eraser7278;n9892921 said:*citation needed
Companies don't post their costs publicly, so we have to use a mixture of common sense, developer information and other similar games' costs to draw our conclusions.
For the common sense part, let's take a look at some ofthe departments Blizzard might use for a game like Overwatch. Bear in mind that this list is not exhaustive.
- Legal (whether in-house, on retainer, or a firm)
- Technical Support (Which is possibly comprised of many teams that address different aspects of the game)
- Customer support (billing, refunds, "YOUR COMPANY SUCKS", etc.)
- Ongoing marketing
- Server maintenance staff
- Quality assurance
- Community outreach/Community managers
- PR (Possibly some overlap with community outreach)
Additionally, in a forum post some time ago, Jeff Kaplan noted that the OW dev team during its actual development cycle fluctuated between 40 and 75 people strong. Those employees are now experienced, and probably make better salaries. A mid or top-tier game developer salary can easily reach upwards of $200k/year. At the time, he noted that this number did NOT include support staff or other similar teams, which he discussed seperately.
Let me reiterate - those numbers account for developers only. That says nothing about the other teams mentioned above, or some others he mentions in that thread.
Apparently, OW developer numbers are now about 100 strong. He also told us about the MANY other related teams that work on the project - eSports coordinators, licensing group, etc.
As far as server costs go, one WoW private server (Light's Hope) costs $600/month to support about 10,000 players. And they go down constantly. And that's some crappy third-party server in a foreign country, not the high-speed, high-volume servers Blizzard actually uses for their games. $600/month for a few crappy servers to support 10,000 players - and Overwatch has millions and millions of players, as other have already stated many times. Yeah, costs are gonna go up quite a bit, especially since Overwatch is an incredibly fast-paced game that requires the best possible server coverage and lowest player latency possible to succeed.
People underestimate how much goes into making and supporting a game. Again, with a 10-year plan, these costs are going to add up (if they haven't already, which I personally believe they absolutely have) and far exceed that "amazing" $1 billion profit.
metalmaniac21;n9893001 said:Surely not Bethesda. They're dumbing down their main series (TES, *ugh*...Fallout) and selling mods because their PR guy thinks the audience is like him, stupid plebs, tend to fuck developers up and delivering unfinished and buggy games (Dishonored 2, New Vegas, The Evil Within) and pandering to lefties and soundly so in their twitter shitposting marketing campaigns (Wolfenstein II: TNC), fucking up marketing to make excuses for single player games to go down in history. (Wolfensten II: TNC, The Evil Within 2)
Bethesda is poisonous.
Well, you're free to think that. I enjoy their games, and aside from the "paid mods" debacle they don't have microtransactions or loot boxes. They are not a perfect company, but they are a good one, IMO.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. Ignore Bethesda, if you want. My point was, if we REALLY hate microtransactions (Which its clear some of us do), we can simply stop supporting the companies that use them.
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