Starsman

Yep, no auction house. The bazar itself did not exist until 2001 and required the purchase of an expansion.

Before that, there was a player designated area where eveyone gathered to consolidate their /trade spamming and barter face to face.

Actually, thats how it used to be (the stall thing.) They seem to be changing it so you can buy from offline players and you can sell or buy from anywhere in the world. No more need to be in one specific zone to sell and buy.

Well, we will have to agree to disagree big time. Without merits I would not be playing this game (they could have been more generous with them, I admit, but was WAY better than the state before.)

Are you proposing merits were good or bad?

The Architect Edition did a LOT of good for the game. Would have been indeed much better if every big issue somehow managed to sell boxed editions.

One of the reasons WoW is where it is, are the silly basic game CDs you can find in almost every store that sells games. Think they sell them for $1.99. For that price, people just p ick them up. It's like the drug dealer that gives you the first sample for free or extremely cheap.

No download to do, just go home and install this thingy in that computer gadgety of yours.

My point was something about it being nearly imposible for the game to go into the negative zone. If it became unprofitable to maintain the dev team, the game itself would still live as long as they have data centers.

BTW, you got me curious and I looked up info on their newest expansion. This thing jumped at me in the feature list:

• New Autonomous Brokering system that allows you to post your Trader in the Bazaar while offline

It took them THAT long to allow offline trading?!?


You would have to remember they also were not offering free content updates in any regular fashion. For a long time EQ kept pumping these expansions to secure shelf space. I think they stopped shipping them a while ago, though. Are they not pure DLC now?

I just ran a custom report for the region, didn’t register. I am not certain but I don't think "data profiles" mean "employees".

BTW, the reason I trust this is precisely it seems to align with what I have been told by people in the industry in the area. One of the reasons I entirely disregarded the idea of finding a job in the gaming industry: it would be an absurd downgrade. Heck, many positions are not even "employee" status, but as contractor with no benefits at all.

The beauty of servers is you don't need anyone pedaling them

Server maintenance is a crazy job. I been involved with that in the past and taking half the servers off the grid still does not change the team job a bit. It's tends to just result in fewer lines to look at in a weekly report or up-status.

Support costs for MMOs can be high when managed in isolation, but when you consolidate support centers and host huge numbers, they tend to go down like crazy. I think it was quoted a few years back as the reason why EQ1 would not be canceled anytime soon. SOE hosts so many MMOs that adding new ones comes basically for free.

PayScale.com data mines their information from employment websites and headhunting firms among many other sources. Their data has much more solid backing than a voluntary survey.

The only reason this may be good for them is that they have been at the job for at least 3-4 years. This means they have some extra solid years of experience that increases their ask-for price in the market.

Once you are in a company, you don't get your compensation increased proportionate to your gained experience, that's something you only get when you change jobs (IF you are good at negotiating.)

It tends to be the reason why people rarely stay working for the same company for too long (unless they already are darn high in the corporate food chain.)

Personally, I trust PayScale.com more than I do a 2 year old article written by a guy in Gamasutra.

Those costs tend to be nearly transparent. Not saying they are non-existant, but removing a game from the support chain actually results in increased average cost to all other games, not a decrease.

20+ years. I think you already jumped into a very different category.

I just did a search in payscale.com and it seems the median for someone with 5 years of experience would be 66k, that’s for a Video Game Designer in San Francisco. A total starter would be below that mark. This is also industry wide, my understanding is steady jobs like MMO maintenance are a bit under the median due to their "steady" nature.



As you say, QA, Artists and others are likely to be way under that.

Define support. The bulk of support costs is manpower, and I would figure this to be covered under the 80 man head count.


Edit to add:

PayScale breaks it down like:


10% are under 45k/y
25% are under 55k/y
50% are under 67k/y
75% are under 82k/y
90% are under 100K/y


Remember: this is for Video Game Designers.

You should look more at the state of the video game industry. It's a horribly underpaid sector. 75k is by no way low.

I trust in Arcanaville's integrity. I have seen her bash the devs even after she was temporarily employed by the studio (something that also sets her in a perfect position to know just how much they pay, btw.)

CoH up to the announcement was a freemium game. "Subscriber" base is meaningless. Quarterly reports showed about 8 million dollars a year. We never get to know but quarter to quarter things where getting better than the previous year.

The devs were still learning what were the most profitable things to add to the game. Super Packs and new power sets proved the previous year to be huge, and these 3 months, plus the next 2, would have seen a barrage of new power sets and a new super pack. You can call this "hope", but I call it an informed estimate. There is reason to believe this may had ended as a 10 million year.

That is more than enough money to sustain 80 developers and pay the rent, while being profitable. This is not about faith.

Positron has already stated as much as he can: the studio as was profitable.

We KNOW that a lot of that team was there for Secret Project. We also know, though, that some of the staff meant for Secret Project was working on CoH's issues (Positron, I think, mentioned some stuff would slow down once we lost art team to Secret Project.) I seriously doubt it was only in the paper/board stages. The comments of such a system came from some one that has not worked at Paragon for a few years, If I recall correctly.

You can do an educated guess. Arcanaville has posted some solid estimates about in these forums. If we assume everyone got paid, tops, 75k a year (after benefits.) That's an absurdly high salary. I recall inquiring about average salary rates when they were recruiting and was told between 30k and 50k is more of a standard, with perhaps 60-80k only for senior management staff. So I'm certain the average salary (with benefits) in Paragon Studios was nowhere near 75k. BUT if it was, it would have added to 6 million a year, leaving 2 million in profits or about 33% returns (assuming 8 million a year, not 10.)

Have the studio, and the game, seen better days? Yes. Does not mean the current days were bad.

Calling anyone in any argument a "Fanboy" is not a loss "because you are wrong" it's a loss because you just admitted you are not willing to continue the conversation down an intelligent path. You are forfeiting the discussion so you lost.

BTW, I don't know who called who fanboy in this thread. I just am commenting on the use of the word. This thread went south on post 1 so I just been hopping in an out while bored at work. HOWEVER:

This game is not dying due to its "choices". This game was doing very well, well enough to cover the cost of two dev teams (CoH + Project X) without taking the whole studio into the red.

This game is terminal only because the corporate equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Most people that toss around the "Fanboy" word are just trying to dismiss someone's opinion by pretending these posers would never dare contradict the devs.

Truth is, though, that most of the time, the word is being targeted at someone with a long history of disagreement with the devs, but that happens to be agreeing with the devs that one day.

It's the last resort used by someone when they have no ground to stand on and are afraid their entire argument will fall apart in the light of more educated views.

The use of the word "Fanboy" is an automatic acknowledge that you just lost the argument. Of course, it's something the name-caller will never admit.

We know about a few already.

I'm perfectly fine if you want to set all of those in the same level of truth as Don Quixote or Harry Potter... I do hope they all fall in the Public Domain realm, though. Would suck to have to strip a project I was working off from all references to Santa Claus.

Confused... you offering the guy a Paragon Studios branded towel, or the dirty towel that was hanging in the men's bathroom and every dude in Paragon Studios dried their hands with?

Googleing it up through geocites.

I know I seen that cart before, though, although never heard of that contest (growing in a Spanish speaking Caribbean island has its “perks”)

Can you see power customization? ... I think you need to buy to see customization first... no?

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! Game makers were artist that opted for money instead of doing art? HAAHHAHAHAHAHAH! THATS SO FUNNY!!!

MAN!

If you only knew how much more money an artist gives up to make games by not pursuing a relaxed job at as a web designer, interior decorator, concept artist, animator, ... well basically ANY artistic career path BUT games...

Not to mention programmers that go working for banking, government or medical fields. The difference in money making is so large it's not even funny.

The only ones making money of games are the large corporations. People that make games rarely earn enough to justify working in that [gaming] industry instead of any other.

Going Under, but they went bankrupt before they got that finished.