Verda said: »
Shiva.Francisco said: »
Bismarck.Josiahfk said: »
SE pulling in 1.5 million usd a month for ffxi is believable
What would it cost to keep FFXI up and running, as well as have the necessary number of people working on the game?
Do we have any idea how many people are working strictly on FFXI?
High end servers... prob cost lets say 20k a year. I could be wrong but I know how much a high end web server costs and I can't see it being more than that.
The main cost is software dev, debugging and maintenance as that has human resource costs. SE is considered a premiere company and you want talent, not sure on conversions but in the US you'd want to pay your devs 80k a year and your management prob near 100k. Then you need a staff of tech support, billing support, customer support, and facilities. Tech support in every language. Translators. Distribution. Marketing.
It definitely floats at 1.5 million a month. If it ever went down to like 200k a month tho they'd prob really struggle to keep the game going. I pull all of this out of my *** based off things I know so, it's just a guess. But it's an educated guess.
To put things in perspective, 1.5 million a month is 18 million a year and that'd buy you 225 Developers at 80k a year. For comparison, I hear that the windows XP staff was about 10,000 people.
Mosts of the costs are shared across all projects. All three MMO's would be running in the same server farm and would have the same O&M and management folks. Very few developers are dedicated to a specific game and instead are dynamically assigned to different projects as needs arise, everyone wears multiple hats basically. The biggest costs are the initial R&D to build, publish and grow a game, it's a good while before they see a return on their investment. That is why FFXI is their more profitable product right now, all the major costs have been recouped and they are operating on pure profit. It's why they can afford to keep pushing out content even with the lower subscription numbers, it's pennies on the dollar to keep FFXI players paying that monthly fee.
