Originally Posted by NeonSamurai
Well I dont entirely agree with that Subman. I'll break down the costs a bit.
The box cost goes to pay several things, first off the retail suppliers get their slice, next comes the publisher/investor(s) who takes a large chunk, the rest goes off to pay the devs for their time and work. After all of that there is pretty much nothing left. Patches are also NOT factored into the price, idealy they dont want to patch the game at all if they can avoid it (though some companies are nice and will further enhance the game out of their own pocket).
So the price basicly pays for the software.
And as for games using the Guild Wars model that dont have a subscription cost, well those games dont have server farms. They have a couple of lobby servers (in guild wars the lobby is the cities), and players though they may not know it, do their own hosting when they step outside them (and this is why the number of people that can come with you is limited to 2-16 people). The lobby servers are payed out of the success of the game.
Now the monthly fee pays for alot of things too, first off the publisher gets a slice of the profits, and the devs get payed to further enhance the game (in theory anyhow), the rest goes into creating, and maintaining the server farm and associated bandwidth which creates the game servers (and belive me this isnt cheap, there is a reason why a typical mmo needs on average at least 30000 subscribers to survive).
A server farm also is not just a couple of pc's straped together, as your average pc can support maybe around 250 players at a time at most (with a high end system, and ignoring bandwidth), were talking several high end servers connected together, where multiple servers can be assigned just to handle a single game zone, and together they support a game world of several thousand players and up. These servers come with high speed raid arays, and multiple backup drives(particularly the server(s) that store characters, it would be an utter disaster for the company if they lost even part of the character database). Also the server farm need backup servers which can step in as needed if one of the other servers crashes, or has a hardware failure. All of this needs to be wired to the internet with massive amounts of bandwidth, to send the game world data to each of the players in more or less real time. That is also just one server farm, your average mmo will have several clusters server farms, usualy scattered across the globe (some in the eu, some in east coast NA, some in westcoast NA, Pacific rim servers, etc), and can have anywhere from 5 to well over 40 of these server farms going. Plus it also costs money to pay the techs who maintain these server clusters.
Now mind you the publisher if the mmo is very successfull makes a pile of money (wow is a good example), especialy if they dont spend much on upgrading the game (again wow). I do think that 15 a month is a bit high and 10-12$ would be a bit more fair for the service
|