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Where did all the money go?
illorion
Member Posts: 467
Before I even start I will state (just like veryone else that does this comparison) that I dont play WoW I played for three years, picked it back up for a month when the Cata xpack hit and havnt played it since
Now thats out of the way
Does anyone know how much it cost to develop WoW?.... 63 million
http://digitalbattle.com/2006/06/15/world-of-warcraft-cost-63-million/
that was for vanilla... the xpacks cost significantly less than the game development did as all Xpacks do....
What was TOR development cost? No one knows for sure because they have not publicly release that info but industy leader estimate between 125 million and 200 million.... i would say the low end number may have been the cost of the entire WoW product line up to this point.
I know that SWTOR is a new game and new games always have their issues... but cmon.... they cant even get the UI to work smooth... here is an example of how tight WoW's UI is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj6LD6H0ys8&feature=related
Here is an example of SWTOR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1T0OisXdew&feature=related
its clunky, its ackward... and its definatly not worth the money that was spent on it.
Its sad that we will not see another SW mmo for probably at least another decade... which sucks because if there was one universe where you could make the "ultimate MMO" Star Wars is it.
Point being... if your gonna develop a game that copies another game in almost every way and then spend triple the price on it... it better be as good as the one you copied
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Comments
Probably voice actors.
I prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola. But it doens't make Pepsi the greatest drink in the world.
The same question did arise after people played Tabula Rasa....
It went into creating cinematics! It costs alot of money to create cinematics that rival movies. Look throughout the game how the characters do the same hand gestures (I like the finger waggle and the hands on the hip the most.
) and sometimes even the same lines! That costs money.
BOOYAKA!
What??? that has nothing to do with my post... its more like if a company said... hey we made a drink that taste JUST like pepsi on way way better and it cost us three times more to make it.... then you drink it and it taste like Sam's Choice Cola... that would be a better comparison
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Speaking purely from having experienced the genre grow with Alphas, Betas, and eventualy Releases & Failures over the past 14years. I believe that SWTOR was the last straw that broke the camel's back in terms of MMO development that players demand.
Themeparks will start being phased out over the next 5years, and for good reason. My clan is getting more & more members each week that are looking for a more in-depth game environment such as DAOC, Planetside, The Arma Series, hopefully EQ: Next etc etc whom have come from WoW.
You're not the only one wondering where that 100s of millions went into SWTOR as there's almost nothing there.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
LOL he didn't even read your post at ALL did he OP?
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
i bet it would have costed less had they dev their own engine !now they have a 2012 title on a 2004 engine that is perfoming like wow was back then.wow got updated numerous time since then lol oh well they ll know next time make your own engine
yeah but TR had a 100 million budget... so yeah still where did all that money go... but now you are talking about a game but the biggest publisher in the Biz with a budget thats double.... now its REALLY where did that money go.
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
You do realize that WOW was developed 8 yrs ago. Go back and find somthing that you bought in that time and compare it to now. Good example ( my 55 " rear projection tv i bought 10 yrs ago cost me $2800.00. Now i can buy the same size LCD for around $800.00 bucks. ) TOR is not WOW, and it wasn't made to be.
If you want to know where all the budget went, see another thread regarding the Hero engine in this forum.
They bought the Hero engine before it was for sale, uncommented, undocumented and incomplete, with no optimisation or security features in place - As directly quoted from the CEO of the HeroEngine.
EA exec said "we have tons of engineers, we will finish it" - Add a couple of years dev time for that mistake.
Money went to Mr.George Lucas for Royalties i guess....and marketing.......
World of Warcraft initial development costs in 2004 was allegedly around 60-70 $ Million.
Tabula Rasa was one of the most expensive games with around 100$ Millione, after people played the game everyone did ask where did all the money go...
Swtor tops this all....with unbelievable 300$ Million (are these numbers really correct ?) and we see what the game delivers.
What you said makes absolutly no sense at all.
You saying tech was more expensive back then... so by that logic developing games should be much cheaper now... so now you have a cheaper development cost and a game with triple the budget....
This situation is more like if you bought your projection TV for 2600 and today went out and bought a LCD of the same size for 7800 which is triple the price and then got it home to find out the picture quality is worse than your old projection TV
Edit: also if you copy and paste the JPG image and look at it you will see that its pretty obvious this game WAS in fact meant to be WoW... just a different IP
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Oh, yeah the part where he's trying to compare WOW to TOR.
"Where did all the money go?"
Huttball, obviously.
No im comparing two games of a similar genrre, similar mecahnics and similar play style. One with triple the developmet cost of the other.
SWTOR was triple the price so therefore it should be triple the quality... well... its not
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
[mod edit]
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
[mod edit]
It's a good point. If it took a billion dollars to make SWTOR or it took 10,000 dollars to make SWTOR why do we really care? We didn't pay for that, the developers and publishers did. As consumers we try our best to "get what we paid for" we don't inherently "get what they paid for".
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Again... public game forum. PUBLIC GAME FORUM. Why would you really care about anything posted here?
This is place for discussion...
AGAIN... if you dont wish to discuss the topic there are various buttons on your browser toolbar that will navigate you away from this page
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Changing your MMO design drastically in the midst of the project making the preceding couple of years for a large part meaningless and invested resources squandered, yes, I can see how that might add a 30-40 million dollar to the budget, if you waste a few years.However, so far the development budget for AAA MMO's seem to range between 40-60 million dollars. Using that as a baseline, anything above 150 million dollars seems just wild conjecture. A range of 80-100 million dollars is far more logical as estimation. But hey, whatever floats someone's boat, I guess >.>
IP costs, voice acting and cinematics can be pretty expensive.
We do wish to discuss it obviously. We're just stating our opinions on a public forum. Please don't get angry just because we do not share your opinion. Ours is just as valid.
Not THAT expensive, esp seeing how other MMO's like GW2 and TSW are using huge amounts of VO and cinematics too; even if they're not on the amount of TOR, it's still pretty extensive what they'll be implementing. So, that'd mean that GW2 and TSW would have 30-50% the additional cost of VO/cinematics that TOR would be having? From what I recall gtom the IP, the cost of it'll only get activated after the initial costs are recovered, so it doesn't seem to be included in the development budget. Don't know how it was for the Tolkien IP for LotrO btw.Well considering they payed a CONFRIMED 776million for bioware droping another 200mill on an MMO doesn' t seem so far outside of the realm of reality... i just wonder where it went...
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"