Quote:
Originally Posted by GRIM
How was Neocron / Neocron 2 an indie game?
It may fall into that niche today - not surprising since development had dried up for so long and the underlying architecture was built well over a decade ago. For most of the development time there were at least a dozen people working on Neocron full time, though. Not AAA, sure, but indie - I dont agree with that. It had financial backing of investors, major publishers etc.
I did not mean to imply that development costs for NC3 would equal any of the games quoted for reference. Those are just well known titles that are built on modern engines and that people can relate to. Also, it nicely illustrates the added complexity of developing a MMORPG at scale, compared to a regular multiplayer or even single player game. From what I have seen, you can easily triple or quadruple a budget when talking MMORPG.
Alright then, let's look at another game which does not belong in the AAA category either, nor does it qualify as a small indie project: Wasteland 2.
It's development budget is in excess of 2 million $US, not including money raised through Steam sales and post-release income. They use an engine that is more affordable than UE4 at scale (Unity) and they deal with a lot less complexity, compared to building a MMORPGFPS architecture.
Black Prophecy - developed by 30-40 employees plus additional contractors over a 4 year period. Assuming an average head cost of just $30k (poor bastards), you're looking at roughly 3-5 million just for staff. Add costs for rent, equipment, licenses and 3rd party materials. Now even assuming that a Neocron sequel is so much easier to develop than BP, since a lot of the game design and concept creation is already covered. Half the staff and half the development time - you are still looking at a couple of MILLIONS that it will cost to develop the game.
A couple of millions is what I said before and if you like it or not, it will hold.
So please stop whining about me comparing NC with AAA titles.
P.S:
On the topic of comparing apples to oranges - how many of those "just a few developer" indie projects you know and/or were involved in had the scope of Neocron or were even MMORPGs? None? Well, never mind ...
