Brian Green has a post up asking “How Low Can You Go?” talking about the minimum amount it takes to make an MMORPG. He’s commenting on a post on a very new blog that claims a new MMORPG (that isn’t trying to compete with the giants) could be made for $2 million and take 2 years doing it. Brian raises the stakes and claims it would take $3-$3.5 million, though he allows that some savings could be made by trading equity for salary.

Note: Brian has since clarified that he’s not asserting it would take 3-3.5 million to make a moderately successful MMORPG. He was asserting that it would take 3-3.5 million to make an MMORPG with the salary figures that the author of MOGBlog was giving. I’m going to leave the post up anyway though as I have little doubt many out there do think it takes millions to turn out an MMORPG.

Brian replies:
“As much as I like such a can-do attitude, I have to show some gentle corrections in the figures. First, a snark. a game is still “massive” if you don’t have millions of players. The original definition usually indicates that the number was supposed to be in the triple digits. That means if you attract over 100 players, you qualify as “massive” enough. You still have to worry about issues like customer service, maintaining servers, etc, whether you’re dealing with 1,000 players or 1,000,000 players.”

I’m unsure if Brian is suggesting that you need tons of money to build an MMORPG that will attract 100 players. You certainly do not. Regardless, 100 players is so easy to hit that I’m going to assume he was being completely rather than partially snarky there. Let’s assume that what Brian and the author of MOGBlog are talking about is an MMO capable of garnering at least, say, 10,000 active players. I pick that number specifically because it removes any real possibility of developing a text MMO for the sake of this argument. I don’t think anyone (including us, and nobody’s created a more successful text MUD than us since 1996) can manage to put 10,000 active players into a new text MUD anymore.

So, does it cost $2 million or $3-$3.5 million to make an MMO that garners 10,000 players?

Neither. It can be done for less than a million.

  • Puzzle Pirates was released for less than $1 million (30,000 active players). (Though yes, it was released before WoW.)
  • Sherwood’s total development cost to date is whatever the sole team member values his time at plus the cost of some (a few dozen I’d estimate) low-end art assets. That is almost certainly far less than even a quarter million and that’s being generous I suspect. (100,000 unique monthly players currently, monetized via Adsense.)

And of course, we’re doing Earth Eternal for less than $1 million. I’d say I’m willing to bet quite a bit that it’ll be capable of garnering at least 10,000 active players but I’ve already bet the development budget! (And happily, we need less than half that number to run in the black if we keep it lean and mean.)

(One thread running through all three of those games is that they don’t aim to compete graphically with the cutting edge or heck, even WoW. Another thread is that they all offer free-to-play options.)

A few points:

1. Brian mentions payroll taxes as being a big expense. We don’t have any. EE’s team all either has equity in the LLC (in which case what they get are guaranteed payments) or are contractors (whom we intend to hire as soon as we are in the black after release) or part-time interns. In none of these cases are there payroll taxes.

2. We all work from home offices (Iron Realms currently has 10 full-time and 6 part-time paid people across the various projects.)

3. Brian correctly points out that you can’t eliminate the whole in-house art department but what I think he misses is that you can combine positions. For instance, Martin Best does both our client-side coding and the UI. He’s also able to tweak 3d animations, models, textures, and so on, as is Ben, our intern that we recently hired as a contractor. Ben has produced quite a few props and weapons but other than that, all art is done by Lamplighter Studios.

The idea with Lamplighter is that we didn’t really want to have an in-house dedicated art director as we are, after all, doing this on a relatively small budget, so we decided that I’d act as in-house art director from a QA perspective and Lamplighter would have an art director on their end handling similar duties while their line artists produce the work we needed. It’s worked out quite well thus far, a year into the relationship, and see no reason why it is going to change. It’s not that they’re necessarily cheaper on a per-artist-hour basis. It’s more that they work with us to really streamline the process and help us plan for things like art re-usability, which is crucial to a small project. There’s a value-add there that’s significant.

4. Brian writes that, “You might want to hire on someone to focus on the business side of things full-time. It can be a lot of work dealing with tax paperwork, getting feedback from the lawyer, etc. Ideally, this person would also have project management experience to keep things running on schedule and on budget. The could also fill in other areas as needed, such as rounding up external testers, proofreading text, etc., during the lulls in their work. Figure another $80k-100k salary if you want quality here, and you do. ;) The challenge is to find someone competent that won’t use their position as “the biz guy” to try to dictate design. If you plan on filling this role, don’t expect to be able to lead the design, too, otherwise you’ll get overworked and something will get ignored.”

Well, this is partly true and party untrue. Sherwood, for instance, clearly does not need a separate person. Earth Eternal could, to be fair, probably use a separate person as I handle the business side of things and do lead design work (and all sorts of other things too). There’s no question that things will be overlooked but then, things were overlooked in WoW and they had a budget 100x ours. We’re attempting a much smaller scope. Nevertheless, a full-time business person on a project this small is just something we did not feel was worth the money. Keeping the budget low means the bar for success is lower, and that is a very good thing.

5. A marketing person is nice but I don’t think you really need one. A project this size lives and dies on word-of-mouth. Marketing and advertising certainly do not hurt, but thus far I’ve been handling our marketing efforts (though we recently opened a blog on IGN’s RPG Vault with about an article a week written by one of our interns). It’s not THAT hard to get some coverage for your game. Google “earth eternal” and see. I’ve largely just sent out a few press releases that I wrote. A press release is not rocket science. We’ve also allocated funds for advertising but won’t spend on that until we’re into open beta.

In any case, MMOs of moderate size have certainly been produced before for less than a million (much less 3 million!) and we think that the Earth Eternal we can produce for less than a million can garner a moderate sized audience (or perhaps a very large one, though I try to avoid thinking about best-case scenarios). Here’s hoping that at least as concerns EE you’re very, very wrong, Brian. ;)