A person close to death will have a better graph than DDO. Revenues are flat not for this year, not for two years, but since March 2020.

https://massivelyop.com/2023/09/21/eg7-and-daybreak-dcuos-volatility-everquests-...

With revamp of LOTRO binned, EG7 has made it clear it is happy to squeeze existing players rather than make efforts to acquire new ones. DDO has the potential but as long as Amanda Grow the joke of a producer is at the helm sucking Severlin, this game is going nowhere under EG7.

Some very interesting tidbits in there. Ji Ham tells us a remaster of LOTRO would cost $30,000,000. DDO being older, with an even worse code base, would likely cost more, but now we at least have a figure.

So to all the tards out there crying "just make DDO 2!!!!" that's what it'll cost. Thirty million dollars.

Hardcore_Girl wrote on Sep 23^rd, 2023 at 3:25pm:



oooh love it when chicks talk shit about other chicks, show us your tits slut!!!

Hardcore_Girl wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 8:11am:


Starfield was like 300-400 million counting advertising. Skyrim was "only" 100 million and is arguably a much better game: the modding community though has been a big part of keeping the graphics up to date and improving the combat.

Skyrim has made ~1 billion in sales. (25 million sales or something. Multiple re-releases.).

Starfield might edge 10 million sales over its lifetime, assuming giving it away on gamepass was worth it, and that many people will buy it when it goes on sale: 45*10=450 million. Now if Starfield only holds the line on gamepass subscribers and doesn't cause an increase then gamepass could have lost MS up to 100 million in sales. This is looking like it might barely beat the inflation rate, and Bethesda was bought for 7.5 billion.

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Let's compare this all with BG3 and Divinity 2.

BG3 has had about 5 million sales at full price. It has made 300 million and cost about 150 million to make. This is without lifetime sales.

DOS2 has made about 150million over its lifetime and cost somewhere between 5-20 million to make. That said, its money was used to help make BG3.

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Breakout hits tend to make a lot more money as a percentage because their budgets are usually pretty small. Once a company makes it into AAA their profitability % goes down but they are a safer bet for investors so there is a risk/reward scenario going on.

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Since Morrowind Bethesda has been trying to move away from strategic gameplay and into action gameplay. Fallout 3 was a big step forward for them. Starfield has pretty good gameplay but I don't know what dumb fuck thought health bars were a good idea.

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Realm of the Mad God was sold for about 1-2 million early in its development. That's about the cheapest to make and most successful MMO at that price point. Literally 8-bit graphics though, 2D gameplay, bullet-hell with a decent enough fantasy world and some quality sprite work.

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Ashes of Creation is looking atleast 70-100 million to get off the ground.
6 million Kickstarter
30million Steven's money
25million Alpha 2 keys
5million Alpha 1 keys

There could be private investors involved as well although I'm sure Steven wouldn't give anyone more than 45% or something.

noamineo wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 12:34pm:


MMOs are winner takes all. Personally, I don't think you would ever try to hire cheap. As it is a creative field you want to hire an "Author" and team experienced in the genre so that they can make a minimum viable product that is new and unique in their niche. If you can't capture a niche then you have no hope of expanding to a larger user base. Realm of the Mad God was a fluke from some smart dudes.

There are tons of existing games with lots of legacy content, where the price / value ratio gets better every year. Now that content might not age as well, but there is more content. There's been millions sunk into DDO and LOTRO.

Quote:


Let's pretend we are only talking about MMOs made out of single player games (E.x., SWOTOR, Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76); if those games try to beat any other game at a particular niche then it will cost---perhaps---more than that game did on that niche. Take Dark Souls. Having any MMO with that quality of combat is going to cost Dark Souls and then a multiplier of that.

World of Warcraft costs at least 10-15 million a year to operate. It's lifetime investment is in the hundreds of millions. It's probably up over the 500 million mark now in how much money has been spent on it. This is why there has never been a "WoW killer." You would have to beat them at their own game.

New game development---if it is adjacent to MMOs---has to operate orthogonally or to use a phrase from Nintendo: "lateral thinking with withered materials."

WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:04pm:


They are absolutely not winner take all, as evidenced by the fact that we are having this conversation on a forum dedicated to a game that is not World of Warcraft.

At any given time there are dozens of small niche MMOs living and dying. They come, they last a little while, they die. The microtransaction model is what made this possible. On a subscription model the game needs to run for years and years to be profitable. Microtransactions let the game make back its budget much faster by milking whales. These games ultimately flare out relatively fast but it doesn't matter because they turned a huge profit in the short-term. MassivelyOP even has an entire category for them: https://massivelyop.com/tag/mmos-youve-never-heard-of/

WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:04pm:


Its not that you have to "hire cheap" so much as "it doesn't cost that much unless you need a rockstar". Consider that "video game designer" is about the most sought-after job by young incels the world over, and the supply of available labor vs demand for it is very lopsided. Just look at SSG: they could fire all the designers tomorrow and hire people to exactly as good a job for half the price and no discernable drop in quality. But then they'd be violating minimum wage laws.


Within the massive sea of people who want to the job, there exists easily thousands of fully-qualified applicants who will do it for a pittance.

WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:04pm:


Weird limitation, but ok. Just keep in mind you're talking about WoW-killers(that failed).

WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:04pm:


Yes its the games that don't try to do that that get made for much less money.


WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:04pm:


Yes and that's kind of my problem: we only ever talk about wow-killers and not all the other games that did not set out to be wow-killers. Those are the ones that can be made for cheap, operated for cheap, and monetized into tedium



WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:10pm:


Its all about finding the right market, though. If you build a game for longevity you can keep players going on it indefinitely. There's folks who've been playing Ultima Online or 26 years. There are many other long-runners out there you hardly hear about, all of which have people who've played since beta.

Some people get burned out on games, some get burned out on genres. Some don't. Personally, I am an MMO gamer. DDO has become too shit for me to continue playing, so I'm searching for another game in my genre to play. People saying "oh just go play baldur's gate 3!" don't seem to know what an MMO is.


WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:10pm:


Yup. And it sucks if your whole life was one of those sports that's now on the decline.

WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 4:10pm:


This has been my problem. With the market share for MMOs shrinking and the rise of e-sports making "action"RPGs the dominant form, I'm stuck with staggeringly few options. There is of course still WoW, but everything that made me quite WoW 17 years ago has only gotten worse since then. There's FFIV but I'm not sure I can start a grind that big this late in my life. There's Everquest II but its just... meh. I had a lot of hope for Amazon's MMO but it looks like that's already failed. My quest is further complicated by financial constraints. A year or two ago spending $150 just to check out a game was no big deal(which I did with Archeage). Today I do not have one dime to spend on a new game.

So the search continues.

Notanarc wrote on Sep 24^th, 2023 at 5:10pm:


You think Cordo is any better at that job than he is his community manager job? She probably has to fill in for him.

Head-Meat wrote on Sep 26^th, 2023 at 1:36pm:


Me too although I'm pretty curious how the last 3 months have been. U61 did not increase the player population at all on ddo audit.

noamineo wrote on Sep 26^th, 2023 at 2:55pm:



I considered that. Headline CPI is down in the 3-4% range now according to "official" numbers. But, it topped out at >9% in the last year. Also, that excludes food and energy costs which.... are a huge part of our costs and have inflated like a mf'er.

Anywhoo, I agree with WFB that this latest update hasn't seemed to bring back ppl on breaks, for example. Pretty meh.