Farmville company worth a shitload
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I would like to take this moment to give a big fuck you to all the developers for hire on this forum. When myspace first started releasing their apps and facebook apps were still in infancy I approached damn near EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU and asked to hire you to build an app. I offered great money and a hefty revshare, hell I even put no cap on the development costs. Most of you declined saying you were too busy working on developing your own gay shit that you were hoping to sell on BST but never amounted to a sock full of pennies. Others accepted the job strictly because of how much money i was offering for it, went through a glance at the documentation and gave up because they didn't feel like putting in the effort to learn anything new and instead wanted to focus on clients who only required their current skillsets. The rest either didn't care or put me off for a few weeks, then a few more weeks then a few months till i quit bugging them.
I saw the opportunity and all its potential (i think most of us did), realized i couldn't do it myself so I threw cash at it and offered up as much as was needed to get the job done and some developers could have become filthy fuckin rich just off the revshare from it. I hate to be a dick and rub it in, but fuck you all for not listening and being lazy ass unopportunistic faggots. Have fun spending today trolling the forum for small jobs to get through the holidays and reading all these stories about how the original myspace and facebook app developers are banking it.
/cynicism
WickedFire post of the year, 2009.
My brother is one of the biggest statician/data miners in the entire video game industry.
If you had/have an idea, and can't figure out how to get it done (Like deliguy) It's your own dang fault. People are banking off of a few hours worth of time on FB.
Don't complain , just get it done.
If you had/have an idea, and can't figure out how to get it done (Like deliguy) It's your own dang fault. People are banking off of a few hours worth of time on FB.
Don't complain , just get it done.
Out of morbid curiousity (and because I'm an avid gamer myself) I contacted some game developers to get rough estimates of time and development costs. Most just wanted to know how much you have to spend first. There were 3 that gave me actual numbers.
Company out of the UK gave the most information: they said a "simple" text type game (like mafia wars, but simpler) would start at $40,000 - 80,000 and take around 6 - 9 months to build out and beta test. The more graphics, AI, sound, etc involved and the price goes up exponentially. They were developing a MMORPG for a gaming (sorry, casino gaming) company. They referred to is as a "kind of casino tycoon game" and said that one was quoted at about $450,000 and they were 9 months into it with beta testing about 3 months away.
So, there is a large financial commitment to these games and also a huge time commitment.
Company out of the UK gave the most information: they said a "simple" text type game (like mafia wars, but simpler) would start at $40,000 - 80,000 and take around 6 - 9 months to build out and beta test. The more graphics, AI, sound, etc involved and the price goes up exponentially. They were developing a MMORPG for a gaming (sorry, casino gaming) company. They referred to is as a "kind of casino tycoon game" and said that one was quoted at about $450,000 and they were 9 months into it with beta testing about 3 months away.
So, there is a large financial commitment to these games and also a huge time commitment.
lol nice so did i
we were probably competitors. Mine was SummerBreakGame.com had just under a million users before i had to shut it down.
Read somewhere that 90% of the time+money spent on game development is artwork. I totally believe it. Look at something like Modern Warfare 2 vs. America's Army. From a code standpoint, AA is less buggy, more features, more complex*, etc, but MW2 has tehz graphix. For the record, MW2 was a full-budget block buster coming out of a major game studio, and AA was developed by a small team of engineers [that the army later fired, as soon as they finished the project].
* I mean that, as a programmer, when I look at the two products side by side, I see more effort/logic/thought put into AA than MW2. Even in the UI/menus, MW2 has shitty interface and rushed code, with the obvious emphasis being put on developing some new antisoptric filter / ray tracer / whatever, instead of making multiplayer mode remember your settings choices, etc.
and i'm talking about art budget vs. tech budget in games.
so yeah, where a basic game will cost you $40-50k in programmer time, you'll need another $450k in artwork to bring it up to snuff.
Yep. To be honest if you're serious and faith in your idea then you're better off hiring full time programmers and designers. The end result will be a lot better and you'll be able to continually enhance it. If it's a genuinely good and unique idea that is marketed well I don't see why it couldn't be as big as mafia wars. Even being 10th of the size would be making you fat fat cash...
Deliguy why didn't you dig through one of the many freelance sites and find a talented developer in Russia for example. There's boatloads of them hurting for work.
I'm not surprised you hit the brickwall you did here. This is a marketing forum after all (people are generally a little more ambitious here I guess?) - if it was a developers forum I would be surprised.
I'm not surprised you hit the brickwall you did here. This is a marketing forum after all (people are generally a little more ambitious here I guess?) - if it was a developers forum I would be surprised.
Most of my income is from a gaming company that I am running and building right now, the latest project that we are building is SimRepublic - The online strategy, politics, economics and social simulation game
I believe you need to be clever about things like development. That game is going to almost match farmville and also have sim city in it as well as other great features and I myself coded the features in 1 month, and have another developer finishing the game.
The graphics so far are probably 1 months worth of worth for 1 designer. We will need him for another month.
That probably comes to $10-$15-$20k before beta is launched. It's platform independent, so it's not a facebook game.
I also own a network of gaming sites with 120k users/day so advertising it will be free. Of course that was down to some good business sense early on in the business, but it frees up a lot of cash.
I can only estimate what will happen after launch, but I have quite a lot of experience and I think reaching 1000 active users will be pretty easy and fast. Of course that is nothing compared to Zynga, but once I get to 1000 users per day getting the invested time and money back is pretty easy.
I believe you need to be clever about things like development. That game is going to almost match farmville and also have sim city in it as well as other great features and I myself coded the features in 1 month, and have another developer finishing the game.
The graphics so far are probably 1 months worth of worth for 1 designer. We will need him for another month.
That probably comes to $10-$15-$20k before beta is launched. It's platform independent, so it's not a facebook game.
I also own a network of gaming sites with 120k users/day so advertising it will be free. Of course that was down to some good business sense early on in the business, but it frees up a lot of cash.
I can only estimate what will happen after launch, but I have quite a lot of experience and I think reaching 1000 active users will be pretty easy and fast. Of course that is nothing compared to Zynga, but once I get to 1000 users per day getting the invested time and money back is pretty easy.
