Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
MMOs have had $100 million invested in them only to find that after a few
months of running they were closed down. In the world of MMOs these days,
unless you have a very well known IP and a game with a lot of depth, no MMO
will be able to garner that level of success with that kind of budget.
This is why free-to-play is a tempting prospect for games companies. But for an
individual or a group of indie game developers trying to make a fun game, free-
to-play may not seem initially like a good idea, because how will you get people
to pay for your game? A larger user base that plays the game for free doesn
t
make anyone any money, but when you add payable items and upgrades, it can
work out to be financially better than a smaller user base who is paying a
monthly subscription. If you are making your MMO on a very small scale,
asking for donations can help a little but obviously if no one visits your website
or pays, it won
'
t help you get very far. If you are also small scale, its unlikely that
people may pay for upgradable items, especially if your game is very much in the
early stages of development and you have already released it.
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You might find it helpful to look at how things are done in the commercial world,
as this can give you ideas, or warnings about what you should or shouldn
'
tdo
when making your own game. For example, it
'
s quite common for a commercial
MMO to start out with high figures as it
s released, yet as soon as the initial
subscription is over (usually 30 days when buying the game), the numbers drop
considerably. If you are making an MMO for your friends, this really isn
'
ta
problem. If you are intending to make a larger game and hoping to make enough
money to continue development, then it is. Over a short time, players will get far
along in your game and then will probably go off somewhere else (especially as
there are many free-to-play quality MMOs available). This is true of bigger
budget MMOs. There are so many available these days, people download a game,
play it for a while, and then move onto the next MMO that
'
'
sreleased.
There are stories of hardcore MMO players getting to the maximum level cap of
commercial MMO games within a few days or weeks of it being released. These
are obviously a small number of the people who play an MMO, but these are also
the people who are more likely to stay with an MMO over a long period of time.
One of the biggest issues facing commercial MMOs is that because they are so
expensive and take so long to create, when they are released, they are not as
complete as they should be and will take another 6 to 12 months to get to the
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