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you do realize that you are playing for free right now right? Than how can it be too expencive if you are playing for free?
Please no need to answer, we all know the answer.
|||Dog of War is right, he is a god, let's respect him from now on, since in real life he must be able to talk like that!!|||Acting like a jerk to a simple post is unfair. What he is saying is true, it’s too much. He does not want to spend 100$ dollars on a bundle setup and I agree that is too high. I can go out, spend 60 on an rts and have the entire game unlocked for me and everyone else who uses my computer. And they can all have their own online accounts without having to worry about buying anything else they need to play. I come from a family of 5 all gamers, if I pay 60 for a game then everyone in the house can play. I am still new to the game this is why I came to the forums first (go figure the first thing I see is someone being rude). Truthfully I would rather spend 60 one time to get a game like this in full then pay 20 here, 20 there, 10 here… you get my drift. From what I read there are three things that you can buy for this game, why could I have not gotten the whole game in a 60 dollar bundle pack like every other rts? When I buy a normal 60 dollar game I get everything the game can offer & I get to make as many online accounts for that game as I want, why is it wrong for the OP to argue about the way this game works?
By the way “you do realize that you are playing for free right now right?” Yea he does notice that he wants to spend money? Please no need to answer, we all know the answer.
|||You've played every RTS game, but how many MMO games have you played? I've played Ultima Online, EveryQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and Pirates of the Burning Sea. I paid around $40 for the client and anywhere from $10 to $15 a month just for access to the servers, which was touch and go at times for all those titles.
I think a $30 entry into the game for your family is cheap. I was paying $26 a month so my daughter and I could play World of Warcraft, plus I was buying two of all the client software packages and expansions. I would probably get Egypt for one of you and Greece for the other, then allow your daughter to play co-op and pvp as a Free player until another Civ is released. It's just a suggestion.
|||While the link I'm going to post isn't necessarily relevant to the OP's concern of initial price, and won't scale to the project size Koster talks about, it certainly hits on your gripe of needing to pay "20 here, 20 there, 10 here".
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/busmodels.shtml
If you don't know who Raph Koster is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
Bottom line... While this game isn't a traditional MMO, it certainly has the multi-player part. That aspect is going to be hosted on their servers. Those servers cost money to run. "Normal" games with a multi-player feature are typically hosted by the base player's machine, with exception to official servers that some games have. Those games are not MMOs, though, and do not have to pay for ongoing development of content. Also, FPS/twitch games use servers (if they even offer them) that are very, very low cost to setup and/or lease per month.
There is also the fact that online games have ongoing development for content. The developers do not work for free.
A good amount of the people in the following link will need to be compensated for their work:
http://www.ageofempiresonline.com/credits_aoeo/
|||Those servers cost money to run.
Server and ISP costs are pretty much nominal these days. A few hundred a month for a game like this, if that.
It's the continued development costs you mentioned though that requires a fair bit of money, plus customer service.
I had to look at it like buying a civ pack was like buying a lifetime sub, and comparing that to a MMO it would be like paying $20 and being able to play warriors in WoW for life with no further subscription cost. If you make that connection, that this is an online game, then the price starts to feel less crazy. I think once they get things like an auction house in and better multiplayer then it will really start to feel like a MMO.
|||Your view is too simplistic.
You do not know their type of infrastructure for the farm. If they are using OC-3 bandwidth (typical for a normal MMO), the monthly fee can start at $15,000 and move all the way up to $100,000 depending on the lines/switches. Obviously, they won't be using a high-end fee OC-3, and maybe not even that type at all with the amount of pipe they'd need. Even a T-3 will fall in the $3,000 - $15,000 range, though...
The "server and ISP costs" are not comparable to a simple shooter-game server that any normal gamer can lease, such as this:
http://www.hypernia.com/game_servers-gaming.php
You need dedicated servers with tons of redundancy, back-ups, RAID array, etc. (as explained by Koster in the earlier link) like these:
http://www.hypernia.com/dedicated_game_servers_us.php
Those look to be lower end machines, FYI.
You may first think... "Well, that's not expensive at all"... Sure, one machine isn't, but when you're expecting hundreds and/or thousands of players online in a simultaneous manner, you need to have a server cluster (AKA farm). Who knows how many machines that would be for this game...? Pre-CU SWG used 80 machines. Darkfall Online uses 80 blades. EVE Online is close to 90 or 100 blades, if I'm not mistaken. Multiply that by the per machine cost that Hypernia lists, and you're getting some big figures. AoE Online won't need nearly as much load balancing and things of that nature, since it's not an open world, but multiple machines are still needed. There also has to be more than enough bandwidth flowing.
There is a reason why you don't see Hypernia list MMO hosting costs... It can be a whole lot of $$$:
http://www.hypernia.com/mmog.php
Now, if this company only expects 100 people to play... Their basement, a normal ISP connection, and a single machine will work just fine. ;)
|||$60 too much? well I guess you haven't been to a game store before|||Server and ISP costs are pretty much nominal these days. A few hundred a month for a game like this, if that.The server costs for running COHO was projected at between US$5 and $10 million a year. This game is much like COHO except there is ALOT more server side content. I guess that game must have failed because they didn't have the ISP and techs that you hire ^^
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The online component of this game is essentially just matchmaking and chat hosting. All the content is run locally or hosted by one of the players in multi-player. The server just keeps tabs on what people are doing and stores their inventory and maps, which requires very little power. It's not like a MMO where all the gameplay is run in real time on the servers which requires quite a bit more power and money.
That site you listed is also a mainstream/public hosting site. Retail prices designed for the masses. They are making a lot of money doing what they do. A company like MS has their own farms, and the actual overhead of running these servers is almost nothing. The only real cost is paying the people to maintain them.
People host private MMOs (real ones, like L2 or WoW) with 10s of thousands of players online at once and get by on only a couple hundred a month in donations. It's totally illegal, but I'm just saying anyone can do it.
I have no idea where you are getting $5-10 million a year from, that's impossibly high. Maybe you are confusing development and support costs. Hardware costs almost nothing to run and maintain. People cost a lot.
Capital cities are persistent. They are online as long as the server is up, and other players can visit. Obviously, that isnotrun by a client-machine.
Your "the server just keeps tabs on what people are doing and stores their inventory and maps" statement is what any MMO cluster does. That's what theyhaveto do, hence... Theonlinepart. And... Everything in the game is real time. Not sure where you were going with that.
PvP/Co-op is not run by a chosen client's machine. That would be absolutely laughable and a hack-fest waiting to happen. The servers are run by Microsoft Studios. Gas Powered Games are the developers... Microsoft Studios is also the publisher... It's quite possible GPG has to pay an infrastructure lease. They definitely pay something. MS isn't going to publish and host for free.
The private servers that are serving thousands of players online at one time are very few. I know WoW has 2 or 3, although those "online" numbers are often inflated to gain more users. To move towards your point, those servers are not run for only a couple hundred a month. I've already explained what you need for hundreds and/or thousands of players online at once. It is 100% impossible to run that many users with a machine or two and a typical home or low-end host connection. The pipe would be so throttled down that people wouldn't be able to move if they could even log into the game at all.
The SWG Emu team upgraded their Denver machine to 2x AMD Opteron 6128 (that's 16 cores) in February and recently upgraded to a 1Gbit connection from 100Mbit and it still lags with only 100-200 (generous value) players at peak. Cost: $900 per month.
http://www.swgemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18161
AoE Online is going to run a lot more hardware and pipe than that, since it's safe to assume they expect a whole lot of people to play.
|||@ Onatac:
Glad someone is finally seeing the reality of this situation. I planned to write this up a while back, but i never got around to it.
Well done!
|||20€ is too much for a game.
But lol!
Ok go away then. Seriously: laughable.
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