N/A
- Thread starter evelynds
- Start date
Pretty much. It's becoming a rather saturated niche. There's still plenty of money in it (and always will be) though for those who actually put some effort into providing a fun game. Kinda how everything else you do will die if you don't give a fuck about the customer.
You're an idiot. Have you even seen Earth Eternal?
$300... Who are you kidding? You're one delusional, dumb fuck.
$300... Who are you kidding? You're one delusional, dumb fuck.
Yeah, there's quite a range of features starting with HTML turn-based and point-based games which are the ones that cost $300. Buy properties, buy items, attack things, level up. That's about the limit of the functionality.
Flash games like Cafe World and 3D games like the screenshot above are obviously not going to cost $300.
I remember this one game a couple years ago was popular, it was soo extremely simple, very simple html, no extreme graphics, just stock photos for items and backgrounds. It looked like a bad geocities page.... It probably got like 200k users at its peak, and some users "donated" as much as 1000 to get ahead. It spread like wildfire through forums and it wasn't even a novel idea. What are the costs there really?
You dont need flashy graphics to make a successful browser game, you just need
1) lots of choices and customizeability
2) ranking/guilds
3) a good theme.
A while back I actually developed a pretty novel idea for a browser mmo (that is I developed things like concepts and the rpg parts), though I didn't have the experience or funds needed to make the actual site.
You dont need flashy graphics to make a successful browser game, you just need
1) lots of choices and customizeability
2) ranking/guilds
3) a good theme.
A while back I actually developed a pretty novel idea for a browser mmo (that is I developed things like concepts and the rpg parts), though I didn't have the experience or funds needed to make the actual site.
You guys should consult mainland Chinese developers for a moment and get some insightI am dead serious on development costs.
A little clarification perhaps... take a 3D game like Perfect World, or 2D like Maplestory and such. We as Westerners could name perhaps 10 from the top of our head. In KR/CN/JP there's over 200+ clones around. The games are not made from scratch barebones anymore. Their kernels and render engines have been sold/resold/leased/stolen so much that there are now teams who push out mmorpg's like meat factories. The games all look familiar. 3D martial arts, 2D scrollers, browser Age of Empires clones. They come from blueprints and are then mass replicated with additions. In the West there's not yet 200+ clones around, so each individual game still becomes successful with proper promotion.
Verify with a Chinese state citizen from mainland China.
I am currently being employed as a security consultant at one of the largest F2P game publishers in the world. I asked my boss/contact to take a look at this thread and tell me what he thinks. He is the executive producer of the company with 10 years experience in the field, and is currently overseeing the development, acquisition, and maintenance of more than 15 games, some of which were mentioned in this thread. He says you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. I agree with him.
Based off of what I've seen working with my current employer for over year, I wouldn't want to publish anything in the F2P market even if you paid me to. Why? Hmm, ok, where to start.
The companies outside the US are fucking impossible to work with. I won't call them scum, because I would do the same in their place, but sometimes we all want to just wring their fucking necks. Why? Because they simple don't care about you. When you agree to publish a game, THEY retain all rights to the game (including source code and art), and if you want any new features to the game / backend, it will take from months to years to develop. Why? Because like you said, they are devoted to churning out low quality titles as fast as possible. It is their lifeblood. If you're a stupid new publisher that has no idea about what's going on, you will agree to publish the game without any clause in the publishing contract that says that they must maintain the game. They will pass off the game to you for a quick buck, and cease any maintenance on it. Now, lets assume that you had it all worked out in your contract on how many content updates they would do per year, what kind of bugfixing they would be responsible for, etc etc... everything that goes into maintaining a game after it is released. Then they will work at an insanely slow pace. Deadlines will be missed by months... then years. Your userbase will grow frustrated and abandon your game, and your game will eventually fade away to oblivion.
Now lets say you had a maintenance clause in the contract and the company wasn't abiding buy it, and you want to enforce the terms of the contract. That would mean lawsuits. International lawsuits. Lots of money involved. You win? And then what?
Ok, lawsuits are messy. Maybe you will threaten to terminate the contract. Guess what? They don't need to work with you. There are 50 million F2P publishers out there, with more popping up all the time. The developers choose who publishes them, and not the other way around. And trust me, there are a lot of shitty publishers out there who are willing to pick up your shitty game with shitty maintenance and push it at shitty margins to their shitty third world markets. Its cutthroat.
See what I'm getting at here? Development is like 10% of the cost, the rest is all about maintenance. If you fall behind on maintenance, the game will become boring and unpopular, and will finally disappear. If you don't add new content, the same will happen. And you can't add content or maintain the game because the developers simply can't be bothered. End of story.
Now a couple of quick headaches from the security front, shit I have to deal with every day, and shit YOU will have to deal with if your game gets popular enough.
#1 Russian DDOS blackmail crews. If you are a browser game, they will DDOS your site. If you are a MMO game, they will reverse engineer your login and build it into their botnet, then start sending an infinite amount of login requests until your server goes down. Then, they will contact you and demand a weekly payment to stop their DDOSing. And what do you do? Pay them? Then 5 other crews will start DDOSing you in hopes of getting a share of the ransom. Hire security consultants like me? (I don't do network security, this is just a scenario I hear about all the time from other consultants) Expensive as fuck. And no guarantee of working. Hire a antiDDOS service? They're ineffectual. Good luck finding one that works. Go to the FBI? lol, they don't have time and try to appear like they care, but they really don't. Local law enforcement? In Russia? lol.
Scenario #2: Hackers
F2P games attract hackers from all over the world. You can't IP ban them because it seems like every fucking third world ISP has dynamic IP addresses. What do these hackers do? Wallhacks, teleport hacks, item duping, speed hacks, aimbot... you name it, I've seen it. They reverse engineer your client and hack it in ways you wouldn't think possible. Then they proceed to wreck havoc upon your legit users who are just trying to enjoy the game. Users will get frustrated and leave your game. Your game dies and fades away into oblivion. Again, what can you do against this? Hire consultants like me? Again, expensive. And then, what can we really do? We need to have access to the source code to patch the game against hacks, and yet the developers won't part with the source code. So in the end, I end up going in at machine code level and patching the executable of the game by hand, just because the dumbass devs are too lazy to do it themselves. This takes a lot of time. And I get paid by the hour. Ok, you don't want to hire consultants. You go with a third party game security solution like Gameguard. Have fun with that, lol. Almost all those major antihacks have public tutorials on how to bypass them. They update about once every 2 years, and are cracked the day after they update. They literally aren't worth the time it takes to implement them.
Scenario #3: Item dupers/frauders.
So lets assume you have a F2P MMO. How are you going to make money? Selling items, land, game gold, whatever, right? Well, bad news. These games are coded like shit. The developers never had security in mind. All the hackers I was ranting about in the previous paragraph are going to come out and duplicate whatever you are selling for FREE. They will duplicate premium items for free. They will duplicate gold for free. They will even unlock GM features and post hacks doing it for free. And how are you supposed to stop them? Again, the developers SIMPLY DON'T GIVE A FUCK. You're going to have hackers running around with premium items in front of GMs, and the GMs won't even be able to kick them because the hackers will have patched the kick feature in the game client. Once again, your user base will become frustrated and leave. Those who don't leave will never pay for anything in your game, because they can get the same premium shit for free just googling "name of game hacks".
As for the frauders: Pretty much, you will have people buying premium items with stolen credit cards. They will then quickly resell the items to someone on ebay or whatever for less then what you are selling the items for, and then they will disappear with that user's money. You find out with was a frauded item and cancel it a couple of days later. Legit user who bought the item comes crying to you. What do you do?
And that's all the shit I can think of off the top of my head. There's a lot more shit going around but I'm too lazy to type it out. These megaparagraphs I typed out above are just a drop in the bucket. F2P games are a fucking nightmare. I am more than happy to take my consulting pay, but god forbid that I ever get involved with that industry.
That is all.
The companies outside the US are fucking impossible to work with. I won't call them scum, because I would do the same in their place, but sometimes we all want to just wring their fucking necks. Why? Because they simple don't care about you. When you agree to publish a game, THEY retain all rights to the game (including source code and art), and if you want any new features to the game / backend, it will take from months to years to develop. Why? Because like you said, they are devoted to churning out low quality titles as fast as possible. It is their lifeblood. If you're a stupid new publisher that has no idea about what's going on, you will agree to publish the game without any clause in the publishing contract that says that they must maintain the game. They will pass off the game to you for a quick buck, and cease any maintenance on it. Now, lets assume that you had it all worked out in your contract on how many content updates they would do per year, what kind of bugfixing they would be responsible for, etc etc... everything that goes into maintaining a game after it is released. Then they will work at an insanely slow pace. Deadlines will be missed by months... then years. Your userbase will grow frustrated and abandon your game, and your game will eventually fade away to oblivion.
Now lets say you had a maintenance clause in the contract and the company wasn't abiding buy it, and you want to enforce the terms of the contract. That would mean lawsuits. International lawsuits. Lots of money involved. You win? And then what?
Ok, lawsuits are messy. Maybe you will threaten to terminate the contract. Guess what? They don't need to work with you. There are 50 million F2P publishers out there, with more popping up all the time. The developers choose who publishes them, and not the other way around. And trust me, there are a lot of shitty publishers out there who are willing to pick up your shitty game with shitty maintenance and push it at shitty margins to their shitty third world markets. Its cutthroat.
See what I'm getting at here? Development is like 10% of the cost, the rest is all about maintenance. If you fall behind on maintenance, the game will become boring and unpopular, and will finally disappear. If you don't add new content, the same will happen. And you can't add content or maintain the game because the developers simply can't be bothered. End of story.
Now a couple of quick headaches from the security front, shit I have to deal with every day, and shit YOU will have to deal with if your game gets popular enough.
#1 Russian DDOS blackmail crews. If you are a browser game, they will DDOS your site. If you are a MMO game, they will reverse engineer your login and build it into their botnet, then start sending an infinite amount of login requests until your server goes down. Then, they will contact you and demand a weekly payment to stop their DDOSing. And what do you do? Pay them? Then 5 other crews will start DDOSing you in hopes of getting a share of the ransom. Hire security consultants like me? (I don't do network security, this is just a scenario I hear about all the time from other consultants) Expensive as fuck. And no guarantee of working. Hire a antiDDOS service? They're ineffectual. Good luck finding one that works. Go to the FBI? lol, they don't have time and try to appear like they care, but they really don't. Local law enforcement? In Russia? lol.
Scenario #2: Hackers
F2P games attract hackers from all over the world. You can't IP ban them because it seems like every fucking third world ISP has dynamic IP addresses. What do these hackers do? Wallhacks, teleport hacks, item duping, speed hacks, aimbot... you name it, I've seen it. They reverse engineer your client and hack it in ways you wouldn't think possible. Then they proceed to wreck havoc upon your legit users who are just trying to enjoy the game. Users will get frustrated and leave your game. Your game dies and fades away into oblivion. Again, what can you do against this? Hire consultants like me? Again, expensive. And then, what can we really do? We need to have access to the source code to patch the game against hacks, and yet the developers won't part with the source code. So in the end, I end up going in at machine code level and patching the executable of the game by hand, just because the dumbass devs are too lazy to do it themselves. This takes a lot of time. And I get paid by the hour. Ok, you don't want to hire consultants. You go with a third party game security solution like Gameguard. Have fun with that, lol. Almost all those major antihacks have public tutorials on how to bypass them. They update about once every 2 years, and are cracked the day after they update. They literally aren't worth the time it takes to implement them.
Scenario #3: Item dupers/frauders.
So lets assume you have a F2P MMO. How are you going to make money? Selling items, land, game gold, whatever, right? Well, bad news. These games are coded like shit. The developers never had security in mind. All the hackers I was ranting about in the previous paragraph are going to come out and duplicate whatever you are selling for FREE. They will duplicate premium items for free. They will duplicate gold for free. They will even unlock GM features and post hacks doing it for free. And how are you supposed to stop them? Again, the developers SIMPLY DON'T GIVE A FUCK. You're going to have hackers running around with premium items in front of GMs, and the GMs won't even be able to kick them because the hackers will have patched the kick feature in the game client. Once again, your user base will become frustrated and leave. Those who don't leave will never pay for anything in your game, because they can get the same premium shit for free just googling "name of game hacks".
As for the frauders: Pretty much, you will have people buying premium items with stolen credit cards. They will then quickly resell the items to someone on ebay or whatever for less then what you are selling the items for, and then they will disappear with that user's money. You find out with was a frauded item and cancel it a couple of days later. Legit user who bought the item comes crying to you. What do you do?
And that's all the shit I can think of off the top of my head. There's a lot more shit going around but I'm too lazy to type it out. These megaparagraphs I typed out above are just a drop in the bucket. F2P games are a fucking nightmare. I am more than happy to take my consulting pay, but god forbid that I ever get involved with that industry.
That is all.
hook it upPerhaps if that is his opinion. Realize though; if I was right instead of 'fucking crazy' -- your employer will have lost a consultant, and welcomed a competitor
If you're into serious insight I will allow you a view into private Chinese development circles, where you'll find the people offering sources on just about every recent browser mmorpg with sticker prices at 3~4000 yuan.
#1 Read what Tainted just wrote and do you still want her to "hook it up"?
#2 If there is so much money in this why is Evelynds pushing this so hard and offering up so much info? Vested interest? I think so, but what do I know.
#2 If there is so much money in this why is Evelynds pushing this so hard and offering up so much info? Vested interest? I think so, but what do I know.