MMORPG/MMORTS!

[kleinemann]

Hey, why not make a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) something like WOW or summin, but just in really historically accurate form, and probably in some certain period, like 15-1600, when the europeans were colonizing the world. You would play an adventurer and you'd fight pirates & savages and stuff. It could also be like a MMORTS (massive multiplayer online real-time strategy), since strategy seems to be your specialization... You'd play a band of mercenaries or pirates or colonists who roam the new worlds (america, africa & asia) you could do slave trading, buy ships and build settlements, and even probably still fight pirates and savages! Then slowly your band increases in size and strength, you'd have a large fleet or a prosperous town. Then of course there could be random events, like storms and earthquakes.
Well... what do you think? Massive multiplayer online games tend to rake in money... only problem is designing the game system... and financing it... well you might as well forget it, but at least give it a thought, will you?
Thanks for reading.

[pipfromslitherine]

There is a lot of competition in the MMO field at the moment, mainly because of the success of WoW. It would certainly be an interesting thing to try, but it's also incredibly expensive to set up and build the infrastructure.

We'd certainly like to improve the online components of our games though - and we have lots of ideas, so keep an eye out!

Cheers

Pip

[kleinemann]

cool
I'm actually not that much into MMO games, or at least I don't play them much, so you don't need to worry about satisfying my thirst for MMO games (not that I'm of any particular importance)... just thought a MMO would be a funny idea.
But anyways I wish you luck with all your current projects and maybe you'll get into the MMO business soon enough

[adherbal]

or why not a MMOTBS (massive multiplayer online turn based strategy) game

[Redpossum]

As Iain said, the investment of capital required to launch an MMO-whatever game is enormous.

It was recently suggested that a figure of 20-30 million (US dollars) is not unrealistic, to carry the whole project through from inception to launch, and the first 30 days of operation.

I played Anarchy Online avidly for roughly 5 and a half years, and had just over 5700 hours on my main character when I finally quit. Yes, five thousand and seven hundred hours.

My point is simply that people spend enormous amounts of time online, and the server loads can be enormous.

AO never published any figures, but Eve Online (my current MMORPG addiction) claims to have 300,000+ paid accounts, and I have personally seen 43,000 people online at once.

But stop and think about 300,000 paid accounts. If you figure those at $15 a month, that's 4.5 million per month in subscription revenue. Now, in fact, some of those paid accounts have purchased longer blocks of time, thus reducing their per-month cost to as low as $12. But still, this is big money revenue.

[pipfromslitherine]

There are tons of these kinds of back of a matchbox calculations about the money made by MMOs on lots of MMO forums. The big issue is that the cost of enterprise-level servers and networking is very very different to what you and I pay for our network connections. They do make money - but they can't just drop the $30M a month into the bank

As you say, the setup for MMOs is fairly expensive as well. That's assuming that Slitherine could come up with a solid game design that worked in the period we wanted to work in.

It's an interesting thought though

Cheers

Pip

[kleinemann]

There are tons of these kinds of back of a matchbox calculations about the money made by MMOs on lots of MMO forums. The big issue is that the cost of enterprise-level servers and networking is very very different to what you and I pay for our network connections. They do make money - but they can't just drop the $30M a month into the bank

As you say, the setup for MMOs is fairly expensive as well. That's assuming that Slitherine could come up with a solid game design that worked in the period we wanted to work in.

It's an interesting thought though

Cheers

Pip

You'd also have to pay off loans or publishers or whatever so there probably wouldn't be very much money left for you in the end
Not that I have a very deep understanding of the gaming industry...

[kleinemann]

Also if you want some easy flow of money you could put up a cheap mmotbsg like this one: http://www.lastknights.com/ or this one: http://combatgrounds.com/ or this one:http://statika.imperiaonline.org/imperi ... ?rand=1221 or many other rather cheap mmo games...

[kleinemann]

or why not a MMOTBS (massive multiplayer online turn based strategy) game

of course that's an option as well