are gaining in popularity. Most's first timers are slowly being addicted to that emotional tug we can have on our characters...! Not neccesasrily graphically (that too!), but also connecting with his own player's history and personal acheivements. No matter how small.
To the many people, that^^ is what World of Warcraft touch on so dearly. The ability to roleplay, albeit at a low level, as WoW's contraints were too limited. As, arcade'esque-style mmo's just aren't worth investing any time on. In semi-shallow games like WoW, the emotional reward is/was just toooo constricted or funneled.
The difference between the massive influx of WoW'ites and the Veteran gamer is time, except the elder player has had history on their side. Having been able to test every game over the last 13 years, as they were released. Veteran's players are armed with incredible knowledge and has more a fundlemental grasp on things.
We can see things as they are... very few mmorpg's are good and some of the best (EQ, SWG, etc) have been so modified (by their developers changing Game & Business Model, to chase the 11 million fish swimming away from World of Warcraft) that today even Everquest has been ruined and people today will never-ever get to expeience what a near-perfect game was.
Everquest is just a shadow of it's formal self and I am ashamed of SOE for loosing it's roots. As almost everything has become trivialized. (travel, money, death, levels, etc) ..!!
None of these pinzi-panzy games that have came out in the last 6 years are even challenging.
Not some gimmick mmo, that uses CGI trailer's to tell a story, but an actuall story told by your travels within content driven world. These games cost millions to make, years to develop and depending on server structure, enormous amounts of money to operate and maintain. (ie: server farm).
So....., when talking about Darkfall or Vanguard, all of these things have to be taken into perspective and discussed BEFORE you can realistically discuss arbitrarily points, components, features, mechanics, or business model of these games. That is where Darkfall fans or fanbois really loose all credability when discussing this (or any) game"s success, it's just to unbearable to hear auch vasts amounts of ignorant banter. Why is it so hard to stop and just listen?
War & AoC, Aion were last stab attempts at the King's throne and the industry is now learning what the veteran's have been screaming since WoW's beta.... Blizzard mastered the "marketing" aspect of the industry..!!
Along with knowing how criticle a release is and offered an extremely olished and well oiled release ..!
(IE: AoC, War, or even AIon), All will be shutting down within a few years. Their shelve life was designed with a limited life span, as they were aimed at dollars, not players.
Newbies typically loose all contex in which Darkfall was Developed, what they attempted vs what they delivered really does matter from a quality standpoint. Understand, the business model Aventurine/Razorwax decided upon, was 7 years ago. Aventurine is now operating under a failed business model and the game is simply a collasal flop. The reason is duofold, but the same. They changed their business model too many times and the game suffered horibly because of it. At the last moment they went FPS heavy (easy and cheap to do) vs RPG depth (encompassing, deep and expensive).
It's hard to do it right! Vanguard was the last attempt to try and do it right, letting the love of the game and the creativity lead you.
Anyways, things like seemless world mmorpg's REQUIRE greater subscription numbers, because designing and hosting those types of game worlds(shards) REQUIRES top-teir server clusters & tech, etc. One game server could cost as much as $150k, where as a single -World of Kung Fu- server would be $11k.
It's all about return on investment (ROI). That is why the bigger, more elaborate game's business model's are based on YEARS of player activity (ie: years of continuous monthly revenues), where-as these arcade'esque, Free2play / Budget MMOs don't care about how long a person plays their game, just if you leave a few buck behind.
Because, even $5 bucks from 0.0001% of the 11 million World of Warcraft refugees, will make these fake MMO's developer's wealthy.....!!!
Quick explanation:
Most newer Players don't know or understand these things, though it's probably because they had never thought about them. Or possibly because they just don't think of the business aspect of Producing such games. They just see onslugh of advertising and hype meters... and get caught up in the marketing and game trailers, not the actual gameplay. Look at all the games that have come out in the last 2 years. It completly dwarfs all the games released in the previous 10 years.
Some of you people think that is the norm, it's not. They are just chasing the 11 million wow refugees that are in limbo and ignorantly tossing $$ around trying to find their next game. These Developers are banking on the fact you'll try their game and spend a few months there. Some are even offering games that allow you to advance really quick (AoC) and reach the end-game within months. Making these newbies feel like the've accomplished something with their character and are somewhat special. Thus, they continue playing feeling like more is to come and unable to put the character down, because "theve come so far already..."
It's phsycological and humorious to see. But when you look back, the gameplay was ho-hum, yet your advencment was increasingly fun, but also trivial. Leaving you empty and seeking yet another MMORPG with the same challenges as WoW that got you so hooked in the first place.
Again, newer MMORPG players (mostly from WoW) got hooked and are not showing restraint, are just fueling all these low budget and crappy games. <--- That is what I was talking about.
jeesh... why is this so long..?
Now... Real world mmorpg's exist to provide and create a playable fantasy novel, etc. These Classic's histories and influences are important. Older games like EQ had certain technical limitations, but seeing a developer's design philosophies change over time, gives you deep perspective of the industry.
So, understand that MMO's that use zones, instancing, battlegrounds, cheap server technology/hardware are very cheap and easy to make (You can make these types of mmorpg's in as little as 8 months). Most Asain free2play -or- WoW "knock-offs" utilize these cheap technologies. Along with other tried and true cheap, cost saving measures, hidden in plain site..!
Therefore, these pseudo MMOs developmental & Operating costs are dirt cheap..>! So they can easily survive or even flourish on just 2,000 ~ 20,000 plus subs/month.
World of Kung Fu, Jade Dynasty, Perfect World, etc... are all examples of fluff over substance with TONS of marketing to get people to play their fake mmo... these games are based on people being lured into their games by awsome graphics and colorful animations and "eww" and "ahhs". But deliver very little actual gameplay and always hide that fact behind PvP or some "special feature" that keep you busy looking in the wrong direction.
These are basically ARCADE GAMES, not traditional character building games, that keep you enthralled for years and years. Budget games just more about Pac Man than Oblivion.
Darkfall... has never had more than 8k subs/month..! Aventurine has had a very high turn-over rate since releasing the game 4 months ago. I highly doubt that Darkfall total sales was more than 18,000 downloads (Virtual boxes of the game). We use 18k to humor the fanbois, but this game is just not that succesfull and there is no indication of anything greater than 15k plus.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon