Well, here I am working on Sunday to make up time that I missed in the last two weeks. A handful of sick days, and being and a physical related to the sick days has left me three days behind on my required-for-salary hours.
Thus, I'm at work, instead of sleeping. Tis okay, I tend to get more work done when I'm alone in the office - less people to distract [me].
Talked to Aaron last night about the game I'm proposing: He wants Cell-shaded graphics and other things that make it entirely unreal. I, however, simply cannot pass up the opportunity for him to do some of the Engine work. He is very good, even when dealing with something that he's not familiar with.
Thus far, I think we've decided that we'd need 5 people on the Avatar models, 5 people on doing the actual world model, 5 more doing models for other creatures one would meet in the world. 5 working on the network programming (client and server side combined) and another 5 doing the actual rendering/UI portion. After that has all been prototyped, we would leave 2 or so in each of those focus groups and move all the rest into Content Creation. Here we would develop plots, going back and making subtle changes to the prototype as required, and fixing bugs. We would plant the quest NPC's into the world, and set up puzzles and loot tables. We'd work on what skills are availible to what type of player, and what armor he/she would be wearing. We'd also do some internal beta testing at this point to test out the ruleset.
That's the plan so far. Afterwards, a shell would be left on the programming side of things, a few more on the graphics side of things (to help add new content) and a whole bunch on Content-Mastering duties (GM's). Since it would all be a single world, and an expanding world, more Content means more Content-Masters - hiring as population grows would be natural.
Initial costs estimates for a 2 year development cycle and 30 staff: 3 million Cdn. Potention income stream after 2 years: ($15 Cdn/mo subscription) Low: 300K/mo, High: 1.5 Million/mo. Breakeven after 36 months of being live. (Taking into account a 2million annual operating budget and expected usage of 20K users.)
If the game was done right, and games are never done entirely right, but if it was: we could see 500K players on it, and could break even within 6 months of going live....
Also, we would charge on a three-month basis, and the updated 3D files and such would have to be purchased each time. Oh, forgot about beaurocratic overhead, add another 10 people to the mix in shipping, marketing, a secretary. If the game got big, tech support as well... A part time lawyer to keep it all in good shape...
I need to find some VC types to pitch the idea. It would be at least a year off...
Be safe...
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