Two reasons you should not buy further expansions.Follow

Now, a related item...I wish they would not offer the expansions with a pop up box during boot up. Would be ok to provide a link or something, but I did not want to buy GOD when it first came out, but my kids hammering through the login sequence on each account made up my mind for me...guess what, I bought two copies of it. lol.

That was a bug??? I kinda liked it... especially the night that the sky was all black and empty like and all the background elements were white... It was kinda spooky... Ahhhhh... good times!

You obviously understand nothing of the costs that a business incurs. Looking at only one side of the ledger is impressive only to people who are easily impressed by big numbers ("OMG! 2.6 million dollars a month!!!"). What matters is how much money you spend in the course of generating that revenue. If you don't know the costs, then simply stating the revenue rate is completely irrelevant.

Ok. But you are either making an irrelevant statement, or you were implying that they were making "good money", and so maybe they could afford to hire more CS, or GMs?

You don't just "throw that out there". The mere fact of pointing out how much money SOE is making is making a point. Obliquely, to be sure, but you know that most people reading that are going to think "2.6 million is a *lot* of money...".


Dunno. I just really question people who want to just "throw stuff out there", but are unwilling to actually state their point and support it. If you believe that SOE makes sufficient money to increase the level of CS support, and you believe that's what they should be doing, then make that point and support it. If you don't or wont do that, then why throw the number out there?

Of course they could beef up their CS. They won't though due to not enough 'legitimate' complaints against it and of course the added dollar amount of the whole endevour.

I have personally never had a problem with SOE CS. My initial post on this thread was to point out mkbailey's value. It works out to his x number of cents per hour (average.)

What I am reading just makes me laugh. Alot of you are grouping ingame bugs with Customer Service petitions. The thing is that they are 2 different things entirely. When you do a /petition it goes to Cust Svc, but if you complaining about a bug, you sent it to the wrong place. Or you do a /bug because you fell through the ground and died. Guess what? yep, that's right you sent it to the wrong place or in this case you didn't send it to both.

Don't blame the Cust Svc Dept because there are bugs, they are not programmers. And for those that constantly complain about a lack of Cust Svc Support, maybe you should be looking at your gameplay. If you have to petition for every little thing, perhaps you should grow up and deal with something on your own.

The only time I have ever needed to petition a GM was to put an apostrophe in my surname.

I know the whole CS issue is big with many people

but look at it this way - this is a game, it has no affect on your credit rating or anything.

Now lets take a look at my line of work - health insurance.

It can take 15+ days just to pay a claim the first time it is submited if there is a problem, and then there are times that it takes months to get the claim fixed once we have all the info we need.

considering we have had people call up and state that they couldn't buy a house because of a collection notice, I'm thinking the issues with SOE are pretty minimal when you put it in perspective...

Yes, but what if, like me, you refuse to grow up? :)

Late last year, beginning this year, well over 500,000 and closing to 600,000 subscribers from reliable data in the game industry tracking companies.

My own sense says may have dropped since March, April, but those will be subscribers shifting to other MMO's. Ultima Online 250,000+, Asheron's Call still respectable, but do not recall numbers. Total world wide is approaching 1 million for all MMO's.

Sony over $6 million / month subscriber revenues.
$3-$5 million per expansion over the first 4 months of expansion.
3 expansions per year averaging currently.

Total estimated revenues for SOE $87million per year from EverQuest. Does not include PS2 and other EverQuest titles.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Estimate 20% of revenue for Salaries for programmers and content and project managers. $17.5 million. Approximately 320,000 hours, 160 persons. Roughly 50-60 progammers, 80+ content artists, designers, 20 managers. Do not know if accurate mix, what they actually have, or even if this is what you need for EQ. Does not include top tier management and executives. These figures are probabaly heavy on programmers and lite on content developers, but something to work with.

Support salaries is probably 2-3%, or roughly $1.7 to $2.5 million year. That will get close to 60,000 total support hours, or a staff of about 30 people. This sounds about right.

Estimate 5% for top-tier salaries, roughly $4.3 million. Close to 29000 executive hours, or 14 or so people. This is probably correct for this category to.

Estimate 2% for miscelleaneous salaries for assistants, IT, etc. This brings to 30% of estimated revenues for salaries. This is probably correct.

Marketing costs are extremly light, and this is almost no manufacturing cost.

Cost of the infrastructure is next highest with datacenter, servers, connectivity costs. But I cannot see this being more than a few percent still.

So overall a very profitable model. Any surprises why all companies are looking at this?

As in all business, customers will go for cheapest product, then for product performance, then for service. But customers will stay with product if serviced well. This does not exist in this MMO market today, as EQ is the only real player in the field based on product performace (CoH just starting, to young to directly impact at this point). But service will be more and more important as the market matures over the next couple of years. Also realize this is a brand new factor in the game industry : until MMO's, there was no need for massive customer support as the games where all 'static', not played on the game companies resources. They are still adjusting to this, and the impact customer service has.

Journey far and fare well!

neverdone, you forgot lineage.
lineage has what, 4 mil subscribers?

Pretty decent cost analysis. But I think you have absolutely no idea how much the equipment and maintanence of said equipment costs. It's going to be a lot more then a "few percent" of the total. I would actually wager that it's by far the single largest expense they have.

The servers and the software running on them is the "product" they are selling. It's the highest cost. The cost for the networking infrastructure alone is going to run into the million plus a year. And that's before you actually plug anything in. They've got ~40 world servers. Each has how many zones now? 80? We know that they double and sometimes tripple up zone servers with real zones (that's why you can be laggy in an empty zone if there's a lot of people in a zone that shares a server). Let's say 30-40 total zone servers per world server. You can't get around this because it's purely an issue of cpu cycles needed to run the game. Amortized per/year costs for the kind of servers they'll need to run EQ are going to run easily 20k each. That's nearly half your total yearly revenue right there. Then there are the fileservers to hold character and gear data. With a good network/san, you don't need that many of those (since data ops aren't terribly cpu intensive). You could probably manage with a farm of maybe a dozen, at a cost of about 100k per year amortized (another million into the pot).

And that's not touching the cost for backup systems, potential offsite storage and emergency recovery. Potential backup site in case the primary site dies a tragic death (we used to say "if the server room has a jet hit it", which was very topical given the area the proximity to Miramar, but we don't say that anymore for some reason...). Um... And there's the simple matter of your electricity bill. AC for the equipment, UPS units, PDUs, etc...


I'd be surprised if they budget less then 40-50M a year just towards maintaining the infrastructure needed to run the game itself. It's really that expensive...

They won't improve their service until competition comes out - competition which actually has *better* service, a better game, or both. SOE has not felt that pressure until recently. Basically I think they waited until the raw number of subscriptions started actually declining and then their first reaction was to just throw out more expansions to keep up their revenue. Their second (visible) response was to hold the community relations event to try to help keep the people they have - which is a very substantial ammount.

They are really walking a fine line: if they are too generous the game will become too easy and people will quit. If they are too hardline, people will get frusturated and quit.

They *have* to design with the notion that everything *may not* be working perfectly at any given time. That is why getting quest items back, or not erasing items from tradeskill bags have been great advancements. Very few people hate these. If they could have designed a system into LDoN missions that if the server crashes mid-mission we don't get a loss (nor a win) but perhaps give a token ammount of partial points - that would have been a nice gesture. Essentially, "look, we're sorry the server crashed. Here's a cookie."

I'm saying that more for future expansions and future versions of Eq, but just having a system by which they can actually recover from their own faults would go a long way. Also, don't say everything is working as intended. Software as large as Eq never is. It's more a problem of managing the bugs.

That's why I look forward to the first open source MMORPG. It will only take one. I'm not saying a *free* MMORPG, just open source so that bugs can get fixed by devoted programmers who also enjoy playing. I would pay for hosting. I think that is the future. A well known and trusted host will occur who will implement quests and MOBs and, say, custom artwork. The engine will be based on total open source. A big part of the hosting will be GM's. What if SOE wrote the game, but 15 different companies actually ran various servers? If one companies' service sucks, just move.