To everyone wondering WHY MMOS cost a FEE

[DarkSign]

Ok. While at the AGC, I got some hardware/bandwidth prices. One of this company's reps just got back with me via email today and I thought Id share the info. Ive edited some stuff out but read and injest.

From: James H
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 9:55 AM
To: 'Alfred Norris' anorris@interplay.com
Subject: RE: Great to meet you at the Austin Games Conference

Dear Alfred

Thanks for this. Our website is XXXXX - needs updating but there you go.

I have also attached a company overview and price list. Re. your breakdown - don't hold me to any of this but:

25 Servers

- You will probably need three tiers of server - Game / Web / DB

The game and web servers, for the purposes of this conversation, balance out at around $325 - $350 per month including colo, power, tier one support. The DB servers (4GB RAM + Fiber Channel Card for SAN Storage or RAID 5 multiple drives) are usually closer to $1000 a month - so you need to determine how many DB servers you need in that 25 server stack. As I mentioned, if you look at 1U servers you also need to figure in switches (Cisco 3650 or similar). You don't need switching with the blade centers, but if you plan to do hardware load balancing (Layer 7 switching) we would have to figure that in too. A dedicated firewall for 40 - 60 Megs of traffic would be ABOUT $350 a month, assuming not all traffic needs to be secure. But roughly, if we say you have 20 game / web servers plus 5 DB servers, you're at

20 x 350 = $7000
5 x 900 = $4500

= $11500 for your hardware, so your $6500 is not realistic. - but the above represents around $150k of hardware before you start looking at colocation, support, warranties, replacement, finance charges, cables, installation etc.

60 Mbps at our standard rate is billed at $75 per Mbps so = $4500 ( I would say that 60 Mbps is low for 25 game servers - more like 150 Mbps @ $70 = $10500). So your bandwidth estimate is closer.

But assuming 60 Mbps,

Hardware: $11500
Bandwidth: $4500

TOTAL = $16,000 per month.

To put this into context, if your game is running 20 game servers, with 500 users per server, this would be give you the means to support 10,000 concurrent users. We usually work on the premise that 30% of your subscriber base will be online at any one time (although it's probably more likely to be 15% or so). At 30%, your 10,000 concurrent users would mean 30,000 subscribers, so if they are paying you $10 a month, you have revenues of $300,000 per month. $16,000 for your infrastucture including 24/7 support (15 minute response guarantee) means 53 cents per user per month.

A couple of other key things to bear in mind.

- Your OS - if you are using anything other than a true open source OS such as Linux plus MySQL, you are going to be looking at something like $799 per game server (assuming Windows Server 2003 Standard) and between $3,000 and $6,000 per server if you use MSSQL Standard or Advanced for your DB's). So across 20 game servers and 5 DB servers, you would be looking at $30,000 in upfront DB costs at a minimum. Higher end games use a commercial DB solution, such as Informix or Oracle, but in the case of Informix, this means $56,000 per CPU (so if you have five dual cpu boxes running your DB, that's $560,000 for your DB software). Oracle runs into the millions of $. SO - we do suggest looking very closely at open source solutions for your servers and DB architecture.
- Storage

We have a 32TB Fiber Channel SAN storage available, and we find this is the best solution to backup large data sets such as your customer / account / character DB. To all extents and purposes it's the same as RAID 5, except you get muvch better redundancy, reliablity and speed (there's 2GB of front end cache on the SAN as opposed to a MAX of 128MB, usually 16MB on regular SCSI HDD. If you look at our price list, you can see what we charge for SAN storage - down to around $1.00 per GB per month. So if you're backing up 1TB of data, it's going to cost around $4000 per month. This is preferable to building your own mass storage solution eg the SAN costs around 1.2 million (you can do it more cheaply but then the reliablity suffers).

SO

Overall costing assuming open source architecture - I'll actually assume 100Mbps connection.

HARDWARE: $11500
BANDWIDTH : $7000
STORAGE (assume 1TB): $4000

= $22500

which at our 30,000 subscriber level is around 75 cents per user from a $10.

As I mentioned in Austin, this is all highly reliable and redundant infrastructure, with a multi-homed Tier 1 carrier network. You will find cheaper options, but the key differences will be lack of reliablity and scalability, additional support and warranty costs, ultimately a higher rate of network failure. Our aim is to be the most attractive, cost effective quality option.

Can you give me a timeframe on when your game is going to reach alpha / beta / commercial?

Cheers,

James

*************
Costs so much per month...here's why. Now of course Im sure some of you will zero in on the 75cents per user cost...but that's only part of the cost.

Enjoy.

 

[Zomg]

It's good to have a means to ballpark what the continuing per-sub profit is for an MMO, thanks.

 

[Avé]

That's also why MMO's can go to an ad based model after several years, the initial high costs have by now(hopefully) been paid off, a decent profit made, and they only need to make ad revenue of ~$1 per user to do better than break even.

Even small niche MMO's can make good profits, look at the piece of shit that is Neocron, for years it printed cash and put barely any back into development.

 

[Seven]

I don't play MMOs and now I surely don't intend to start. A side from the time sinks there's also the ridiculous costs which (now seem some what justified) still seem over inflated.

 

[Atrokkus]

Plus the personnel, right, DS?

Anyways, thanks for the insight here.

 

[Tiliqua]

If you never play mmos you are really missing out on some of the best gaming experiences that computers have to offer. The friendships made are as real as rl and if the PvP is as good as in Eve then you experience truley frightening and exhilerating sessions.

Being a gamer and not playing mmos is like being a human and never having sex - SEX WITH ANOTHER PERSON, that is.

 

[Atrokkus]

Being a gamer and not playing mmos is like being a human and never having sex - SEX WITH ANOTHER PERSON, that is.

An utterly childish and almost retarded statement. You understand that it is all matter of personal preference, don't you?
Besides, MMOs can be easily substituted with, say, MUDs and forum-RPG experiences, because it is human interaction even on higher level, and a more freeform and realistic experience to boot, compared with MMORPG's monotonous and quite RP-scarce gameplay.

 

[Seven]

If you never play mmos you are really missing out on some of the best gaming experiences that computers have to offer. The friendships made are as real as rl and if the PvP is as good as in Eve then you experience truley frightening and exhilerating sessions.

Being a gamer and not playing mmos is like being a human and never having sex - SEX WITH ANOTHER PERSON, that is.

Any one who would make such a comparison has obviously never had sex.

 

[merry andrew]

The friendships made are as real as rl

omfg that soe troo cuz in rl teh goal is also to pwn

p.s. phat lewtz as well

 

[Greatatlantic]

If you are posting at this forum, chances are you think the games made in the past are still better then the games made today. Chances are, you like to be able to play these great games of the past whenever you suddenly find yourself in the mood. Thats me to a pretty good "T". That, and I love to collect games. I have a couple of book shelves devoted to just the boxes the games came in.

So for me, paying a monthly fee to play a game on a foreign server is counter intuitive. Sooner or later that server is going to close down, and I won't have a game anymore. And what if I only want to play for a couple hours on a weekend? MMOs just don't allow for that sort of casual play, at least as their designed now. I did indulge myself in Guild Wars, and I just can't see myself paying for that type of play. If I want to play with Real People I can just load up a RTS or CS or Serious Sam. The cost of running the servers may justify the monthly fee from a business stand point, but from my consumer standpoint it just doesn't make sense to keep paying money to play a game when I can just buy a game, get another box for my collection, and then have it play whenever I want without having to pay somebody something more. Maybe I'm just cheap.

 

[Tiliqua]

Those who have never played mmos or only played them for a short time are in no position to dispute my opinion. Mmos imo are the way of the future; sure 'playing' with yourself can be fun but it pales into insignificance when compared to playing with others.

 

[Atrokkus]

Those who have never played mmos or only played them for a short time are in no position to dispute my opinion. Mmos imo are the way of the future; sure 'playing' with yourself can be fun but it pales into insignificance when compared to playing with others.

Well, I play StarCraft and WarCraft3 with others, so what? It also pales in comparison with MMORPG, just because you love it so much?

 

[Tiliqua]

LAN parties and games like Starcraft etc give very similar experiences to mmos, especially if you play with and against the same group of people. So I would say that you also experience the joy of friendship and the challenge of playing against worthy adversaries, as occurs with mmos.

The financial aspects of a mmo are overstated imo. A new game often costs me $50-99 and I might only play it for a week or 2, sometimes even less. For that money you can play Eve for about 6 mths, with the ability to bail as soon as you tire of the game.

If you enjoy playing Starcraft etc with others, you will probably will love mmos, if you find one that suits. My main point is that if you have only played sp games, you aren't in a position to legitimately bag mmos. Obviously in your case this is not true.

 

[Atrokkus]

You see, what I don't like in nowaday MMORPG is that mostly all what people do is just levelling and PvPing. For me, PvP and levelling is not the most important in a game, let alone in the RPG (which is not about munchkinism in the first place). It all feels synthetic to me.. all those repetituous quests, all those loot-monging... it's like playing pretend that you live in alternative world, but oyu are not! Because you do the same thing as you can do in Diablo II over battle.net, but Diablo was designed that way, it was not meant to be RPG.

Modern MMORPGs are just too technically inadvanced to create a real alternative world. All those separate servers... it's no better than D2, i tell you.

The way I see it should be is one seamless world with people living on their own. Witout dumbfucking quests, without even dumber NPCs, without some idiotic distinction of RP and PvP servers. It's like astral plane of existence: you phase there from your real life - the material plane, and when you disconnect you are phased back. But of course it is not possible to create one seamless world, because there are just too many users online, the server will just meltdown.

However, even greater problem of MMORPGing is the average player. Even the dream-system of mine that I descirbed above will be probably ruined by your average Joe who wants the uber loot and doesn't even want to consider roleplaying, a little pretending, a little imagination. He considers it the ordinary game, just something to kill time and to achieve something to pretend he's such a gifted player or something (although he might be a loser in life, but that's another question). That's what bothers me the most. That's what is most repulsive about MMORPGs to me.

 

[Tiliqua]

I feel you aren't against the concept of mmos but rather their current implementation.

I agree with you that many mmo gamers suck, however I have faith in the genre and have had brilliant experiences in Eve. As computers and technology get better I have real hope that mmos will become more realistic and seamless.

Where I think we disagree is that I think some mmos are worthwhile playing right now, even if roleplaying (simple as it is) seems beyond the ken of a majority of gamers.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Being a gamer and not playing mmos is like being a human and never having sex - SEX WITH ANOTHER PERSON, that is.

A/S/L?

 

[merry andrew]

Being a gamer and not playing mmos is like being a human and never having sex - SEX WITH ANOTHER PERSON, that is.

A/S/L?

))<>((

 

[Drakron]

Those who have never played mmos or only played them for a short time are in no position to dispute my opinion. Mmos imo are the way of the future; sure 'playing' with yourself can be fun but it pales into insignificance when compared to playing with others.

Two months in WoW and two months in GW.

I can dispute your idiotic opinion because MMORPGs "social" aspect can be achived on a message board or chat rooms.

In fact EQ was even sued over the idea of a 3d avatar and chat command and that alone says a lot.

MMORPG greastest flaw is that its grind inclined, designed for time sink and lacking any involving and evolving story arch and the people that play on then are not going to change.

 

[kingcomrade]

But killing red murlocs instead of blue murlocs with a +10 sword instead of a +1 sword is progress! /sarcasm
The appeal WoW had was the scenery. The game was gorgeous, and I liked the music. Duskwood was awesome, as was Westfall, Darkshore, Ashenvale, and 1 or two others. The gameplay isn't that good, and the attack animations are so silly, and the "social" aspect, come on. "omg cn any1 heel mi? i wnat a groop 2 get teh magikian! any1 wnat bag lol?"

 

[Elwro]

Can you give me a timeframe on when your game is going to reach alpha / beta / commercial?

 

[Walks with the Snails]

I kinda have a thing about the whole time sink/grind issue, too. As long as MMOG's charge monthly fees and a sizable chunk of the customer base is willing to sink double-digit hours per day in them, it will be there. It has to be, otherwise people will start to whine that there's nothing to do and quit after they've logged in a few hundred hours like people regularly do with Guild Wars. Quitters don't cough up $15 per month.

I also usually game to get a break from people. If I'm in the mood for them, RL is generally more interesting and more fulfilling. And you can more easily identify and avoid the tards by sight.

 

[almondblight]

I wouldn't mind the fees so much if they let you run your own server. The fact that, for example Blizzard stopped a group trying to create an independant server program seems to show that companies count on raking in money from the monthly fee (just look at Blizzards recent groundbreaking profits). The line that they need the monthly fee to squeak by is a joke, in my opinion.

 

[Ausir]

If you never play mmos you are really missing out on some of the best gaming experiences that computers have to offer. The friendships made are as real as rl and if the PvP is as good as in Eve then you experience truley frightening and exhilerating sessions.

Being a gamer and not playing mmos is like being a human and never having sex - SEX WITH ANOTHER PERSON, that is.

Any one who would make such a comparison has obviously never had sex.

And has no friends in rl.

 

[DarkSign]

Can you give me a timeframe on when your game is going to reach alpha / beta / commercial?

I'm not answering, yet :D

 

[MINIGUNWIELDER]

MMOs can be easily substituted with, say forum-RPG experiences, because it is human interaction even on higher level, and a more freeform and realistic experience to boot, compared with MMORPG's monotonous and quite RP-scarce gameplay.

*brain explodes at the mere mention of forum rpgs!*
all the noobs who jump on just to ridicule the concept by posting*i kill you*
the only good forum rpgs have storys that youve already missed half of and everyone else is uber (forum rpg plugins)