the corporate hype/crap that says running servers costs lots of money
That's the dumbest thing I've read in a while. You think subscription fees just go to electricity bills? Running MMORPG servers costs a lot of money.
There's the sheer amount of bandwidth that is needed to keep the several thousand simultaneous connections going 24/7, the hardware and software required to keep the servers up plus upgrades to both to keep up with recent technology. An example would be the RamSan-400 upgrade to the EVE Online server; basically a $250,000 harddrive.
How about staff? 24/7 Customer Support? Who works on patches and/or expansions? Who tests them? Who implements them? MMORPGs need full time paid staff right down to forum mods.
With no subscription fees you have only the cost of the game and any expansions bringing in money to do all these things, which is why many people see them as failing.
If you are happy getting what you get for free, thats fine, but I, for one am happy to dish out a subscription fee every few months to pay for all these things that make my hobby more enjoyable.
You think subscription fees just go to electricity bills? Running MMORPG servers costs a lot of money.
Okay, reality check time. I'm currently playing on a RO private server that hosts 1200+ players on one server at all hours and the admin is paying about $400 a month.
Here are the server specs:
2 AMD Opteron 170 (Quad Core 2GHz Processors each with 1 MB cache)
4 GB RAM (ECC DDR 400)
10Mbps connection in a carrier class network; connections to AboveNet, SAVVIS, Verio
Now then, since we're talking about 1200 people logged all the time, I'd say she has about 5,000 registered users, if not more. If each of those users was paying $15 a month, she'd gross $75, 000 a month. That would be $74,600 a month profit!!! As is, she runs the server entirely off of donations.
Guild Wars needs even less networking infrastructure due to the Peer 2 Peer instancing that it does. They really only need servers for the "town hubs" in between instanced areas. The cost for those hubs is probably no more than the cost of Lobby servers for most conventional multiplayer games. I would go so far as to say that the cost for the town servers is probably on the same level as the lobbies for Diablo on Battlenet. And we all know that Diablo didn't charge a monthly fee.
If you want an mmorpg server that holds up to ...lets say, 8k players (which should be normal for an mmo) then its going to take much more then 400$ a month. add a few zero's behind it. and that is for a high quality server with close to no lag. but thats not the onlyt hing your paying for. your paying for more content and customer support as well.
The instancing turned me off also. This is what you call "milking" the customers before collapse, instead of improving the game the company begins degrading it in favor of cash and upsetting it's veteran players. It would be a different if they had offered the same from the beginning, but this is like pulling the rug out from under it's player base; although a small rug - it's only the first.
If you want an mmorpg server that holds up to ...lets say, 8k players (which should be normal for an mmo) then its going to take much more then 400$ a month.
I'm under the impression that you work in the business so I'm sure that you're right about that. The kickers is that most companies divide the game world into zones that occupy their own servers. That's regardless of whether or not the world appears seamless to the end user. Each of those severs can hold about 1,000 + players at once. So each "server" is actually a cluster of about 20 servers. That kind of rack space is pricey as hell. However, since you're buying the bandwidth and rackspace in bulk, you're actually paying less per player. Start up costs on these things is a bitch. But once you've been around for awhile, you make money hand over fist.
If this wasn't true, no one would even bother making MMORPGs since single player games would be more profitable.
but thats not the only thing your paying for. your paying for more content and customer support as well.
Content is usually delivered as an expansion. Thus, content developement is paid for via box sales. If you're talking about a patch team, then I don't have to tell you how little that actually costs a developement house. As for cosutmer support.... I can pay 1,000 Pakistanis 25 cents a day to handle costumer support. In fact, this is exactly how most devs deal with costumer support. Just call the customer support of your current MMO if you don't believe me.
Oh, and I almost forgot.... None of this has anything to do with Guild Wars network setup since most of the non-instanced areas only hold about 150 people at once before opening another server. So again, they're probably only spending as much as Blizzard spent on Battlenet.
1.) Guild Wars is not a MMORPG. Sorry but buy a freaking clue. GW is a Diablo 2 clone except the lobby is in game instead of out as it was with D2.
2.) The main folks playing GW are doing so for the PvP not for any RPG'ing questing or grinding desires. So I doubt the bulk of their fan base will care.
3.) GW was trying to capture the same audience that flocked to Diabllo 2 and BattleNet as Blizzard did but they failed for some reason.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Content is usually delivered as an expansion. Thus, content developement is paid for via box sales. If you're talking about a patch team, then I don't have to tell you how little that actually costs a developement house. As for cosutmer support.... I can pay 1,000 Pakistanis 25 cents a day to handle costumer support. In fact, this is exactly how most devs deal with costumer support. Just call the customer support of your current MMO if you don't believe me. thats not the case with most mmo companies. Blizard entertainment has both staff & customer support located in the US, and france for EU. SOE same story. Codemasters hires Alchemic dream, a company in Canada to do the customer support.also, if you take a look at the job openings, you see that the requirements are pretty high, those people really won't accept 25 cents a day. also, content developen via box sales isn't the only way. only a few western MMO's use that model. most MMO companies stay loyal to the patch updates.
Oh, and I almost forgot.... None of this has anything to do with Guild Wars network setup since most of the non-instanced areas only hold about 150 people at once before opening another server. So again, they're probably only spending as much as Blizzard spent on Battlenet.
Originally posted by Jorev I hope this move turns a lot of GW players off. I never was interested in GW because of it's instancing.
All I see in this thread is those with gripes against GW (for whatever stupid reasons they have) wishing and hoping it will fail.
GW isn't going to fail...HASN'T FAILED...and will last at least as long as most other MMOs do.
People think my comment about servers not costing that much to run (which they DON'T) was stupid, then look at the one I quoted above. Hoping for a game to fail because you aren't interested in it because it has instancing...most ignorant and stupid post I've read on here in a long time! (And that's saying something!!)
Plus, people don't only play this game for PvP...my guild has almost max members...and almost NONE of them PvP. The PvE in this game is some of THE BEST in the MMO genre, for story, challenge, graphics, etc. I rarely PvP as I generally think PvPers are tools. (Though, with GW, the skilled/professional PvPer is fairly abundant, as opposed to the other MMO's PvP where you're often overrun by trash-talking, kill-stealing, gank-festing, small-peepee-compensating tools)
I understand being able to pay for money / levels on a game that is very level and money based. But common, guild wars. There honestly are only a few skills you need. This simply makes it so that those that don't want to play through the game for a while to unlock skills can. It's not necisarily bad. Honestly most PvP people that are even somewhat serrious into PvP have every skill they need anyways .
Problem is those not-so-hardcore pvpers. Who are in the middle of collecting their skills. Now all of the sudden everyone can get skills through money.
Also, when you can buy skills with real life money, it means the game is not going to do well. Another reason is... why keep playing then? Many people will feel, after getting all the skills and few ranks, that they are "done" with the game. It might be of sheer of boredom or other thing...
I played guild wars but I stopped playing along time ago after I got bored of it (it was worth every penny though). I do not think this will have any affect on the game at all nor will the current players really care about it (I am not a supporter of item malls in games but this is kinda different). All older players have all the skills anyway and these packs will give ZERO advantage. Like others have said you can just PvP to unlock all the skills and items. I would think anyone whos played for more then a month or 2 has already unlocked everything they want/need anyway.
And about those server costs...
"Okay, reality check time. I'm currently playing on a RO private server that hosts 1200+ players on one server at all hours and the admin is paying about $400 a month.
Here are the server specs:
2 AMD Opteron 170 (Quad Core 2GHz Processors each with 1 MB cache)
4 GB RAM (ECC DDR 400)
10Mbps connection in a carrier class network; connections to AboveNet, SAVVIS, Verio"
Yes... now picture 100,000 people online at peek times everyday, paying customer service and programmers to fix bugs and add new content. They would also be using a server farm with much better/expensive servers. Those programmers arn't working for free to fix bugs and make expansions, and I would think they would be paying each of them like 100k a year. I would not be shocked if someone said they lost $200,000+ every month keeping guild wars running.
I dont remember how many copies guild wars/expansions sold but lets just say 2 million at 40$ canadian. Stores mark up twice the amount so NCsoft probably sold it to outlets for 20$ or less... packaging... all the free preorder packaging/stuff and things I would guess for every game sold they actually only make 10$ a game sold. So IMO 20 million from sales so far. Then they had to pay ArenaNet to acctually make the game (WoW cost 10+ million to make or something and i know xbox developers spend 5-10 million making thier games). Anyway I think they expected more people to be comming into the game and its just not happening and their 10-15 million they made is evaporating.
Why would ncsoft care what any of the customers think? You dont pay per month...the worsed that will happen is you dont buy the next expansion. Making a few more bucks out of soem people far outweighs the odds some will quit I suppose.
Originally posted by Bama1267 Why would ncsoft care what any of the customers think? You dont pay per month...the worsed that will happen is you dont buy the next expansion. Making a few more bucks out of soem people far outweighs the odds some will quit I suppose.
Just so you know NCsoft and Arenanet are actually losing money on GW, last time I checked out their financial stuff anyway... Guess that's what you get for making a f2p game.
Well, this does put out a bad image for Guild Wars but if it is going downhill in terms of sales and whatnot, you really cannot blame NCsoft for doing this. Would you rather GW just close down all together? I don't think so.. o.O;
Originally posted by mozis Originally posted by Tsayak Will they make money in the long run with people not buying new games they release because of this?
Exactly, sales for GWP was around 2 mill, sales for GWF was about 200k-300k, any guesses as to how many copies of GWN are going to be sold? At least 100k.... They couldn't do that badly..
And what really sucks is that every other MMO i've played has always been a little lower on the scale than GW imo. It's gonna be hard finding another game to play.
Originally posted by Tsayak And what really sucks is that every other MMO i've played has always been a little lower on the scale than GW imo. It's gonna be hard finding another game to play.
Yeah, I have seen my friend play it for hours... It looks very exiting to me, I don't see why sales were down so much for Factions... Probably because most of the GW players didn't expect to "Pay" for expansions.. o_O;
Originally posted by mozis Originally posted by Bama1267 Why would ncsoft care what any of the customers think? You dont pay per month...the worsed that will happen is you dont buy the next expansion. Making a few more bucks out of soem people far outweighs the odds some will quit I suppose.
Just so you know NCsoft and Arenanet are actually losing money on GW, last time I checked out their financial stuff anyway... Guess that's what you get for making a f2p game.
Yeah, I thought the game looked good graphically. But then I bought the game and quit in a week as did my fiance. Too much instancing for my liking...couldnt play it for free..wouldnt have thought about paying monthly.
Maybe things will work out for those that like it though.
Comments
There's the sheer amount of bandwidth that is needed to keep the several thousand simultaneous connections going 24/7, the hardware and software required to keep the servers up plus upgrades to both to keep up with recent technology. An example would be the RamSan-400 upgrade to the EVE Online server; basically a $250,000 harddrive.
How about staff? 24/7 Customer Support? Who works on patches and/or expansions? Who tests them? Who implements them? MMORPGs need full time paid staff right down to forum mods.
With no subscription fees you have only the cost of the game and any expansions bringing in money to do all these things, which is why many people see them as failing.
If you are happy getting what you get for free, thats fine, but I, for one am happy to dish out a subscription fee every few months to pay for all these things that make my hobby more enjoyable.
Reps wrote:
You think subscription fees just go to electricity bills? Running MMORPG servers costs a lot of money.
Okay, reality check time. I'm currently playing on a RO private server that hosts 1200+ players on one server at all hours and the admin is paying about $400 a month.
Here are the server specs:
2 AMD Opteron 170 (Quad Core 2GHz Processors each with 1 MB cache)
4 GB RAM (ECC DDR 400)
10Mbps connection in a carrier class network; connections to AboveNet, SAVVIS, Verio
Now then, since we're talking about 1200 people logged all the time, I'd say she has about 5,000 registered users, if not more. If each of those users was paying $15 a month, she'd gross $75, 000 a month. That would be $74,600 a month profit!!! As is, she runs the server entirely off of donations.
Guild Wars needs even less networking infrastructure due to the Peer 2 Peer instancing that it does. They really only need servers for the "town hubs" in between instanced areas. The cost for those hubs is probably no more than the cost of Lobby servers for most conventional multiplayer games. I would go so far as to say that the cost for the town servers is probably on the same level as the lobbies for Diablo on Battlenet. And we all know that Diablo didn't charge a monthly fee.
The instancing turned me off also. This is what you call "milking" the customers before collapse, instead of improving the game the company begins degrading it in favor of cash and upsetting it's veteran players. It would be a different if they had offered the same from the beginning, but this is like pulling the rug out from under it's player base; although a small rug - it's only the first.
When a game company makes a special offer where you can pay money to not play their game, it's generally a bad sign.
Gameloading wrote:
If you want an mmorpg server that holds up to ...lets say, 8k players (which should be normal for an mmo) then its going to take much more then 400$ a month.
I'm under the impression that you work in the business so I'm sure that you're right about that. The kickers is that most companies divide the game world into zones that occupy their own servers. That's regardless of whether or not the world appears seamless to the end user. Each of those severs can hold about 1,000 + players at once. So each "server" is actually a cluster of about 20 servers. That kind of rack space is pricey as hell. However, since you're buying the bandwidth and rackspace in bulk, you're actually paying less per player. Start up costs on these things is a bitch. But once you've been around for awhile, you make money hand over fist.
If this wasn't true, no one would even bother making MMORPGs since single player games would be more profitable.
but thats not the only thing your paying for. your paying for more content and customer support as well.
Content is usually delivered as an expansion. Thus, content developement is paid for via box sales. If you're talking about a patch team, then I don't have to tell you how little that actually costs a developement house. As for cosutmer support.... I can pay 1,000 Pakistanis 25 cents a day to handle costumer support. In fact, this is exactly how most devs deal with costumer support. Just call the customer support of your current MMO if you don't believe me.
Oh, and I almost forgot.... None of this has anything to do with Guild Wars network setup since most of the non-instanced areas only hold about 150 people at once before opening another server. So again, they're probably only spending as much as Blizzard spent on Battlenet.2.) The main folks playing GW are doing so for the PvP not for any RPG'ing questing or grinding desires. So I doubt the bulk of their fan base will care.
3.) GW was trying to capture the same audience that flocked to Diabllo 2 and BattleNet as Blizzard did but they failed for some reason.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
All I see in this thread is those with gripes against GW (for whatever stupid reasons they have) wishing and hoping it will fail.
GW isn't going to fail...HASN'T FAILED...and will last at least as long as most other MMOs do.
People think my comment about servers not costing that much to run (which they DON'T) was stupid, then look at the one I quoted above. Hoping for a game to fail because you aren't interested in it because it has instancing...most ignorant and stupid post I've read on here in a long time! (And that's saying something!!)
Plus, people don't only play this game for PvP...my guild has almost max members...and almost NONE of them PvP. The PvE in this game is some of THE BEST in the MMO genre, for story, challenge, graphics, etc. I rarely PvP as I generally think PvPers are tools. (Though, with GW, the skilled/professional PvPer is fairly abundant, as opposed to the other MMO's PvP where you're often overrun by trash-talking, kill-stealing, gank-festing, small-peepee-compensating tools)
I feel kinda bad for Guild Wars.
Even though I dont like the game very much, it is actually kinda good. Good game... but destroyed by bad business management.
I do hope the guys up there will pull this through.
I understand being able to pay for money / levels on a game that is very level and money based. But common, guild wars. There honestly are only a few skills you need. This simply makes it so that those that don't want to play through the game for a while to unlock skills can. It's not necisarily bad. Honestly most PvP people that are even somewhat serrious into PvP have every skill they need anyways
Problem is those not-so-hardcore pvpers. Who are in the middle of collecting their skills. Now all of the sudden everyone can get skills through money.
Also, when you can buy skills with real life money, it means the game is not going to do well. Another reason is... why keep playing then? Many people will feel, after getting all the skills and few ranks, that they are "done" with the game. It might be of sheer of boredom or other thing...
I played guild wars but I stopped playing along time ago after I got bored of it (it was worth every penny though). I do not think this will have any affect on the game at all nor will the current players really care about it (I am not a supporter of item malls in games but this is kinda different). All older players have all the skills anyway and these packs will give ZERO advantage. Like others have said you can just PvP to unlock all the skills and items. I would think anyone whos played for more then a month or 2 has already unlocked everything they want/need anyway.
And about those server costs...
"Okay, reality check time. I'm currently playing on a RO private server that hosts 1200+ players on one server at all hours and the admin is paying about $400 a month.
Here are the server specs:
2 AMD Opteron 170 (Quad Core 2GHz Processors each with 1 MB cache)
4 GB RAM (ECC DDR 400)
10Mbps connection in a carrier class network; connections to AboveNet, SAVVIS, Verio"
Yes... now picture 100,000 people online at peek times everyday, paying customer service and programmers to fix bugs and add new content. They would also be using a server farm with much better/expensive servers. Those programmers arn't working for free to fix bugs and make expansions, and I would think they would be paying each of them like 100k a year. I would not be shocked if someone said they lost $200,000+ every month keeping guild wars running.
I dont remember how many copies guild wars/expansions sold but lets just say 2 million at 40$ canadian. Stores mark up twice the amount so NCsoft probably sold it to outlets for 20$ or less... packaging... all the free preorder packaging/stuff and things I would guess for every game sold they actually only make 10$ a game sold. So IMO 20 million from sales so far. Then they had to pay ArenaNet to acctually make the game (WoW cost 10+ million to make or something and i know xbox developers spend 5-10 million making thier games). Anyway I think they expected more people to be comming into the game and its just not happening and their 10-15 million they made is evaporating.
Because of this i'm not getting nightfall.
Will they make money in the long run with people not buying new games they release because of this?
At least 100k.... They couldn't do that badly..
And what really sucks is that every other MMO i've played has always been a little lower on the scale than GW imo. It's gonna be hard finding another game to play.
Just so you know NCsoft and Arenanet are actually losing money on GW, last time I checked out their financial stuff anyway... Guess that's what you get for making a f2p game.
Yeah, I thought the game looked good graphically. But then I bought the game and quit in a week as did my fiance. Too much instancing for my liking...couldnt play it for free..wouldnt have thought about paying monthly.
Maybe things will work out for those that like it though.