Cost of Developing a MMORPG

[Portents]

US$5 Million ++ ??

[Smoke]

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[Ryain]

Moreover, UbiSoft, Electronic Arts and others are now committing as much as $10 million on production and another $10 million on marketing on a single title.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...acodalogin=yes

Not directly talking about MMORPGs, but might give an indicator in the direction. I'd imagine the numbers are higher for MMOs, especially the recurring monthly staffing costs (which are of course covered by the recurring monthly charges >_<).

[Smash]

I'm guessing EQ2 is probably triple that...but then SOE has 20's for toilet paper.

[Cerebrix]

mmorpg development costs can balloon way over 5 mil. id say more likely around the ballpark of somewhere round the 10 or so million mark on average these days.

the extra time it takes to write your own scalable server backend takes a ton of time. i dont even wanna think about the voiceover costs in eq2. no way that was cheap to engineer all that sound. then youve gotta pay world designers to populate the world after a team of artists have created the assets you need to do it.

all that is way before you even start thinking about building a customer service team, website developers, and a billing staff.

the costs are huge and all of these costs you have to pay up front for 3-5 years before a single copy is even sold.

i expect to see a lot of video cards and prebuilt computers coming with mmorpg's installed. oem deals would be a slick way to get extra cash to aleviate some of that overhead before launch.

[popawheelie]

About 10 million, for a blockbuster. Four years of IT wages and licenses for certian programes, starts getting really pricey. I guess why they have advertising/sponsores. (EQ2 and nividia)

Heckler. the wiz with the biz.