What does it cost to develop/build content in an existing modern mmo?

[Deficineiron]

Looking for someone who has experience with the numbers involved in what it costs a game company to develop a piece of content, say an instance-sized zone, for an existing mmo engine. If possible, would like breakdown approximation of major expense categories, such as

1) humans - salary, payroll taxes/medical insurance/etc. how many human work-years go into an instance, inc. cgi/art, scripting, integrating into the existing engine/world, etc.
2) hardware - what kind of hardware beyond a reasonably normal high-end graphics machine is needed? how much mainframe time is invovled?
3) software? is there anything here that is goig to be more than a 4 or 5 digit number?
4) what have I missed?

Examples can be used to compare/contrast art/cgi, scripting, etc.....some examples I am familiar with -

1) gruul's lair (light on both art and number of mobs to script)
2) Blackrock Depths (major art/cgi, lots of mobs to script)
3) violet hold (unlike black morass, this actual had original terrain/art)
4) karazhan
5) Blackwing Lair
6) ? anything you like, though I am not familiar with any cataclysm instanced content personally.

what would it cost, today, to make instances functionally/aesthetically similar to these? are we talking a million/per, a few million, etc.? how many people might be invovled, and how much labor time overall between them? what is the biggest(s) expense in this? %-wise, how big a savings can re-using existing art or zones be, such as black morass, durnholde (both had minor art changes), and of course the various instances/raids that have been re-used? How does this compare to new art but of widely varying apparent complexity, such as some of the newer symmetric instanced zones where you can reuse sections for almost the whole thing, versus areas where you have an awful lot of distinct art pieces even with whatever replication you can get away with?

[Aerimae]

You asked if it would take a few million? take it this way, Blizzard makes around 70million every month on subs alone, they probably spend around 10million every month.

[vesseblah]

what would it cost, today, to make instances functionally/aesthetically similar to these? are we talking a million/per, a few million, etc.? how many people might be invovled, and how much labor time overall between them? what is the biggest(s) expense in this?

Pulling things out of hat... Blizzard has bit under 200 ppl in WoW development & QA (iirc) not including any marketing or support or other fluff. It takes them few months per tier, so if we pretend those people make $80k/year the salary costs alone are about $1.2M per month. Computers and office space is negligible.

With $1.5M/month expenses you need to have about 100k subscribers paying $15 month to break even. Or you can pay people less.

[Deficineiron]

You asked if it would take a few million? take it this way, Blizzard makes around 70million every month on subs alone, they probably spend around 10million every month.

I appreciate your reply and guess. I am looking for someone who actually knows something about the expense involved (there are posters here who are or were in the industry). What part of designing a new raid/instance is the major monetary expense?

I think blizzard takes in about 60m a month on western subs alone. the rest is chinese royalties, value-added services, and box sales. some of the annual pass revenue gets credited to diablo, not wow. Operating expenses seem to run about ~20m a month (rough numbers here obviously). product development isn't in that, though.

---------- Post added 2012-07-13 at 10:37 PM ----------

Pulling things out of hat... Blizzard has bit under 200 ppl in WoW development & QA (iirc) not including any marketing or support or other fluff. It takes them few months per tier, so if we pretend those people make $80k/year the salary costs alone are about $1.2M per month. Computers and office space is negligible.

With $1.5M/month expenses you need to have about 100k subscribers paying $15 month to break even. Or you can pay people less.

Any idea on the specific time-resources involved in designing a piece of content? I would assume most of their staff that actual does coding or art is involved in future expansion content at any given time, or major engine changes that come with each expansion. What sort of resources (e.g. how many people for how collectively long) are needed to, say, redo a troll instance using existing art, or build a new instance from teh ground up?

[vesseblah]

What part of designing a new raid/instance is the major monetary expense?

Wages of people is probably around 80-90% of expenses, depending on how much you develop in house and how much you license stuff (like 3D engine) from others.


Also the guesstimates of previous poster are way off. Activision-Blizzard's quarterly reports say Blizzard's "online services" (WoW and Blizzard store) costs $62M/quarter (approx $21M/month) to run and makes about $400M/quarter ($130M/month) profit.

[Deficineiron]

Wages of people is probably around 80-90% of expenses, depending on how much you develop in house and how much you license stuff (like 3D engine) from others.


Also the guesstimates of previous poster are way off. Activision-Blizzard's quarterly reports say Blizzard's "online services" (WoW and Blizzard store) costs $62M/quarter (approx $21M/month) to run and makes about $400M/quarter ($130M/month) profit.

right on the expenses, but the revenues are too high. wow and call of duty elite together only brought in 250m *REVENUE* last quarter AND the quarter before (each). some annual pass revenue is diverted to diablo, though....I use the non-deferred online subscription revenue section on page ~5 of the report. the number on the front page includes some other stuff as far as i can tell, it never reconciles annually or over any period of time with either the gaap or non-gaap numbers on page 5 for MMORPG (formerly) or Online Subsciptions (now).

if wages are the vast majority of expense in content design, what might be the cost of designing something, either in dollars or labor-years, like any of the examples above?

[Yig]

A huge aspect is creative talent. You can't just throw money at that problem. You need specific artists with a very specific set of aesthetic appreciation that work well in a cohesive group. This is not something you can just throw money at and expect to get a greater return for hiring more people. You have to vet each artist and creator and develop a team that can work off each other with a good flow.

[Lillpapps]

Not much at all except wages. If you reuse assets that have already been created and tested its pretty much copy paste in an editor.

[Deficineiron]

A huge aspect is creative talent. You can't just throw money at that problem. You need specific artists with a very specific set of aesthetic appreciation that work well in a cohesive group. This is not something you can just throw money at and expect to get a greater return for hiring more people. You have to vet each artist and creator and develop a team that can work off each other with a good flow.

so what I am seeing is that 1) in actual monetary terms it is maybe low to very low 7 digits? and 2) actually getting a group that can put something brilliant together is another matter altogether.

how big if a parrt of the entire design time is the art? a comparison might be, say, gruul's lair or something otherwise not too remarkable (e.g. a cave), which I assume has a lower need for genuine brilliance, versus some of the more detailed instances and raids (mostly classic from what I saw up through 3.2.x), which might as well be works of art, there is so much thought and detail in them..

[Yig]

It's hard to say. If you're making a professional game, artists and lead creators will expect anywhere from 40k-80k a year, or you get freelance employees and pay them per project. That's tricky, and I'd look into a community like http://conceptart.org/ and ask some of the people there. You'll find AAA pro artists and animators from the industry there who'd love to answer your questions.

[Lillpapps]

how big if a parrt of the entire design time is the art? a comparison might be, say, gruul's lair or something otherwise not too remarkable (e.g. a cave), which I assume has a lower need for genuine brilliance, versus some of the more detailed instances and raids (mostly classic from what I saw up through 3.2.x), which might as well be works of art, there is so much thought and detail in them..

This is really hard to say since there is a separate team working with it. Its not like you make the art and then start programming the dungeons and stuff. The final art is pretty much the last thing added when making content. Then its testing and balancing / fixing.
Gruul's lair and the current art probably took the same amount of time to create. The thing that takes time when making art is making it look as good as possible with as few polygons as possible and limited to the engine.

[Deficineiron]

Well, I found a post on another thread that essentially answers many of my questions. This thread was about blizzard, though I didn't explicitly spell it out. The underlying question was why were they so slow on producing wow content intra-patch?

People talk about Titan like it's going to be the second coming of Christ. Well let me burst that bubble a sec here.

The MMO Market has peaked. The market barely supports two large subscription MMOs. Everything else has gone free to play, and nothing is coming even close to World of Warcraft numbers from when it launched despite there being many more gamers. MMO players are typically staying put in their game or migrating, but the MMO Market isn't experiencing net growth at all. That isn't my opinion. That's the opinion of professional market analysts:

http://www.rpgreporter.com/2012/07/1...-says-pachter/

The US market in particular can't even support both WoW and Star Wars being both large, subscription based MMOs. There isn't simply enough people to fill both games to make them worth the large investment their publishers put into the games.

This begs another question then: why is the MMO Market stagnant now while it was growing from 2005 to 20010?

Two answers: WoW meeting a previously unmet need and mobile gaming.

First, WoW was the first real "post-Everquest" mmo. It got big exactly the same time broadband and always-on internet exploded in North American and European homes and universities. It's just like how 10 years prior "Quake", a game with no sort of balance whatsoever by modern standards, became a massively successful competitive game because it was in the right position at the right time, just as homes were getting faster and faster modems (and even DSL). WoW came to market at the perfect time, as the internet started to get faster and faster.

Secondly if you've played WoW the last 6 or 7 years and only WoW, you've missed the biggest revolution in gaming since NES controller. The iPhone and iPad and Android have done more to bring gaming to more people and make it "normal" for every day folks to do who never would have before than any other "console" ever, including any mobile console. More people are "gaming" than ever before, but all this money is going into $2 games for their mobile devices. They're getting hooked on Angry Birds and Cut the Rope and Infinity Blade. The thought process of having a big gaming machine a 23 inch LCD monitor and an ethernet cable to play World of Warcraft is completely foreign to them. Computing in general is shifting to tablets, touch screens and the cloud, not the kind of "power computing" machine that's dominated the market place since Windows 95 in Desktop or Laptop form. You want to see the future? It's the iPad. in 15 years, computing will be that plus the cloud except for software developers. The people who are making this possible, the NEW GAMERS, don't have hardware or mindset for traditional video gaming, much less an MMO like WoW or Titan. As a result, Blizzard isn't getting many of these "new" potential customers.

So what does this have to do with Titan?

Well what do we know about Blizzard? Lots of things, but mostly is that they are an extremely frugal company. With a development staff of roughly 400 they produce and mange three major franchises and modern games - World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and Diablo III. They move their development staff around very frequently... there isn't a "WoW" team like there used to be. Rather its a shared pool of artists who one week might make WoW Art assets, the next week they'll make Starcraft art assets.

This is extremely unusual in video gaming and is commonly only found in near nameless "content farm" companies that are contracted by publishers to produce game content at a flat rate (very common across all types of games), in much the same way animation is outsourced to Asia after being storyboarded by western writers/artists. In most video game companies, one team gets one project and its a closed group. For example ChAir works on Infinity Blade but People Can Fly works on Bulletstorm while Epic Games Raleigh works on Gears of War 3... all 3 are the same company however, just three different development groups. Blizzard does what they're doing with their organization for the same reason content farm companies do - you have to hire less people, and people are expensive. How different is this? Consider until the recent layoffs, Bioware's staff for Star Wars The Old Republic alone was 450 people - their one game having a larger production staff than all three of Blizzards.

The results are pretty obvious: massive content gaps in WoW despite promises to have smaller ones, the still missing battlenet map store for Starcraft II, the unpolished, incomplete nature of Diablo 3. It's very clear, they're juggling too many projects with not enough people to do it.

So back to Titan. Let's look at Blizzard - they're already overstretched, they aren't hiring (they're laying off in fact) and the MMO market has peaked according to professional analysts (and no doubt their own). They are committed to ongoing support for their other 3 franchises. How are they supposed to honestly support a 4th major franchise?

They aren't and they know it. Maybe they didn't think that when they started Titan 3 years ago, but the gaming world has changed a lot in the last 3 years.

In the software industry we use a term "fork". It means what it sounds like - a fork in the road. WHen we want to take one project in two different directions we "fork" it. WoW, Starcraft II and Diablo III all use the same technology base (their engine), all of them forks of the evolved version of the Warcraft III engine WoW is based on and SC2 and D3 built on. It is likely that instead of being a clean sheet production (as Epic's Unreal Engine 4 is relative to UE3), Titan is a fork of their existing technology. Considering that Software is expensive, and Blizzard is very economical, it makes more sense than them starting over.

My prediction thus is this: Blizzard may have once intended Titan to be their 4th franchise when they started and announced it years ago, but today, in the second half of 2012, it isn't going to happen. The rendering engine changes in MoP might be tech from the "Titan" fork being moved into WoW, but I think its far more likely that we'll see whatever work went into "Titan", at least from a technology standpoint, be instead folded into the WoW Expansion after Mists of Pandaria. It will be a way to recoup investment costs in Titan and supporting their 3 major franchises without having to go to the significant expensive of expanding their company. For Blizzard to actually make Titan a game, rather than just fold it into WoW eventually to save money, would be the first major non-cost cutting decision they've made in many years. I think it's incredibly unlikely.

One more thing you folks should know about Blizzard. We're all Blizzard fans and we all play WoW, but let's be realistic about the kind of company they are. I've been a software developer for ten years. I have an advanced degree in computer science from one of the best schools in the world for it (it's not MIT. It's #2 or #3). I know the field and I know who works in it. About a year ago Blizzard put up a job posting for a software engineer with expertise in distributed systems and networking. That is my expertise, and I love WoW and gaming... I should have run to it right?. But they were also offering a salary according to Glassdoor.com $35k or so below what I was making at the time at about $33 an hour (and $45k less than now) and without the ridiculous perks I got working at a start up venture capital. And that is because the kind of company Blizzard is - Blizzard is where you go for your first job out of programming school or art school, and they know that, so they offer extremely thing pay and benefits. They're where you go when you're 24 and dumb and looking to get a line on your resume. They notoriously can't keep rank and file developers for long, and unlike other development houses (like id Software, Epic, Bethesda, Rockstar, Microsoft) can't attract the best and most experienced "free agents" in the industry. That is their rep as a place to work. Without experienced developers and experienced product leads, 10 years of work experience tells me and anyone who has worked on a major project, that projects go nowhere. If Blizzard can't lure 37 year old or so developers from other game companies because they refuse to offer competitive pay, benefits and perks, then they wont be able to build the staff to seriously support a 4th franchise. Already the Diablo 3 staff's game design inexperience and rather lack of professionalism is glaring. And since they aren't doing this... they simply AREN'T hiring the people they would need to in order to expand their company, I'm really going with Titan never coming as its own franchise.

That is why Titan will never see the light of day.

Glassdoor for Blizzard: http://www.glassdoor.com/Job/blizzar...RCH_KE0,22.htm

This is from 6 weeks ago