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Orcs and Ostriches posted:It might cost pennies for bandwidth and storage per month, but does $40 cover an expansion and two years worth of content, and salaries for all supporting staff making that bandwidth and storage relevant? I mean one sysadmin can cover entire racks worth of servers and once you scale as large as WoW investing in a lot of automation becomes the name of the game. As subs increase needs for GMS/Sysadmins general support staff also increases. But by the time you've passed a certain threshold of content development dev costs aren't really going to increase for each sub though. The basic economics of the situation is the shareholders of activision are rolling around in big fat stacks of cash scrooge mcduck style, enough that they are able to create brand new IP's out of wholecloth and stuff them into already oversaturated markets (Arena shooters lol) and come out on top just from the sheer amount of money they can pour into it.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:14
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Customer service is probably the biggest single cost for running an MMO beyond the initial development/launch. Blizzard has done a lot to minimize those costs but since they still do most of the work in house and on shore it cant be cheap.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:01
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It's hosed up how good the housing system was in wildstar considering the top 2 mmos, wow and ff14, have terrible housing.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:27
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AlmightyBob posted:It's hosed up how good the housing system was in wildstar considering the top 2 mmos, wow and ff14, have terrible housing. For how terrible both ended being, Rift and Wildstar had the best loving housing systems. I miss them dearly but not enough to actually install the games again.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:32
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Only knowing FFXIV's housing, how does Wildstar's work?
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Feb 23, 2017 21:45
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Only knowing FFXIV's housing, how does Wildstar's work? Everyone gets a house, not just the ultra rich. And all items are resizable and rotatable in 3 dimensions. you can basically make anything you can think up.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:50
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Only knowing FFXIV's housing, how does Wildstar's work? Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPwbUmyX-1U
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Feb 23, 2017 22:31
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AlmightyBob posted:It's hosed up how good the housing system was in wildstar considering the top 2 mmos, wow and ff14, have terrible housing. Is Lineage not still the top MMO? How's the housing in that.
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Feb 23, 2017 23:57
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AlmightyBob posted:Everyone gets a house, not just the ultra rich. And all items are resizable and rotatable in 3 dimensions. you can basically make anything you can think up. Yeah someone had a pretty good recreation of serenity from firefly that you could walk around in. By the time I left they had actual hoverboard half pipes and stuff that you could throw into that.
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Feb 24, 2017 04:14
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Byolante posted:Back in the good old days AMD hardware was better than nvidia/intel so it got done first Heard they might be getting their poo poo together with the new Ryzen series CPUs, which is good because there needs to be an affordable alternative to Intel again.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:33
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CoffeeBooze posted:Weirdly enough I think WoW has been a victim of its own success when it comes to innovating. The game is so incredibly successful that it seems like the designers arent willing to do anything particularly different or new for fear that it could be a disaster that damages the games profitability. No one wants to be the guy who kills the goose that keeps on laying golden eggs. From a business standpoint this is just fine, the game has been obscenely profitable and will continue to be for a long while to come, from a consumer's standpoint though its kind of a bummer since the game just feels stagnant for a lot of people.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:32
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They're busy making Overwatch and Hearthstone cash now.
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Feb 24, 2017 12:47
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I'm pretty sure WoW's still their biggest money maker by a good margin. Blizzard is just trying to diversify their income with non-MMO properties because they aren't insane.
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Feb 24, 2017 13:46
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Im assuming as subs continue to slowly but steadily decline Blizzard will ramp up expansion production so box sales help to compensate for the lower number of subs. Itll be interesting to see what else they do to keep revenue up.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:56
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someone in this thread said they're now making GBS threads out patches more regularly like ff14, that sounds like a good thing to do to keep subs up.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:58
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CoffeeBooze posted:Im assuming as subs continue to slowly but steadily decline Blizzard will ramp up expansion production so box sales help to compensate for the lower number of subs. Itll be interesting to see what else they do to keep revenue up. Well considering that they tried this with warlords, failed, and then said they are going back to longer exspansions, I'm pretty sure that's not happening.
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Feb 24, 2017 18:27
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Truga posted:someone in this thread said they're now making GBS threads out patches more regularly like ff14, that sounds like a good thing to do to keep subs up.
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Feb 24, 2017 21:33
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This is why Carbine's quarterly content promise was so hilariously empty. Its like they hadnt learned anything from MMO development over the past decade.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:31
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Asimo posted:Yeah, FFXIV having content patches every 3-4 months is pretty astounding and I'm not sure how they manage it when Blizzard's been trying to do the same for over a decade and failing. I know to be fair that a lot of it is due to the somewhat formulaic patch design (Here's two new dungeons with one using old assets, a raid, and some story quests) but it's still enough to keep folks interested overall. Maybe the FFXIV engine is easier to develop for? It's possible that they just never considered doing it and so never allocated resources for it. Whether or not the cause is FFXIV, they're trying to do it now.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:34
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Asimo posted:Yeah, FFXIV having content patches every 3-4 months is pretty astounding and I'm not sure how they manage it when Blizzard's been trying to do the same for over a decade and failing. I know to be fair that a lot of it is due to the somewhat formulaic patch design (Here's two new dungeons with one using old assets, a raid, and some story quests) but it's still enough to keep folks interested overall. Maybe the FFXIV engine is easier to develop for? Different scale of updates. Blizzard patch updates generally revolve around raids that have 10-15 bosses and all of which will have brand new art assets, and as a rule of thumb they have decided not to re use zone and art assets to make new dungeons in patches because ???? after doing it once in Cataclysm, which would be an easy way to add frequent smaller content to the game the way FFXIV does. 14's raid updates are all 4-5 bosses, and by the end of 2.0 and 3.0 they had two raids of ~12 encounters, a total number that Legion has already topped since releasing with at least 1 more major raid planned (likely two). Not to mention they have things like flex scaling and 4! tiers of difficult which makes it take longer to design encounters, compared to 14's raids and trials frequently only having two difficulties. 14 also has a different design philosophy for bosses, where the challenge usually comes from the boss re-using another boss's gimmick in an interesting way by combining it with another often used gimmick. Adding new 'gimmicks' is somewhat infrequent, the last major one I can think of would be the stacking meteor gimmick they first introduced with... Sepiroth? that's become a part of practically every other boss in the expansion since then. This makes them easier to design since everything is done piecemeal, whereas Blizzard tries to come up with brand new gimmicks and if they re-use an old gimmick they make up new spell effects and indicators etc. There was a good analysis by FF14's boss design by a Blizzard raid developer somewhere where he says he really likes the fights and finds their piecemeal approach interesting for training players to get better over time and easily adding depth to fights without needing to spend so much time developing new boss gimmicks.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:05
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Yeah, that's probably the biggest part of it, with squeenix being both willing to readily reuse assets and encounter design and, more importantly, good enough at doing so that it still feels fun to do. I remain impressed by the hard mode dungeons in FFXIV even if I know they're fairly low effort... changing all the enemies and bosses and taking a different route through the map does make it feel new enough, even if it's reusing all the map assets. The reuse of mechanics also works surprising well too, yeah... I don't remember the address to it but I saw that same article and agreed with a lot of the assessments. Having repeated mechanics with visible and clearly distinct "tells" and markers makes it a lot easier to dive into a fight and understand what's going on even if it's a surprisingly complex encounter. I suspect part of it is that WoW is still designing the game as if they were making raids that are going to be ground at for months by guilds expected to wipe dozens or hundreds of times, even though even WoW itself has gotten more focused around casual PUG raids. If you're not planning to have people slam their face against something for six months then it's easier to spend a bit less effort and just do something flashy instead of uniquely mechanically complex.
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Feb 25, 2017 03:44
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This is the article by the WoW raid designer about the Thordan (Extreme) fight in FFXIV.
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Feb 25, 2017 03:54
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Chairman are you still a mod over at r/wildstar? If so whats the mood like over there?
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Feb 25, 2017 04:09
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Minrad posted:Different scale of updates. Blizzard patch updates generally revolve around raids that have 10-15 bosses and all of which will have brand new art assets, and as a rule of thumb they have decided not to re use zone and art assets to make new dungeons in patches because ???? after doing it once in Cataclysm, which would be an easy way to add frequent smaller content to the game the way FFXIV does. 14's raid updates are all 4-5 bosses, and by the end of 2.0 and 3.0 they had two raids of ~12 encounters, a total number that Legion has already topped since releasing with at least 1 more major raid planned (likely two). Not to mention they have things like flex scaling and 4! tiers of difficult which makes it take longer to design encounters, compared to 14's raids and trials frequently only having two difficulties. Is WoW's raiding more common among casual players now than it was back in Lich King?
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Feb 25, 2017 04:15
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super sweet best pal posted:Is WoW's raiding more common among casual players now than it was back in Lich King? The lowest difficulty is very simple and you can queue for it (in sections of up to three bosses) so definitely a lot of players do it.
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Feb 25, 2017 04:23
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Blizzard makes more from in game purchases now than it ever did through subs, and that's just WoW. Hearthstone and Overwatch microtransaction revenue is astronomical on top of that
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Feb 25, 2017 09:48
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Hearthstone "only" made 400 million dollars profit in 2016
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Feb 25, 2017 13:40
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CoffeeBooze posted:Chairman are you still a mod over at r/wildstar? If so whats the mood like over there? Quiet and resigned. There's a new post-cap progression system that they're adding soon, and some people think that that'll bring a lot of people back, but for the most part the remaining people are accepting of the fact that their game will never have more than a couple hundred people on at peak.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:08
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clone on the phone posted:Blizzard makes more from in game purchases now than it ever did through subs, and that's just WoW. Hearthstone and Overwatch microtransaction revenue is astronomical on top of that
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Feb 25, 2017 16:21
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Mohawk Potato posted:Well considering that they tried this with warlords, failed, and then said they are going back to longer exspansions, I'm pretty sure that's not happening. If anything, they'll likely go free-to-play when the sub numbers hit truly critical levels, and there may be a paradigm shift in the content pipeline. If the numbers ain't there for traditional expansions, they may have to roll out stuff piecemeal.
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Feb 26, 2017 04:09
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They are everything you mentioned. I believe they are referred to internally as 'value added services'.
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Feb 26, 2017 04:10
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CoffeeBooze posted:This is why Carbine's quarterly content promise was so hilariously empty. Its like they hadnt learned anything from MMO development over the past decade. Didn't they promise to have significant content patches monthly? And then the sheer amount of bugs introduced by patching so quickly torpedoed that strategy?
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Feb 27, 2017 05:09
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Mizuti posted:Didn't they promise to have significant content patches monthly? And then the sheer amount of bugs introduced by patching so quickly torpedoed that strategy? Yeah, they abandoned it immediately after the first patch because all the instability, bugs and market exploits that it introduced. They decided to spend months fixing what they had already which caused them to bleed subs faster than anything and then they went into pseudo maintenance mode until they could get the f2p model out. Seriously NCsoft has shown amazing restraint by not putting them out to pasture yet.
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Feb 27, 2017 14:08
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You know, I wonder if the reason why WoW and FFXIV 2.0 managed to keep and grow their subscriber bases (and why FFXIV was salvageable at all) was because the two companies didn't do the usual AAA dev house thing of firing or reassigning half or more of the staff once the game shipped. You always see a lot of fumbling and slow patches and recovery in b-tier MMOs and it always seems to be related to something like this. Even if you didn't somehow need all the people who made the game to make more of the game that's still a lot of institutional knowledge gone that the remaining staff has to cover for.
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Feb 27, 2017 14:27
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I love that the norm in the games industry is once your product ships, you get fired. "Oh those guys, yeah they made a really good game. Excellent game. We fired them and hired new lovely interns that'll work for peanuts all over again for our sequel" 
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Feb 27, 2017 14:38
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I got bored this weekend and downloaded Wildstar. I changed to the new mouselook action controls. I'm . . . having . . . fun? Oh god help me guys, I'm actually having fun playing Wildstar.
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Feb 27, 2017 14:52
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If you're enjoying a game, play it. Something doesn't have to be good to be fun. 
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Feb 27, 2017 15:00
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Mizuti posted:Didn't they promise to have significant content patches monthly? And then the sheer amount of bugs introduced by patching so quickly torpedoed that strategy? Im pretty sure it was quarterly, but I could be wrong. They had two big patches in the pipeline at launch and rolled out both as scheduled and both were buggy messes that did nothing but pile even more bugs on top of an already buggy product.
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Feb 27, 2017 16:23
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Truga posted:I love that the norm in the games industry is once your product ships, you get fired. This is one of the big reasons dlc is such a big thing now, it lets you keep your production staff while new projects are going through preproduction
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Feb 27, 2017 17:34
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Ohtsam posted:This is one of the big reasons dlc is such a big thing now, it lets you keep your production staff while new projects are going through preproduction I heard about that on extra credits. From when a game is finished until it gets to stores there can be several weeks. A really big studio will have preproduction on the next title done at that point so the staff can just move over but DLC is a fantastic way to keep the staff on while there's no regular work for them to begin on.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:13
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