Long time not seen! Tried to reach you a few times but your site was down and no AOL love either… anyways I hope all is well.

I agree totaly with you. You can easily get the rock rolling, pushing the right buttons in the right communities ie. MSG Boards and web pages.

Once you reach a certain attraction play out the newsmedia sources and after your name starts to really get attraction by the industry get sponsors or advertaising rolling.

IF you get your 200k Hits a day, you can live from the adds ;) and offer a new business model for mmo’s hehe… btw the last weeks I have read several essayies by different “old” dev guys from various mmo games. All of them proclaiming “UO” was awesome?! what a sudden realisation!?! Now that mmo have become mainstream, you can get a playerbase which actually lets you create and release a professional game and maintain it.

And if you plan that game really smart, technically there will not be this kind of overhead which creates the need for ridiculously large support centers like wow has.

Thats it for a few, I will check your blog out daily now that i see your back :)

And if you ever plan something, drop me a line, I got 8 hours a day haha as someone once told me “sleep is for the weak”

Take care

I think your rundown was a good one, especially if someone had 3-3.5. I just, personally, felt a little more like talking about bare minimum budgets.

The little pirate shard was an alright example, I think. Being that, before my pirate shard, the biggest populations that were being pulled tended to be 100-150 concurrent online users. And those were a pretty extreme exception to the rule. I’d say that, once we were hitting 2000 unique online users, there was something a little different than just a vanilla setup, vanilla word of mouth, and the general marketing that UO proper had which any grey shard benefitted from.

As stated above though, we clearly benefitted from the name and the familiarity of Ultima Online. It’s not as though I set out to do a project and specifically chose UO because it’d net me users and big big profits though. I didn’t make a dime, it was purely a labour of love.

As far as QA, CSRs, and post launch costs – I didn’t factor it in because, simply, on a $1m budget, the developer wouldn’t be able to. Personally I’d be recruiting myself for many different jobs, and two of which would be those. I think I spent the first two months of IPYs life forgetting to eat meals and spending 18-20 hours a day playing the role of ingame, email, and messageboard support. If I had to do it again, I’d recruit some close, trustworthy, MMO-schooled friends (especially the type that played CSR roles for me on IPY).

Undoubtedly I’d mitigate the up front launch costs further by hosting out of established colocation centres as well. At the very least until I was turning a profit.

First of all, I didn’t say this was the minimum. As I added to my original post since so many people seemed to misread what I said:

Note: I’m not saying that you cannot make a game cheaper than this. Rather, I’m pointing out some of the missing expenses from the post I linked. You can make a game for much cheaper, and several people have. But, if you want to hire 14 people and pay them the salaries listed, you will end up spending more even if you don’t hire anyone else. A true “indie” game will have a few underpaid and overworked developers that are doing multiple jobs simultaneously.

Plus, I didn’t say that you need to have a full-time marketing employee. I simply said there was no PR budget in the original post’s estimates. I think this is an important cost because word-of-mouth rarely builds itself. Matt can get away without as much PR expense as a relative newcomer because he has about a decade of experience that has gained him a few followers. A bit of relatively inexpensive PR will get you more attention than having none. And, no, your experiences with your pirate shard are not valid examples, because it benefited from the marketing that UO proper had.

Further, the original budget also did not have QA, or any CSRs. In fact, the budget seemed to have ignored the post-launch costs entirely. Sadly, it seems few people have been giving this issue any critical thought.

So, yes, Matt is right in that you can make a game for cheaper. That was never my assertion that you can’t. But, the budget and planning was flawed because it did ignore some legitimate costs that someone giving you $2M will probably want to see.