I guess not much of that has come to Europe because in France and Sweden I haven't seen that much advertising for the game. Certainly nothing on TV and billboards like WoW have/had. In US this is the case?
So I see the fanboiz have stopped buying into the EA bullshit. This thread 2 weeks ago would have blown out to 40 pages of tards defending it in an hour.
3 weeks before launch it would have gone to 80 hehe
Some project are just overpriced, that's the way it is. Somehow it attract/push people to double/triple their price/salaries, and then said project blow up pretty fast. They are tons of such example in any kind of industry. I remember the channel under Britain/France back then were some of my close relative worked and told me the story, and how greedy those people/companies were which end up with a project costing so many more time than it should, also those kind of projects are usually very badly done because nobody gives a shit except to grab their load and run away as fast as possible. Now, maybe, Swtor is not one of those projects, i have no inner insight about it, i'm just speaking generally, but it sure smell as one to me
I'm fairly sure they bring in a lot more income than all of EA's combined earnings. Just consider how much they get paid for promotional use of starwars stuff :P
I dont buy this claim that it was 300 mio $ development cost. Where would all that money go ? The 80 mio $ figure some people talk about sounds a lot more realistical.
Seriously, I don't know what this guy Brown was smoking, "over 12 M subscribers in the west" alone ?
With such an attitude you have NO clue about this industry and the state the subscription based part is in at the moment.
And then we wonder why there is an economic crisis out there, based on such "specialists". Even yesterday I found a broker who stated that SW TOR could go to 6 million players in a few months time.
These guys have NO grasp of any reality.
The more scary part is, that they sold their stake holders into this bullshit.
That means, if these insane expectations aren't met in the coming months, they gonna pull the plug.
They now gonna try sell this game in Asia, but seriously, there is no market there for this kind of easymode themepark game. If they though the western players blew through the content fast, they will be in for a shocker to see how fast the Asian blow through it, IF they even gonna bother.
In a couple months time, this game will be on lifesupport just like WAR. EA is absolutely notorious for this, when expectations aren't met, they will lay off most of the people in that studio and that will be the end of content updates for SW:TOR.
Does the production budget influence your enjoyment of a game? Wether they blew a thousand million or a hundred dollars it is what it is. Would you have had more fun in SWTOR, or any other game had they made it for zero cost?
No but production values do. I thought they where pretty poor tbh.
In a couple months time, this game will be on lifesupport just like WAR. EA is absolutely notorious for this, when expectations aren't met, they will lay off most of the people in that studio and that will be the end of content updates for SW:TOR.
Except that I would guess Lucas has made a flat rate deal + royalties. So they will have a pretty high minimum revenue requirement per month to even keep the game profitable month per month. All speculation of course, but see what happened to SWG in the end, plus EA has already completely closed down more MMOs than all other western publishers combined.
Voice acting isn't that expensive. I'd be surprised if even the most expensive (famous) voice actors were all that expensive.
It's not like voice actors, the best of the best with the most gigs and highest payed, even make that much money. They aren't celebrities or real actors.
Normal voice actors, high quality tv personas, and non-celebrity voice actors are extremely, extremely cheap.
I severely doubt very much money went into voice acting. If it did, it is because they were too stupid to realize hiring overpriced "famous" voice actors made no real difference than normal voice actors.
I once got a quote from an incredible voice actor who could do hundreds of unique voices with the higher quality. I asked him how much 1200 lines of dialogue would cost, and it would only cost $1200.
You could give me an indie budget and I could supply top quality voice acting for a large cast with every quest fully voiced in dialogue. It's extremely cheap.
You also have to realize...the MORE voice acting required, the CHEAPER it gets to hire them. 1200 lines of dialogue for $1200 is cheap compared to what he wanted for only 12 lines of dialogue.
It's amazing how easy it is to speak into a microphone doing something these professionals do on a daily basis. I think some people don't realize how easy voice acting is for professional voice actors. They know how to do it right, and speaking a line written with some explanation or acting skills isn't too difficult, especially if you're an indie developer who doesn't demand director perfection (repeating the same line 1000 times to get it 100% perfect according to whimsy director over-opinionated drivel called "taste" or "director talent").
Some project are just overpriced, that's the way it is. Somehow it attract/push people to double/triple their price/salaries, and then said project blow up pretty fast. They are tons of such example in any kind of industry. I remember the channel under Britain/France back then were some of my close relative worked and told me the story, and how greedy those people/companies were which end up with a project costing so many more time than it should, also those kind of projects are usually very badly done because nobody gives a shit except to grab their load and run away as fast as possible. Now, maybe, Swtor is not one of those projects, i have no inner insight about it, i'm just speaking generally, but it sure smell as one to me
A massive budget doesn't equate to fun. I think there's a certain expectation at the consumer level where a game should reflect the budget spent on it, and when you look at SWTOR I think most people go "am I missing something?". SWTOR could've easily had half the costs that it did and the final product would've been the same, unless licensing is really that bad. I hope the mediocrity didn't leak through to Mass Effect 3.
Now Playing: Mission Against Terror, Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Dark Souls, League of Legends, Minecraft, and the piano. =3
Voice Acting - For anyone who knows how much Hollywood actors charge for this you would guess that they would have spent ALOT on actor fees.
Development cost - Artists, coders, designers. Probably a total of 100 of these working for several years. This cost alot. However this is no different for any other triple A MMORPG.
Storywriting - Believe it or not, it costs some money to hire good story writers and SW:TOR class stories are pretty good.
Licensing cost - Lucas Art mainly but also for the Hero Engine and other stuff they licensed to make this game
Marketing - Good marketing cost alot of money.
Infrastructure cost - servers and bandwidth to host servers.
Add all these up and I am sure the total cost would exceed $150 million. Can't imagine it being lower than that.
Question is, are they in the black yet? Let's assume 2 million copies have been sold and of those 2 million they got average of 1.5 months of sub. fee of $15. With an average unit price of 60$ (collectors editions and what not).
2.000.000*60+2.000.000*15 = $150 million
I dont know how much of this raw income will go to distributers and what additional chunk Lucas Arts will take but for sure it is not pocket change. So imo they are still in the red.
EA only gets 50% of those 60 dollars. the rest is for distribution and retail and taxes....
It is more like: 35 dollars * 2 M = 70 M on sales and around 1.000.000 subs * 10 dollars= 10 M dollars on subs (minus subscription cards - retail profits - distribution).
So that's 80 M dollars on return until end of 2nd month (first month is free).
Now add 5 million dollars a MONTH to support a 200+ server parc, maintenance, programmer staff, next content staff, new VO actors, support desk staff and publicity&marketing.
And EA is looking at an investment for 2012 ongoing for around 260 M dollars of which only 80 M have been recuperated.
If they stay at 1.000.000 subs, they will arrive break even point around the start of 2013. If they reach 500K subs, they will need to reduce operating costs and they will not be profitable until early 2014.
Meh. This misinformed fuzzy numbers play again: as for the budget, shall we rate GW2's and TSW's budget in the 200+ million dollar range too, since those use extensive VO and cutscenes too (iirc GW2 use enough VO to fill up 60 feature lenght movies - sounds like quite a lot, right?) or do we only do that nonsense for MMO's we dislike? Or here's a thought, why not use common sense and rational, objective thinking and keep in mind that ALL AAA MMO's only had a dev budget of like 40-60 million dollars, unless they screwed up 2 years time and did a complete remake/redesign halfway development (Tabula Rasa)?
Man, the double standards and hypocrisy that I see people use in arguments regarding MMO's sometimes are a killer -_-
Now, when it comes to profit: Jimmyboy, I think you're missing 2 elements here: unlike for many other games and MMO's, EA IS the distributor here, so they get that share what usually would be lost to a third party distributor if a company didn't do it themselves. Also, you're forgetting the added profit of the CE (small sum) and the digital sales (large sum), which has a far larger profit/revenue ratio since the cost of a digitally sold game is only a fraction of a physical box sold. Also here, the digital distributor is EA, so they get that part of the digital revenues as well.
IIRC the digital sales was 40% of the total sales.
I would go with IP, one of themost or the most costly IP there is... Also I don't belive they could have spend more than couple millions or then millions on voice acting... Marketing is one other thing, they are still running full page adds here. Not sure what other licencing cost are...
I wonder if they can keep up the amount of storytelling voice overs in future content, or that they will add more terminals that now mainly give heroic missions.
Comments
No billboards... but Times Square, NYC isn't exactly cheap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wjf_lWxqyI
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
I need to take this advice more.
3 weeks before launch it would have gone to 80 hehe
Some project are just overpriced, that's the way it is. Somehow it attract/push people to double/triple their price/salaries, and then said project blow up pretty fast. They are tons of such example in any kind of industry. I remember the channel under Britain/France back then were some of my close relative worked and told me the story, and how greedy those people/companies were which end up with a project costing so many more time than it should, also those kind of projects are usually very badly done because nobody gives a shit except to grab their load and run away as fast as possible. Now, maybe, Swtor is not one of those projects, i have no inner insight about it, i'm just speaking generally, but it sure smell as one to me
You mean what did they do with Lucas Arts money.
I'm fairly sure they bring in a lot more income than all of EA's combined earnings. Just consider how much they get paid for promotional use of starwars stuff :P
I dont buy this claim that it was 300 mio $ development cost. Where would all that money go ? The 80 mio $ figure some people talk about sounds a lot more realistical.
All I can really say is: I told you so
Though it is kinda scary that I was exaggerating (god, how du you spell that word!?) from time to time
EALouse was right and fanboys are suddenly quiet...
I think I actually spent way more time reading and theorycrafting about MMOs than playing them
The more scary part is, that they sold their stake holders into this bullshit.
That means, if these insane expectations aren't met in the coming months, they gonna pull the plug.
They now gonna try sell this game in Asia, but seriously, there is no market there for this kind of easymode themepark game. If they though the western players blew through the content fast, they will be in for a shocker to see how fast the Asian blow through it, IF they even gonna bother.
In a couple months time, this game will be on lifesupport just like WAR. EA is absolutely notorious for this, when expectations aren't met, they will lay off most of the people in that studio and that will be the end of content updates for SW:TOR.
No but production values do. I thought they where pretty poor tbh.
Except that I would guess Lucas has made a flat rate deal + royalties. So they will have a pretty high minimum revenue requirement per month to even keep the game profitable month per month. All speculation of course, but see what happened to SWG in the end, plus EA has already completely closed down more MMOs than all other western publishers combined.
I can tell you what they didn't spend money on..
A decent game engine.
Voice acting isn't that expensive. I'd be surprised if even the most expensive (famous) voice actors were all that expensive.
It's not like voice actors, the best of the best with the most gigs and highest payed, even make that much money. They aren't celebrities or real actors.
Normal voice actors, high quality tv personas, and non-celebrity voice actors are extremely, extremely cheap.
I severely doubt very much money went into voice acting. If it did, it is because they were too stupid to realize hiring overpriced "famous" voice actors made no real difference than normal voice actors.
I once got a quote from an incredible voice actor who could do hundreds of unique voices with the higher quality. I asked him how much 1200 lines of dialogue would cost, and it would only cost $1200.
You could give me an indie budget and I could supply top quality voice acting for a large cast with every quest fully voiced in dialogue. It's extremely cheap.
You also have to realize...the MORE voice acting required, the CHEAPER it gets to hire them. 1200 lines of dialogue for $1200 is cheap compared to what he wanted for only 12 lines of dialogue.
It's amazing how easy it is to speak into a microphone doing something these professionals do on a daily basis. I think some people don't realize how easy voice acting is for professional voice actors. They know how to do it right, and speaking a line written with some explanation or acting skills isn't too difficult, especially if you're an indie developer who doesn't demand director perfection (repeating the same line 1000 times to get it 100% perfect according to whimsy director over-opinionated drivel called "taste" or "director talent").
This.
I mean...it's Star Wars for goodness sake, lol.
Ferraris, blow and escorts don't grow on trees.
Crack?
Having a huge team like they did is very expensive really...
A massive budget doesn't equate to fun. I think there's a certain expectation at the consumer level where a game should reflect the budget spent on it, and when you look at SWTOR I think most people go "am I missing something?". SWTOR could've easily had half the costs that it did and the final product would've been the same, unless licensing is really that bad. I hope the mediocrity didn't leak through to Mass Effect 3.
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EA only gets 50% of those 60 dollars. the rest is for distribution and retail and taxes....
It is more like: 35 dollars * 2 M = 70 M on sales and around 1.000.000 subs * 10 dollars= 10 M dollars on subs (minus subscription cards - retail profits - distribution).
So that's 80 M dollars on return until end of 2nd month (first month is free).
Now add 5 million dollars a MONTH to support a 200+ server parc, maintenance, programmer staff, next content staff, new VO actors, support desk staff and publicity&marketing.
And EA is looking at an investment for 2012 ongoing for around 260 M dollars of which only 80 M have been recuperated.
If they stay at 1.000.000 subs, they will arrive break even point around the start of 2013. If they reach 500K subs, they will need to reduce operating costs and they will not be profitable until early 2014.
Meh. This misinformed fuzzy numbers play again: as for the budget, shall we rate GW2's and TSW's budget in the 200+ million dollar range too, since those use extensive VO and cutscenes too (iirc GW2 use enough VO to fill up 60 feature lenght movies - sounds like quite a lot, right?) or do we only do that nonsense for MMO's we dislike? Or here's a thought, why not use common sense and rational, objective thinking and keep in mind that ALL AAA MMO's only had a dev budget of like 40-60 million dollars, unless they screwed up 2 years time and did a complete remake/redesign halfway development (Tabula Rasa)?
Man, the double standards and hypocrisy that I see people use in arguments regarding MMO's sometimes are a killer -_-Now, when it comes to profit: Jimmyboy, I think you're missing 2 elements here: unlike for many other games and MMO's, EA IS the distributor here, so they get that share what usually would be lost to a third party distributor if a company didn't do it themselves. Also, you're forgetting the added profit of the CE (small sum) and the digital sales (large sum), which has a far larger profit/revenue ratio since the cost of a digitally sold game is only a fraction of a physical box sold. Also here, the digital distributor is EA, so they get that part of the digital revenues as well.
IIRC the digital sales was 40% of the total sales.
Just sayin.blow and hookers
C G I
I would go with IP, one of themost or the most costly IP there is... Also I don't belive they could have spend more than couple millions or then millions on voice acting... Marketing is one other thing, they are still running full page adds here. Not sure what other licencing cost are...
After playing SWTOR for a solid 1.5 months and still have 1.5 monhts of sub left i just uninstalled the peice of shit.
The single player is nice with story telling.
But the PvP and the ability lag should have been fixed before release.
Where did BW spend their money on is a big riddle....iam curious what budget Bioware and Arenanet got to make their mmo.
As when you look at GW2 it destroys SWTOR in each department.
From character creation to story telling to Dynamic Events or even PvP...
I feel cheated once again..
I wonder if they can keep up the amount of storytelling voice overs in future content, or that they will add more terminals that now mainly give heroic missions.
'Ok so...voice acting and cut scenes are the key to providing a great multiplayer experience
...'
Global? thats zero advertising in asia man...
RIP Orc Choppa
I obviously meant in all released territories....
This forum has so many pedants lol