User blog:Equillibrium/The Math Behind Subscription Fee's.

This is for those concerned or upset about the recent move by Zenimax to opt for subscription fee's in their upcomming MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online. This is a bit of a collaboration as I am not always the sole user of this account. Hopefully this can give some insight as to what its like to make an MMO video game, and give everyone a simple math lesson.

Its broken down into 5 catagories. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to play a little bit fast and loose with the numbers here- these will be mostly back-of-the-envelope informal estimates, informed by common sense, research, and my location.
 * Development (making the game)
 * Marketing (making people aware of the game)
 * Infrastructure (base cost of server hardware and supporting infrastructure)
 * Infrastructure maintenance (recurring costs in electricity, parts replacement, rent, etc.)
 * Operating expense (cost of patches/updates/moderation)

I'm going to err on the side of being a small developer, and I'm going to bend the rules to get you your MMO. You should thus consider this to be a very conservative economic assessment (you will probably end up spending more) and a very liberal social assessment (you might end up in prison with some of my shortcuts.

I'm going to avoid assuming this is a superman developer or an exotic product design, and instead assume a conventional MMO such as Asheron's Call or WoW, and merely a highly-motivated developer (which is still a generous assumption)



 Project Scope Estimate and Assumptions- 

So, lets throw out some numbers to get started. These may or may not be reasonable, but they give us a place to begin with. Running time: 4 years. (people still play Asherons Call and Ultima, so not unreasonable)
 * Development time: 2 years. (this is about how long Minecraft has been in development, and about the total amount of time it took to create Project Volucris, an MMO based on Xenimus)
 * Development rate: Full-time work. (if you aren't working full time, you aren't working)

 Development:

So, let's consider the costs of development. I'm going to keep a running total for you.

People-

So, we all know that zero people will get no work done. Minecraft was done by 1 guy, WoW was done by hundreds. We expect to fall somewhere in that range. We support specialization, so we have people dedicated to one particular field, with maybe some overlap. We need at least one coder, and one artist. This, however, will ve an MMO, and so we need someone to babysit the servers (or in TESO's case, megaserver) so add a sysadmin.

Except, this doesn't cut it. You want some amount of redundancy in case somebody gets sick, so double all of those. Especially for programmers, you really need somebody to call you out on design decisions and motivate you. So, 6 people. More artists are better (content creation really scales linearly) So, 8 people. A third programmer wouldn't be a bad idea either, especially if you need to farm out grunt work while doing design. So, 9. And a tools programmer is going to be really important- but let's pretend that could be your second sysadmin.

So, 9 people. Let's assume they are motivated/deluded into doing this work for two years, and so are willing to work at minimum wage for the duration of the project. Living wage where I live is roughly $26k a year, these guys are also all-star developers, so lets give them a 7k bonus on top of that. (Incidentally, this is paying them peanuts compared to real industry work, and this is also assuming we are treating them as contractors, and so have avoided the full cost of things like health insurance, HR overhead, etc.)

9 peole x 25k per person per year x 2 years development = $450k

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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">People Cost: $450 000. 00

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">''Grand  Total: $450 000. 00''

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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;"> Software: 

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Operating Systems

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Let's save our money and use Linux for everything, and assume that we cant test on our home machines, or that the users can magically provide beta-testing for us. Or, even better, that we pirate copies of Windows or OSX, or scavenge license keys off discarded equipment.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">OS Cost: $0

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Art Tools

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Let's use the GIMP or Paint.net for our 2D art, and Blender/Wings/Scuptris for our 3D art. Or, we can get Adobe CS5 and 3DStudio Max 2011 with the PirateBay discount. The end user doesn't know/can't tell, and we can probably mask the origins of the assets used when asked about it.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Art tools Cost: $0

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Code Tools

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">We can legitimately use GCC/Visual Studio Express/Eclipse for free. If we really need to have the fancy ultimate/pro/whatever editions, back to PirateBay- just remember to strip your executables after.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Code tools Cost: $0

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">'''Software Cost: $0. 00'''

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">''Grand Total: $450 000. 00''

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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;"> Hardware: 

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Development Hardware

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Let's not assume that you need insane next-gen tech to catch a gamers eye, and let's not assume that you ask everyone to just bring their home machines to work everyday. So, a couple of minutes on TigerDirect shows several systems for under $500. I'll assume you spend a full grand anyway, which could be for storage, RAM, video card, or whatever helps that particular developer.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">$1k per box per developer x 9 box-developers = $9k.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Developer Hardware Cost: $9 000 00.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Server Hardware

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">IBM has some great hardware for many tens of thousands ( but really, hundreds of thousands) of dollars. Let's Google this, and use cheap, normal components. Lets again use the $500/box metric from above.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Second Life, an MMO by Linden Labs, has over 2000 servers. We'll use that as a general example. This is of course, not what TESO uses as Zenimax has developed their own hardware.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">2000 servers x $500 per server = $1 000 000.00

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Server Hardware Cost: $1 000 000. 00

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Hardware Cost: $1 009 000. 00

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">''Grand total: $1 459 000. 00''

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">This is all before you have marketing (zero to millions, depending), maintenance, which on the megaserver I can only see as being a staggering cost for any company, and anything else that comes up, like content, patches, and hacksheilds. That is all just development and hardware costs.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">MMO's are expensive to make. WoW might have lost subscribers, but Blizzard is in no present danger of losing their crown jewel. Its the subscription that will ultimatley keep the game afloat. It's understandable that people might be frustrated, but looking at the bigger picture, it does make sense. If a recurring payment of $15 monthly is something you don't want to do or can't do, then don't, no one will think less of you for it. It may change or stay the same, but only the developer/publisher of TESO really has the final say on that.

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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:10px;line-height:16px;word-wrap:break-word;">Equillibrium (talk) 21:20, September 2, 2013 (UTC)Equillibrium

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