[MUD-Dev] Indie MMOG's

[Mike Rozak]

Derek Licciardi wrote:

> That assumes that we had enough cash to begin with.  Bootstrapping
> forces you to take risks with development cash.  We fully
> understand what that meant and unfortunately we simply did not
> have enough money to build a demo that is as pretty as Star Wars
> on a miniscule fraction of their development budget.  Publishers
> we worked with didn't see enough graphical quality despite a fully
> realized server and such and sent us off to create a demo that
> looked as good as any current game out there.  Even in MMOs
> publishers are fixated on graphical quality.  All this takes money
> and when you didn't have enough to begin with, every decision is
> moving ahead without sufficient guarantees of development funding.
> Bootstrapped MMO projects don't have the luxury of adequate
> funding which was my point all along in stating that money has
> been our biggest problem.

Some pessimistic thoughts... (which I hope you can prove wrong):

  - You already know this, but given the .com crash 3 years ago, the
  costs of recent and upcoming MMORPGs, and the fact that MMORPGs
  are dropping like flies (one every two weeks or so), you're more
  likely to win the lottery than get funding. (Someone just won
  (approx) $200M on a ticket... that would be enough.)

  - A non-pessimistic thought: With all the flies littering the
  ground you might be able to buy a dead fly cheaply. Many have
  their pretty artwork half finished.

  - You can't evolve a mouse into an elephant, and an mouse-sized
  elephant won't survive. Starting small with the intention of
  getting larger is likely to fail. Starting small with the
  intention of staying small has a much better chance of
  success... and the mouse population has a larger biomass than the
  elephant biomass.

  - Graphics quality is highly correlated to money spent; to compete
  on graphics quality you'll need to spend as much money as EQII has
  spent, and then double that... why? Because your MMORPG won't be
  out for 2-3 years...  EQII won't be standing still, and
  MMORPG/game budgets seem to be going up 30% (or more) a year. The
  doubling doesn't even include the inefficiencies you get when you
  ramp up from a very small team to hundreds of people. EQII and the
  other major players only need to double the size of their teams
  over the next 2-3 years, not create them from scratch.

> There is a minimum barrier to entry in project budget size to
> compete with the big players in the industry.  I just don't buy
> that a half million dollar MMO is going to beat the pants off EQ,
> DAoC, SWG and the others out there.

Actually, even if you had a small and very talented team that could
produce a better product, as soon as your product looked like a
threat, the large MMORPG companies would leverage their marketing
and finances to squash your accomplishment.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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