Two of the longer-running questions answered
Whenever MMO devs get together there’s always the standard questions.
“Where’s the alcohol?”
“Are you hiring?”
“How many users do you have now?”
“No, really, I’m not kidding, where’s the alcohol.”
“WTF is up with Blizzard, anyway? WoW cost like, 100 million dollars to make, right?”
Well, no one will tell me where the alcohol is, but we now have the answer to the last question, thanks to Schild of F13 who has a front page now and everything. According to Vivendi, WoW cost $63m (50m euros, at today’s exchange rate) over 4 1/2 years.
This is relevant, since Vivendi also dropped the bomb that Blizzard will be making MMOs now from every other franchise they have. Which answers question 2, “Are they working on World of Starcraft or just on crack?”. Anyway, no other sourcing at this time. So if World of Lost Vikings never comes out, blame Schild.
They better have some alcohol here, given its distance from 6th street:
http://www.txindiegamecon.com/
Going?
Well, I’m not really an indie game developer.
This only raises new questions. Such as, “will cows be playable in World of Diablo?”
Yeah, I looked at their presentation, and what they seemed to say was that they intend to make MMOGs out of their other two MAJOR franchises: specifically, Starcraft and Diablo. The slides don’t mention any intention to make MMOGs for ALL of their franchises.
Oh, and WoW is up to 6.6 million now.
It’s like the population of the earth minus 3 zeroes.
The end is near!
I have a bottle of scotch.
Right on the bookshelf next to the copy of Ender’s Game.
Grab some ice and two glasses from the kitchen before you swing by.
-Walt
Still more questions: does that 50 million Euro figure include marketing or not? The figures I always heard most reliably were that marketing added US$20M to the price tag. I assume that figure doesn’t include the cost of ongoing content additions.
Definitely interesting news, in that “may you live in interesting times” sort of way. Echoes of EA’s old “Hey, Origin, stop making wonderful single-player games and start working on a bunch of soon-to-be-canceled online games!” decision? Also interesting since most of the top people have left Blizzard and gone on to other opportunities.
Seems a bit odd to be making a Diablo game that would likely compete directly with Warcraft. Unless they were to go in a completely different direction and try to do one of the less popular game forms “right”. (Hey, Blizzard, I’ll bring along the source to Meridian 59 when you hire me as a Producer if you do a PvP game.
The big reason WoW’s development cost blooms is because of the long development. Typically you try to do it in 3 years. If you’re spending, say, $30M, you’re spending $15 – $20M of that in the third year. If you add on another year, that’s another $15M – $20M. Still, I suspect that figure includes marketing…
Please note that the presentation was meant for “wall street analysts”.
The mention of “a model to…” allows analysts to brainstorm and speculate (which the strategy staffs at Blizzard and parent will read and analyze).
$50m is (not confirmed) an all-in cost input for the model. If you want to get a sense of of the marketing dollar needed, just take a look at the deal The9 signed with Blizzard (the money spent by The9 in China). Also look at the deal The9 signed for London-something (an FPS/action game) for I think $34m….(sorry, don’t have all the details with me now)….
I’m pretty sure this just means we will get another Diablo game… that plays like Diablo… but this time around you pay a monthly fee for B.net
“Right on the bookshelf next to the copy of Ender\’e2\’80\’99s Game.” – Walt
This had me laughing for some reason and I can’t figure out why.
http://www.imagegenerator.net/image/19099/BREAKING_NEWS_-_KOSTER_SPEAKS_Simulation_Experime.jpg
It won’t bother me if they make MMOs out of both licenses, but they’ll need to do them differently instead of following the WoW model. Starcraft MMO could be like planetside and Diablo MMO can be like it has been but with a cost (or maybe like DDO, either one works).
But then, we’re talking about Blizzard. Their fans will lap up just about anything even if it is space WoW or WoW with more demons and undead.
I’d play World of PlanetStarsidecraft, but it’d have to be DAMN good to get more than 9.99$ out of my wallet.
TitanQuest is a better Diablo than Diablo2, that franchise peaked with the 1st original expansion.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=8703206&p=1&tmp=1#post8703206
Several community reps on the WoW forums are saying Vivendi has misquoted, that Blizzard doesn’t have any plans beyond the WoW expansion and that they don’t intend to shift focus to one type of game genre/platform.
Supposedly, Blizzard acts without accordance to Vivendi’s plans, but it wouldn’t suprize me if this was a sudden decision on Vivendi’s part that Blizzard will have to comply with.
Maybe they can revive the Ghost project. Sounded pretty cool before it got canned. Starcraft is a pretty aged franchise tho. Still, I would love to see a new project in that vein. They left some threads hanging in Brood Wars that could make for a good MMOG. Could show up games like Anarchy Online and EVE if done right and since it would be more sci-fi instead of fantasy it could inherently work different from WoW.
One of the things I really liked about StarCraft was how vastly different the races played. It would be really neat to translate that sense of variety into a MMORPG. I imagine it would be very difficult to implement. The Protoss are too powerful as individuals. How do you prevent population imbalance?
j – lock the servers when the ratio of x:y is greater than +/- 25%. You know, what they should have done in WoW from day 1.
As for creating wholly different, yet balanced, gaming experiences? They can’t get that right now and there’s only one class and about 5 racial abilities that seperate the sides.