I'd be surprised if the box sales did anything but dent the development costs.
MMOs cost anywhere from 30 to 80 million dollars to develop.
They also can cost upwards of 2 million a month or more to maintain and continue post-launch development.
When people hear about 5 million here and 10 million there, they think "that's a lot of money!"
Not in business it ain't.
Do you have any proven basis for these statistics, only they look completely out of scale for an enterprise like this one.
I've been running companies that produce all manner of things for years now, including automotive production cells. Staffing levels have varied from 15 to well over 50, and I can tell you that the figures for running costs quoted above for a company of Cryptic's size are more than a little incorrect.
Note to forum Mods: this is not a flame, merely a question before you go hitting the report button, and I get yet another incorrect infraction. My post above clearly does not infringe either of the TOS posts quoted earlier
Do you have any proven basis for these statistics, only they look completely out of scale for an enterprise like this one.
I've been running companies that produce all manner of things for years now, including automotive production cells. Staffing levels have varied from 15 to well over 50, and I can tell you that the figures for running costs quoted above for a company of Cryptic's size are more than a little incorrect.
Sure. (pulling some stuff from one of my earlier posts)
When Cryptic was making CoH, a rough number of about 25 million over four years of development was being tossed around the pre-beta boards by some of the Devs.
WoW infamously cost somewhere from 75 to 100 million to develop. This is also gleaned from Dev discussions.
Most MMOs are somewhere in between. Note that development costs are markedly higher these days as compared to five years ago.
People. Hiring database admins, systems engineers, applications developers, guys to watch the servers on off hours, community reps, customer service, marketing, quality assurance, etc, etc, is costly. A big chunk of the dev expenses is salary, sometimes upwards of half. Salaries will range from probably 25-40K a year at the low end, 250-400K or more at the high end. And you don't want to hire cheap - quality work takes money. Double that to find the 'real' cost for an employee, including their insurance, non-salary resources they expend, etc.
Hardware. Servers that can handle the high load that MMOs generate cost in the 250K to 400K range, EACH. Most MMOs use 12-18 servers per shard. Since STO uses a single shard system, let's assume for the moment that it's the equivalent of a 10 shard MMO. That's at LEAST 3 million just for the hardware to run the game. I'm probably WAY too low on my numbers, STO probably had to shell out a lot more than that.
And there's utility expenses, rent, it all adds up.
After launch, you have to pay a bunch of folks to maintain the game and develop continuing content. Probably some of the same folks you had before. Add in server hosting costs, utilities, rent for the building, etc. Total will be somewhere between half a million to upwards of a couple mil or more, depending on how successful you are (bigger player base = bigger ongoing expense). WoW probably spends a lot more that that a month.
Five years ago, you had to maintain at least 100K subscribers in order to have the cashflow to maintain the game and pay off your investors in a reasonable amount of time. 18 months after launch is common, that's after 2-4 years of development - any longer and the investors start worrying badly about ever seeing a return on their investment.
I have no idea what size player base you'd need nowadays.
If you get an infraction notice, it's because someone reported your post, not because a mod has it out for you personally..or inpersonally, but because someone reading the post didn't like something you wrote, or they simply don't like YOU...it happens, a lot.
Once your post is reported, a mod has to read it and decide if there's an infraction of the TOS. Sometimes there's not an obvious infraction, but what is written was obviously meant to be inflammitory wthout violating the actual wording of the TOS, and in that case, you may or may not get an infraction, but just because you followed the LETTER of the law while violating the INTENTION of the law doesn't mean you'll get away with it.
And as far as what is or isn't worth of an infraction..that's entirely up the mods, read the TOS, it isn't YOUR call to make, it's theirs, and only theirs, on what is or isn't a violation. As already pointed out, this isn't about freedom of speech(doesn't exist online, period, no exceptions) but about what Cryptic and it's appointed mods feel is right and correct for these forums and what isn't.
You can say it's bad business or bad PR or whatever, but it's irrelevent because this is a forum run by Cryptic with their rules and their regulations and their moderation. The forums were up 16 months before the game was sold to any of us, so none of us has any rights or entitlements either to use or view them, without Cryptic's explicit permission, as outlined in the TOS. Annoy them at your own risk, be it directly or indirectly.
And never assume that someone didn't get infraction points for something they posted just because the post wasn't edited or removed, Cryptic doesn't discuss such things, nor does any other company run forum that I'm aware of, and that's been a policy most forums use for years.
Oh..and trying to get around the language filters by making up words or creative spelling..well...that IS covered in the TOS..so don't be surprised if you get infraction points for doing that That's an OLD trick, part of the reason for the creation of leetspeak back back in the days of AOL and CNet and Prodigy.
No-one has "rights" on someone else's forum, if the owners decide to do whatever(ban, suspend, dress your avatar as a donkey and poke it)then they can, get over it.
I got one of these infractions because my temper got the better of me when raging at people during open beta when they made the pve even more stupidly easy than it is now and some people actually wanted it like that..
As I recall the harshest word I used was "idiot", I can only guess someone over sensitive got offended, well if they can get offended by that and report it they havn't lived much.
Anyway my point being they can do whatever they want and you don't have a leg to stand on when complaining.
I have gotten warnings, and i have gotten points that never expire. so far i haven't found any place to see exactly what happens when you get too many points or what that number is. And yes i agree that there should be a way to appeal and mods should have to tell you exactly how you are violating the TOS.
know when I read someone was upset for getting punished for using the racial slang paddy I almost died laughing. That term is in many areas going to start a fight.
must admit, i did :rolleyes: at that one too.
its all well and good saying irish people you know dont mind you using that term, but y'know, what do you call you asian/black/jewish/whatever else friends?
See? This is apparently considered "trolling". Will someone please name me a single counter that prevents a klingon ship from clicking cloak -> fly away when it's being attacked. Science Vessel and sensor scan doesn't count since I've never seen a single science vessel do it over all the time I've been doing PvP
Sorry but paddy, racial slang ? It is a shortened version of Patrick, quite legitimate.
It's like a Richard being upset at being called TRIBBLE...
Most of the dam world is just too sensitive and needs tougher skin, worried about words people use, a word is just a word and only has any power as long as you believe it. Especially words banded over the internet are pretty meaningless anyone on here can say anything they like about me personal or whatever and I won't go crying to the mods and reporting it.
All of the people I have spoken with who have placed GM tickets have told me that they have never received a reply from the GMs. Sometime this is expected (ie tech support, bug reports, etc). However, when someone submits a ticket asking about the Code of Conduct or an unfair warning, the GMs should respond. I am told they do not.
Atari does. If you go to: http://www.atari.com/support/contact they will respond and look into the matter for you. I hope that Atari knows how much we appreciate their knowing that customer communication is just good business.
Obvious troll.
Zero 1st hand knowledge but still going on a crusade. Nice.
All of the people I have spoken with who have placed GM tickets have told me that they have never received a reply from the GMs. Sometime this is expected (ie tech support, bug reports, etc). However, when someone submits a ticket asking about the Code of Conduct or an unfair warning, the GMs should respond. I am told they do not.
Atari does. If you go to: http://www.atari.com/support/contact they will respond and look into the matter for you. I hope that Atari knows how much we appreciate their knowing that customer communication is just good business.
I've put in three tickets, and all three were responded to. I received a PM on these forums letting me know where to look in game to see the answer. Don't mistake ignorance on the part of some players for GM's not responding. Just because people don't bother to take a few minutes to follow up and see if their ticket was answered, does not mean it wasn't answered.
Sorry to burst your crusading against Cryptic's GM's bubble.
I've put in three tickets, and all three were responded to. I received a PM on these forums letting me know where to look in game to see the answer. Don't mistake ignorance on the part of some players for GM's not responding. Just because people don't bother to take a few minutes to follow up and see if their ticket was answered, does not mean it wasn't answered.
Sorry to burst your crusading against Cryptic's GM's bubble.
I don't think he was referring to a ticket of a bug or problem in game, more a personal grievance.
Even in open beta I got a response to a ticket from being spawned inside a satellite, took a few hours but was surprised, in a good way.
My ticket was answered. Of course, i am not the sort to say things in chat that get me banned, and my ticket request was not some "I was banned for saying something stupid."
I received 2 infractions from "Dionaea", I advised him/her to relocate those infractions to that proverbial
area where it is often said that the sun never shines, in those exact words.
Do you have any proven basis for these statistics, only they look completely out of scale for an enterprise like this one.
I've been running companies that produce all manner of things for years now, including automotive production cells. Staffing levels have varied from 15 to well over 50, and I can tell you that the figures for running costs quoted above for a company of Cryptic's size are more than a little incorrect.
Note to forum Mods: this is not a flame, merely a question before you go hitting the report button, and I get yet another incorrect infraction. My post above clearly does not infringe either of the TOS posts quoted earlier
The 30 to 50 million is accurate based on all reports of most MMOs. Dungeons and Dragons Online, not the most expensive game ever made, was in court quoted to have cost $35 million dollars to produce. STO had an initial development costs of $15m.
Star Trek Online has a development team of 70. If the total cost per employee averages 150k/year salary, benefits, and support, as it easily could, then the cost is around 10.5 million dollars per year. CSR and GM duties probably use as many people as development, although no numbers are extant on this, and they cost less per seat.
Assuming Cryptic has similar hardware needs per subscriber as a company like Turbine, whose numbers we can peek at while they fight a court battle with Atari, the hardware and bandwidth could cost a dollar per subscriber per month. Bulk gets you more of course. Based on 250,000 subscribers active, which is an average estimate for a million sale game, we are probably seeing an operation cost of $2 million dollars per month, with a sustaining revenue of $3.75m per month.
These are logical guesses, but we will know for sure by reading the Atari parent company numbers next SEC report.
The 30 to 50 million is accurate based on all reports of most MMOs. Dungeons and Dragons Online, not the most expensive game ever made, was in court quoted to have cost $35 million dollars to produce. STO had an initial development costs of $15m.
Star Trek Online has a development team of 70. If the total cost per employee averages 150k/year salary, benefits, and support, as it easily could, then the cost is around 10.5 million dollars per year. CSR and GM duties probably use as many people as development, although no numbers are extant on this, and they cost less per seat.
Assuming Cryptic has similar hardware needs per subscriber as a company like Turbine, whose numbers we can peek at while they fight a court battle with Atari, the hardware and bandwidth could cost a dollar per subscriber per month. Bulk gets you more of course. Based on 250,000 subscribers active, which is an average estimate for a million sale game, we are probably seeing an operation cost of $2 million dollars per month, with a sustaining revenue of $3.75m per month.
These are logical guesses, but we will know for sure by reading the Atari parent company numbers next SEC report.
Atari's whole research and development budget for the first half of this financial year has been 35.9 million. Last year it was 67 million with marketing costs of 19 million . Now considering that most of that went on the Xbox platform (Ghostbusters, Riddick) and that the Atari.SA revenue from the PC market is only 15% of their whole worldwide income. Add that to the fact that Atari stated the reason for buying Cryptic was because they can make MMO's for half the price in half the time do you think that all of that R&D cash is spent on STO? Do you think that even 50% of it would be spent on STO?
I too got an infraction with 'expires never' for something rediculous (posting a link to billy madeson 'debate' video - which contained no violence, swearing, or anything else bad)
The mod in question told me if I disagreed with the decission, I should contact a GM (who never replied)
I received 2 infractions from "Dionaea", I advised him/her to relocate those infractions to that proverbial
area where it is often said that the sun never shines, in those exact words.
I called somebody an idiot and received one from the same person.
I replied with a 3 paragraph rant about people being too sensitive to be allowed on online forums without parental supervision.
I received 2 infractions from "Dionaea", I advised him/her to relocate those infractions to that proverbial
area where it is often said that the sun never shines, in those exact words.
Seems many people have had bad experiences with this 'moderator'
Seems many people have had bad experiences with this 'moderator'
Someone who tells a mod to stick moderation where the sun does not shine in all probability is not adult enough to be allowed to post on a forum in the first place and should get banned. Does not seem if people are having problems with the mod, just the mod has a lot of pretty young people to moderate who are not all that together in their level of communication skills.
Someone who tells a mod to stick moderation where the sun does not shine in all probability is not adult enough to be allowed to post on a forum in the first place and should get banned. Does not seem if people are having problems with the mod, just the mod has a lot of pretty young people to moderate who are not all that together in their level of communication skills.
Not to mention the person I was responding to called me an idiot several times but he got no infraction of any kind. Fun stuff.
I'm curious how you know that they didn't get infracted. I've moderated other boards that use the same software and unless they've modified it here there isn't any way of knowing whether or not someone else gets an infraction.
Considering I got an infraction for using the word 'TRIBBLE' (context as in: "people who brag in pvp are TRIBBLE" as an offhand remark, not even at a specific person), I'd say their mods are smoking something.
OH NO I USED THE WORD TRIBBLE TWICE I'M HEADING FOR THE BAN TRAIN AGAIN. OH NO THREE. THEY'RE COMING FOR ME SAVE YOURSE
lol now your gonna get it for talking about moderation they dont like that one bit
EDITs:
also... sun dont shine guy thats funny. I basically have been like wtf you sob blah blah blah not a word :P
archer most of the time you can tell because they will edit your post and it says blah blah blah violates blah blah blah :P
Someone who tells a mod to stick moderation where the sun does not shine in all probability is not adult enough to be allowed to post on a forum in the first place and should get banned. Does not seem if people are having problems with the mod, just the mod has a lot of pretty young people to moderate who are not all that together in their level of communication skills.
I only made a suggestion that I felt appropriate for having received the infraction in the first place.
One turn, deserves another. Your entitled to your opinion, however misplaced it may be.
Comments
Do you have any proven basis for these statistics, only they look completely out of scale for an enterprise like this one.
I've been running companies that produce all manner of things for years now, including automotive production cells. Staffing levels have varied from 15 to well over 50, and I can tell you that the figures for running costs quoted above for a company of Cryptic's size are more than a little incorrect.
Note to forum Mods: this is not a flame, merely a question before you go hitting the report button, and I get yet another incorrect infraction. My post above clearly does not infringe either of the TOS posts quoted earlier
A day later, the thread is locked, and that post is gone.
I guess patience is the key.
Sure. (pulling some stuff from one of my earlier posts)
When Cryptic was making CoH, a rough number of about 25 million over four years of development was being tossed around the pre-beta boards by some of the Devs.
WoW infamously cost somewhere from 75 to 100 million to develop. This is also gleaned from Dev discussions.
Most MMOs are somewhere in between. Note that development costs are markedly higher these days as compared to five years ago.
People. Hiring database admins, systems engineers, applications developers, guys to watch the servers on off hours, community reps, customer service, marketing, quality assurance, etc, etc, is costly. A big chunk of the dev expenses is salary, sometimes upwards of half. Salaries will range from probably 25-40K a year at the low end, 250-400K or more at the high end. And you don't want to hire cheap - quality work takes money. Double that to find the 'real' cost for an employee, including their insurance, non-salary resources they expend, etc.
Hardware. Servers that can handle the high load that MMOs generate cost in the 250K to 400K range, EACH. Most MMOs use 12-18 servers per shard. Since STO uses a single shard system, let's assume for the moment that it's the equivalent of a 10 shard MMO. That's at LEAST 3 million just for the hardware to run the game. I'm probably WAY too low on my numbers, STO probably had to shell out a lot more than that.
And there's utility expenses, rent, it all adds up.
After launch, you have to pay a bunch of folks to maintain the game and develop continuing content. Probably some of the same folks you had before. Add in server hosting costs, utilities, rent for the building, etc. Total will be somewhere between half a million to upwards of a couple mil or more, depending on how successful you are (bigger player base = bigger ongoing expense). WoW probably spends a lot more that that a month.
Five years ago, you had to maintain at least 100K subscribers in order to have the cashflow to maintain the game and pay off your investors in a reasonable amount of time. 18 months after launch is common, that's after 2-4 years of development - any longer and the investors start worrying badly about ever seeing a return on their investment.
I have no idea what size player base you'd need nowadays.
-np
I hate hatespeech.
Oh damn, now I will be banned.
Once your post is reported, a mod has to read it and decide if there's an infraction of the TOS. Sometimes there's not an obvious infraction, but what is written was obviously meant to be inflammitory wthout violating the actual wording of the TOS, and in that case, you may or may not get an infraction, but just because you followed the LETTER of the law while violating the INTENTION of the law doesn't mean you'll get away with it.
And as far as what is or isn't worth of an infraction..that's entirely up the mods, read the TOS, it isn't YOUR call to make, it's theirs, and only theirs, on what is or isn't a violation. As already pointed out, this isn't about freedom of speech(doesn't exist online, period, no exceptions) but about what Cryptic and it's appointed mods feel is right and correct for these forums and what isn't.
You can say it's bad business or bad PR or whatever, but it's irrelevent because this is a forum run by Cryptic with their rules and their regulations and their moderation. The forums were up 16 months before the game was sold to any of us, so none of us has any rights or entitlements either to use or view them, without Cryptic's explicit permission, as outlined in the TOS. Annoy them at your own risk, be it directly or indirectly.
And never assume that someone didn't get infraction points for something they posted just because the post wasn't edited or removed, Cryptic doesn't discuss such things, nor does any other company run forum that I'm aware of, and that's been a policy most forums use for years.
Oh..and trying to get around the language filters by making up words or creative spelling..well...that IS covered in the TOS..so don't be surprised if you get infraction points for doing that
I got one of these infractions because my temper got the better of me when raging at people during open beta when they made the pve even more stupidly easy than it is now and some people actually wanted it like that..
As I recall the harshest word I used was "idiot", I can only guess someone over sensitive got offended, well if they can get offended by that and report it they havn't lived much.
Anyway my point being they can do whatever they want and you don't have a leg to stand on when complaining.
must admit, i did :rolleyes: at that one too.
its all well and good saying irish people you know dont mind you using that term, but y'know, what do you call you asian/black/jewish/whatever else friends?
See? This is apparently considered "trolling". Will someone please name me a single counter that prevents a klingon ship from clicking cloak -> fly away when it's being attacked. Science Vessel and sensor scan doesn't count since I've never seen a single science vessel do it over all the time I've been doing PvP
It's like a Richard being upset at being called TRIBBLE...
Most of the dam world is just too sensitive and needs tougher skin, worried about words people use, a word is just a word and only has any power as long as you believe it. Especially words banded over the internet are pretty meaningless anyone on here can say anything they like about me personal or whatever and I won't go crying to the mods and reporting it.
Obvious troll.
Zero 1st hand knowledge but still going on a crusade. Nice.
I've put in three tickets, and all three were responded to. I received a PM on these forums letting me know where to look in game to see the answer. Don't mistake ignorance on the part of some players for GM's not responding. Just because people don't bother to take a few minutes to follow up and see if their ticket was answered, does not mean it wasn't answered.
Sorry to burst your crusading against Cryptic's GM's bubble.
I don't think he was referring to a ticket of a bug or problem in game, more a personal grievance.
Even in open beta I got a response to a ticket from being spawned inside a satellite, took a few hours but was surprised, in a good way.
area where it is often said that the sun never shines, in those exact words.
The 30 to 50 million is accurate based on all reports of most MMOs. Dungeons and Dragons Online, not the most expensive game ever made, was in court quoted to have cost $35 million dollars to produce. STO had an initial development costs of $15m.
Star Trek Online has a development team of 70. If the total cost per employee averages 150k/year salary, benefits, and support, as it easily could, then the cost is around 10.5 million dollars per year. CSR and GM duties probably use as many people as development, although no numbers are extant on this, and they cost less per seat.
Assuming Cryptic has similar hardware needs per subscriber as a company like Turbine, whose numbers we can peek at while they fight a court battle with Atari, the hardware and bandwidth could cost a dollar per subscriber per month. Bulk gets you more of course. Based on 250,000 subscribers active, which is an average estimate for a million sale game, we are probably seeing an operation cost of $2 million dollars per month, with a sustaining revenue of $3.75m per month.
These are logical guesses, but we will know for sure by reading the Atari parent company numbers next SEC report.
Atari's whole research and development budget for the first half of this financial year has been 35.9 million. Last year it was 67 million with marketing costs of 19 million . Now considering that most of that went on the Xbox platform (Ghostbusters, Riddick) and that the Atari.SA revenue from the PC market is only 15% of their whole worldwide income. Add that to the fact that Atari stated the reason for buying Cryptic was because they can make MMO's for half the price in half the time do you think that all of that R&D cash is spent on STO? Do you think that even 50% of it would be spent on STO?
I too got an infraction with 'expires never' for something rediculous (posting a link to billy madeson 'debate' video - which contained no violence, swearing, or anything else bad)
The mod in question told me if I disagreed with the decission, I should contact a GM (who never replied)
Really they should give out this information.
I called somebody an idiot and received one from the same person.
I replied with a 3 paragraph rant about people being too sensitive to be allowed on online forums without parental supervision.
Seems many people have had bad experiences with this 'moderator'
This post has been edited to remove content which violates the Cryptic Studios Forum Usage Guidelines ~Dionaea
Someone who tells a mod to stick moderation where the sun does not shine in all probability is not adult enough to be allowed to post on a forum in the first place and should get banned. Does not seem if people are having problems with the mod, just the mod has a lot of pretty young people to moderate who are not all that together in their level of communication skills.
wat
10chars
I'm curious how you know that they didn't get infracted. I've moderated other boards that use the same software and unless they've modified it here there isn't any way of knowing whether or not someone else gets an infraction.
lol now your gonna get it for talking about moderation they dont like that one bit
EDITs:
also... sun dont shine guy thats funny. I basically have been like wtf you sob blah blah blah not a word :P
archer most of the time you can tell because they will edit your post and it says blah blah blah violates blah blah blah :P
↑ you were saying?
I only made a suggestion that I felt appropriate for having received the infraction in the first place.
One turn, deserves another. Your entitled to your opinion, however misplaced it may be.
Erm not like you aren't set up for it...I mean Boxxy???? you live for it