EverQuest "Next"

[strosz]

Damn. There goes all hope.

[wasp23]

looks like im playing p99 for the rest of my life.

[Atmas]

Originally Posted by gloine36 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

MMO's are economically feasible. The problem is corporations don't view games like players do. The suits want to invest money into something that returns that money for many, many years as a veritible money stream. An awesome MMO will possibly last for 10 years. We don't know yet because while EQ is now 13 years old how much real profit is it producing? WoW is almost 8 and I think we can assume it will still product profit for several more years.
The suits see WoW as what they want in an MMO. What they don't get is that it came from a company that built games for several years and had an existing fanbase that was international in scope. Wow may be a game that never gets replicated. That doesn't mean games can't be made that are just as good or better and make good money. There are games out there that are smaller and making money for their owners. The problem is that the money men want WoW every time.
The business world is insane right now. It used to be if you invested x dollars and made 2x that back in a few years you did good. Now they want multiple X dollars back or the investment is a failure? I think the best games are going to come from smaller teams of builders who create their worlds before they get the big money. Once they have a good product ready for the final polishing the money men can step in and spend the big $$ needed to market it, put together the CS teams, and do the expensive stuff.
Good grief, the technology today to build a good game is there and it's not crazy expensive. You don't need cutting edge graphics. You need content and design. Seriously, look at the WoW graphics. Then look at the EQ2 graphics back in 04. They were so awesome few people had the power to run the PC to play them at their best setting. That's what killed EQ2. The game was good. It was just that too many people didn't have enough PC to play the game at any acceptable mode while they could play WoW at good or high settings.
Let's be honest. We could take EQ's graphics and classes, mix it with any game world we want, and somebody could build a new world for a fraction of what it would cost to build a EQ Next or some really heavy duty WoW killer. If the content is good and the game playable and fun, it'll make money.

Unfortunately the initial cost of games, particularly MMOs has skyrocketed because of the player expectation level. While I understand what you are saying about the content of the game being more important than the flashiness no company is willing to risk investing money into a game which may be considered sub-par. At launch MMOs now normally have or are expected to include:

• Voice Acting
• Auction Houses
• Hundreds of quests from the start
• Sprawling realistic landscapes
• Sizeable end game content
• Full support for a large number of environments
• Fully implemented tradeskills
• A world populated by NPCs that all have some level of player interaction

And much much more. Even though WoW had cartoonish characters they still had to employ about 2 to 3 times as many artists as they had programmers. The reason you don't have any more EQs is no one wants to invest millions of dollars into a game with a niche market.

I love EQ but it also got away with a lot of crap that people wouldn't really deal with now when a game launches. Lack of support for several sound cards, broken quests, frequent patching with server downtime, a ton of NPCs that don't interactwith the players. EQ players kind of accepted that a lot of stuff hadn't been done before so leeway was given.

I don't really like the ideals of super easy play presented in WoW but I do understand that it is a very well made and very polished game. Many other MMOs have run into a problem where they run out of money and time before getting to the level of content expected. Even when not trying to compete directly with WoW or other established MMOs you are competeing with the perceptions of what a game should include based on games that have been undergoing development for nearly a decade.

[Malloci]

I think its time for another game like EQ1, i dont think it would be nearly as expensive to make as a new AAA mmo and i think it would get a descent amount of players. Old eq vets and wow vets who have been raised on the new care bear mmos and want something more now.

If i were to make a new mmo right now it would be exactly like eq1 with modern graphics and some tweaks to the combat mechanics. but leave in all Risk vs rewards features like the death penalties the dificulty in leveling and the need for a community to get anything done.

[Grozmok]

Meh.

If it's good, I'll play it (just like every other MMO or PC game that's been released since I quit EQ back in 2004) if it sucks I'll just log back into p99.

/thread

[Sithel1988]

OMFG GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THERE WILL BE COOL FACIAL EXPRESSIONS!!!!! I HAVE TO GET EVERQUEST NEXT. fucking gay

[gloine36]

The biggest hurdle to all of this is money. Look at it this way. Regardless of what game you make, you have to pay the bills. If you pay everyone an average of $40K a year you will be paying out $4M a year/100 employees. Figure $5M when you add in bonuses, benefits, and payroll taxes. (Rough figures folks, but we're going ballpark here).

Now lets look at how much income we'll have. If you charge $50 a box you get $5M per 100K purchases. The 100K mark used to be a big benchmark before 2004 and WoW by the way. Now you think you just made $5M off of box sales but you actually don't. There's a lot of middlemen there, so 40% is much more realistic. In reality you just made $2M for selling 100K games. So box sales won't pay the bills. All they do is get you subscribers.

You have three options when you price the game to the players. Free to play with microtransactions, traditional subscribers, or some combination thereof. If you charge $15 a month then you pull in $1.5M a month or $18M a year. (Don't forget you lose $15 for the first month per sub.)

How much does it take to make the game? The more cutting edge you go with graphics the higher your costs. So if you want a graphics driven game you have to really work the technical elements and go for higher tech customers. The higher the tech required to play the game the smaller the pool of potential subs. See what happened to EQ2 for an example of how that worked. Basically the better the graphics are, the more subs you need, but you run into diminishing returns because you will have less people able to play the game.

So far we're looking at pulling in less than $20M for the first year if you get 100K subs. Obviously 100K subs isn't the new benchmark. You need more than that and you have to hope to have a five year life cycle for the game in order to make back the investment, turn a profit, and do what? You have to be preparing the first expansion the day after launch. So you have one team fixing the problems in the game while the other team is building the next expansion. Obviously you should have developed a five year plan for the game's development so you can be in the technical part of that expansion the day after launch, not the initial development of it.

Go back to graphics. If we go with the slightly better than market average graphics EXPECTED just before the game's initial launch, then we can work with good stuff today in expectation that a large pool of potential subs will have the tech needed to play the game at better than average specs. However, if we go with the lesser graphics we need content. This is where the game is made or broken. It's a fact that MMO players don't necessarily need cutting edge graphics. What they want is good gameplay and good content.
That means you better have a world that appeals to a wide range of players. You need about 250K subs (or the dollar equivalent thereof at $15 a month or better) to make a really good game. So you can see that the subs may not make enough and RMT is needed to boost income. How many employees are there? 400? That's $20M a year in wages. Notice that I didn't include the physical overhead or utilities or anything else. General rule of thumb is that the office expenses equal labor in a physical production world, but since this isn't that way the office expenses will be less than labor. I don't have a hard figure for this, but I'm sure there are those who can tell us what an office building for 300 to 400 employees would cost to operate on a yearly basis. We also have to allow for marketing, licensing, legal, and any kind of cost that comes from outside the building.
If you have 250K subs, you have about $45M in yearly revenue. You need to boost that. RMT can help. Go back to the sales. Why sell anything for a 40% return? After the initial game sale, go digital download. You get the entire amount. For that matter think like this. Why even go with expansions? Sell mini expansions for $5 a pop that are good updates with entire new zones built around the game's progression. They can be made according to a master plan of development. Throw in some free ones as well. That might take out the long delays in product expansion and increase length of subs while raising the amount of revenue over time.
I think a good game can be made for about $35M, but it won't be cutting edge graphics. The trick is all in getting a very small group of people to build a game plan and then develop the game so that it launches with everything you want on Day one. The larger amount of employees get brought in when you're ready to move from concept and initial design to actual construction.

The plan isn't perfect, but then I don't have $35M to start making a game. I think the way to make a great game is to make a good game first. If it's great, people will play it. I think part of the problem is that the suits want WoW and that's not going to happen every time. Plan accordingly and make the good game. It could sell 1M copies and have 500K subs over 5 years or more, but make damn sure you make a game that gets you 250K subs.

[Sithel1988]

dude......facial expressions man. im so fuckin excited

[bridgetroll]

Originally Posted by bridgetroll [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'd like to see more sandbox mmo's developed. Minecraft + Everquest would be an interesting game. I'd play the shit out of it.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/10/20/so...t-sandbox-mmo/

I guess he heard me.

[RahlaeRuffian]

I'm not big on the sandbox/themepark terminology and how it fits in with this and other games, but I guess its player made content vs. dev made content? Can someone provide some examples whether it be EQ or WoW? The only examples I can really think of for sandbox is crafting or maybe siding with factions based on your actions. I would think that raiding and dungeons would have to be themepark for the most part?

So, I'm curious to know what kind of balance there will be between the two.