Not to defend them - but don't forget they have to recoup their initial
expenses. Does anyone know how long the game was in development? Also -
don't forget hardware costs. So yes - it's possible they have just (or not
quite yet) turned a profit.
As far as a small company - they are going to need some major venture
capital to pay developers salaries for several years without income - and
then buy lots of servers. Remember when UO and EQ came out? 40,000 ppl
sign up and expect flawless play and the companies are overwhelmed with
bandwidth needs.
On the other hand - perhaps part of the problem is a company like Sony
expecting Console-game type profit margins. That point will be moot in the
near future as consoles have Internet access - and they vast majority of
gamers will be console users (think about that!) I read on a webpage
somewhere the prediction that console Internet users will surpass PC
Internet users in the year 2002.
Slyde
----- Original Message -----
From: <kim@...>
To: <eqbards@onelist.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 4:04 PM
Subject: RE: [eqbards] Broken Song
> From: <kim@...>
>
> On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Kimes, Dean W. wrote:
> >
> > I'd buy this except that with the money they have rolling in it wouldn't
be
> > a big proposition to do the minimal testing/consideration they aren't
doing.
>
> I suspect most of the money is going back to Sony. At 100k
> customers at $10/mo, that's $1 million/mo. If all the profits
> were being reinvested in the game, they'd have 40+ employees
> working on it all with salaries around $100k/year, with
> per-employee expenses running around $100k/year. The numbers
> were about the same for UO.
>
> It's for this reason that I think the first truly successful
> persistent MMORPG will be made by a small company, not a giant
> like EA or Sony or Microsoft. So far, they've all been
> treating this genre like any other game - code it, sell it,
> rake in the dough, slap on a few bug fixes.
>
> --