500 Million to make ESO

RedTalon

Kharnis wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

Kharnis wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

Kharnis wrote: »

Gyudan wrote: »

jamesharv2005ub17_ESO wrote: »

Guy has a point Zenimax is more than just ESO.

true ... except ZOS specifically refers to this 300$ million investment in their own FAQ that I mentioned above and got LOLed for.

How are you paying for this?

ZeniMax Media recently announced a $300 million investment from Providence Equity Partners, and of course the massive success of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 only adds to the assets that helped fund ZeniMax Online. Suffice it to say, we're covered.

Maybe they're "covered" in debt now.

Did you bother to follow the link in that answer you quoted? Had you done so, you would have discovered this little piece of info:

Rockville, MD, October 25, 2007 – ZeniMax Media Inc. today announced the closing of a $300 million investment by Providence Equity Partners Inc. for convertible preferred stock of the Company. The proceeds of the investment will be used to fund future growth, increase game development and publishing, facilitate acquisitions, and finance massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

ZeniMax Media was founded in 1999 by Robert A. Altman, its Chairman and CEO, and through wholly owned subsidiaries creates and publishes original interactive entertainment content for gaming consoles (including the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, and the Nintendo DS and Wii), the PC, handheld/wireless devices, and online gaming. Last year its wholly owned subsidiary, Bethesda Softworks, released The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion®which was voted Best Game of 2006. Bethesda’s upcoming title, Fallout® 3, has already been featured on the cover of more than 20 magazines worldwide and has won accolades as one of most anticipated games for 2008.

"We believe that Providence will be an ideal partner for us as we build our businesses worldwide in the years ahead. Providence shares our strategic vision for the Company and is excited by the opportunity to help us move into a position of leadership in this industry,” said Mr. Altman.

“We are pleased to partner with one of the best managed companies in the videogame industry,” said Michael Dominguez, a Managing Director of Providence. “ZeniMax Media has an outstanding series of proven interactive entertainment content and a burgeoning position in the rapidly growing global video game market. We look forward to working with Robert to build value at ZeniMax Media over the long-term.”

Note the bolded.

You are aware that Bethesda Softworks has other online games in the works, right?

And that has what to do with Zenimax Online Studios' mission goals and the reason they had Providence Equity invest in them?

Because the money was given to ZeniMax Media, not the ZeniMax Online Studios. I doubt that ZOS got the entire 300 million.

Okay, I see what you're saying now. I'm thinking that two cups of coffee this morning wasn't quite enough for me.

clocksstoppe wrote: »

Kharnis wrote: »

Note the bolded.

Note that out of 4 different things they claimed to do with the money, you are assuming they did only one.

nice try.

Um...what? I bolded that part specifically to show you that this game didn't cost three hundred million dollars like you claimed, but that the money was going into setting up Zenimax Online Studios, and all current and future projects. Where are you getting that I assume they only did one thing?

I don't think people are going to get that ZOS was set up with more then ESO in mind pretty sure it says so on there site somewhere, and there are a heck of a lot other costs has you pointed out

Kilandros

I would be shocked--SHOCKED--if Bethesda didn't sink a couple of hundred million into ESO. TES is one of the most marketable game titles in existence. They aren't going to be stingy with a title that has the potential to be ridiculously profitable.

Besides, remember that ESO is built from the ground up. ZOS did all the coding, engine, etc. themselves in house. That ain't cheap.

LadyNerevar

egosumacunnus wrote: »

anyone know what they spent it on?

Without getting caught up in what exactly the budget was, here are a few things budgets are spent on:

-Employees. ZOS has a team of 200+ people, all of whom need to be paid. Senior/Lead level people get paid triple digests, so it doesn't take very many of them to add up to a million a year.
-Contractors/Outsourcing. These people are more expensive than employees, since their lack of benefits is made up for by more cold, hard cash.
-Technology. Computers and peripherals for those 200+ people, console dev kits, the software those people need to do their work, the middleware the game runs on, the massive servers needed to run it. Also the cost for having this website created and maintained, the software and server it runs on.
-The office space (ZOS takes up two buildings in Maryland alone), chairs, tables, paper towels, whiteboards, and other stuff that an office needs to function. Plus catering for all those crunch times, office parties to keep the morale up (ZOS' are totally dope black tie affairs and I am jealous every year).
-Marketing. Those Blur trailers were probably several million by themselves, since you're basically covering the cost of the four points above for another huge company. Plus the money needed to place ads in various media, which, again, is a pretty penny. Plus nice big booths in conventions. Plus other stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting.
-Various launch related costs (some of which probably haven't come up yet, since we're a while away from console launch), including the certification price, the price to get it translated/localized into other languages, the price to get it rated by various rating boards.
-The actual printing of the game. On disks and stuff. Plus the cost for designing and making the packaging, plus the cost for the creation of all the additional stuff that came with the collector's edition.
-Probably something else I'm forgetting.

This is a neat little article about an indie dev's cost for launching on XB1. Note that this does not include the actual creation of the game, and is an independent developer's story (which means big ol price cuts versus a giant publisher like Zenimax)

In short, tens of millions of dollars, or even a hundred million dollars, are absolutely a normal price to go into the development of an AAA title. Especially if that title is an MMO, which takes many years (something like half a decade, in ZOS' case) to develop.

Gyudan

I understand that the $300 million and $150 million figures could be shared between different structures inside Zenimax Media, so let's consider some other way to evaluate the production cost.

How many people work at ZOS? According to Linkedin (I hope the link works), there are 473 employees registered as active ZOS personnel. Let's say 500 to simplify (not everyone's in it, especially not the Loremaster).

If you consider a total production cost ratio of 100,000$/employee / year, which is pretty low in my opinion for a game design company, that's $50 million / year.

ESO had been in production for 7 years before launch (even if the development didn't require that many people at the beginning) and if you add the licence fees and the company HQ in the US and Europe, the $500 million figure doesn't seem so far away now.

None of this is accurate of course, but ESO probably cost closer to $500 million than to $100 million.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate.

ZOS has 250 employees now according to wikipedia.
But during dev had more QA and had more voice actors bills to pay. Probably more marketing costs as well.
So let's say $1.5M a month for, or $18M a year to stay more than afloat.

Let's consider your 473 employees figure is accurate. Let's even beoverly generous and consider it was that number for the whole 7 years.
473 is a 83.2% increase from 250, so 18M a year become $34M.
For 7 years that's $238M.

We've been generous several times in these estimates, so it is likely less, but it's better to have a worst case scenario.

From what we can gather from some sources of average fiability, ESO pulled $111M in the first 6 months. This includes the box sales, the steam release and sale and the fact that the imperial edition outsold the standard edition by 5 times the numbers, alegedly.
Still, reimbursing nearly half of your investment in the first 6 months is impressive.

Even if subs are extremely low now, let's say 200K, and we use the $18M a year in costs, that's still $36M revenue, $18M profit a year.
The chinese chicken industry is soiling itself over this kind of profit with Warframe.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-16-digital-extremes-sells-61-per-cent-of-shares-for-usd73-million

If you add in the console launch which has the potential of selling at least a million copies accross both platform, they can get ROI in under a year.

That's what motivated the b2p switch, not long term profit. Investors just wanted to get their money back quickly to go spend it on another short term venture. They have no interest of seeing ESO become a cash cow.

For the record, if a more "niche" game like Eve Online has 700k subs, $126M revenue, so can ESO with a susbcription.
But heh, that will unfortunately never happen now.

Fruity_Ninja

jjf42001_ESO wrote: »

cgi and voice actors and marketing lol

I imagine John Cleese and Dumbledore cost them a fair bit, amongst the other known names that were involved in the voicing side of it.

It is a nice touch though, adds a lot to the production quality. I roll alts all the time just so I can listen to Dumbledore's deep tones over again.

Brittany_Joy

Kilandros wrote: »

I would be shocked--SHOCKED--if Bethesda didn't sink a couple of hundred million into ESO. TES is one of the most marketable game titles in existence. They aren't going to be stingy with a title that has the potential to be ridiculously profitable.

Besides, remember that ESO is built from the ground up. ZOS did all the coding, engine, etc. themselves in house. That ain't cheap.

Eh, not really. They still used the champion engine, all they did was make a few adjustments. They have a lot of money in advertisements and multiple platform support which is very bad because it is just a money sink without any of it going towards the actual game.

YstradClud

A multi-platform mmo of this scale may well end up costing a lot to get off the ground (i have no idea how much it is costing them) but I'm sure they will be well placed once they get set-up and have their systems in place across PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

eisberg

Kilandros wrote: »

I would be shocked--SHOCKED--if Bethesda didn't sink a couple of hundred million into ESO. TES is one of the most marketable game titles in existence. They aren't going to be stingy with a title that has the potential to be ridiculously profitable.

Besides, remember that ESO is built from the ground up. ZOS did all the coding, engine, etc. themselves in house. That ain't cheap.

ESO uses Hero Engine, they didn't create the engine, same engine as SWTOR.
http://www.heroengine.com/2012/05/heroengine-licensee-zenimax-announces-elder-scrolls-online/

fromtesonlineb16_ESO

egosumacunnus wrote: »

Apparently this was the cost of developing ESO, anyone know what they spent it on?

Where did you get that from, that was the cost of SW:TOR, figures I've seen for ESO are $300m.

Gyudan

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate

Funcom has 162 employees registered on Linkedin. Zenimax Online has 473. I think your calculations should be based on those figures instead of old ones from wikipedia.

@eisberg: ZOS bought the Hero engine licence during the development process and built their own engine afterwards.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

Gyudan wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate

Funcom has 162 employees registered on Linkedin. Zenimax Online has 473. I think your calculations should be based on those figures instead of old ones from wikipedia.

@eisberg: ZOS bought the Hero engine licence during the development process and built their own engine afterwards.

As you comment the data, I take that you agree with the process. Correct?

I guess you're right, we should use numbers coming from the same sources.
I personally trust linkedin less than wikipedia though. I work as a developper and most people I know do not have those kind of accounts.
I do get invite spam mails from friends that are more in careers like communication, HR and marketing. Annoying.
It's more likely that wikipedia stats are more accurate, the 250 number comes from an article in 2012, but let's do the maths just for the sake of discution.

With 162 employees, funcom has positive cash flow at $1.43M
Let's say the needs with all PR and voice acting during dev bumps that up to $1.5M a month necesarry during dev.

Let's consider your 473 employees figure is accurate. Let's even be overly generous and consider it was that number for the whole 7 years.
473 is a 191.98% increase from 162, so 18M a year becomes $52.5564M.
For 7 years that's $367.8948M.
A bump of $129M from the $238M in the previous estimates.

And that's the worst case scenario with some exagerations:
- Funcom has positive cashflow, so their cost must be less, potentially much less
- I increased from $1.43M a month to $1.5M at fairly random
- I considered the max employee count as if it was constant when it must have been les in average.


This change of estimates should be reimboursed a bit slower, but "quite easily" too:
- presumed $111M from first 6 months. (estimated 1.2M box sales)(superdata)
- Estimated 300k subs now, so $27M till june launch
- Box sales for console probably around 3M copies so $180M
- 300k+300k+300k subs for 6 months: $81M

$399M revenue over 18 months, for an operating cost of $27M.
Worst case scenario ROI met with some extra pocket money.

I'm assuming a LOT of things, but I think I've been conservative with the subscription numbers on PC, the potential extra box sales and the subscription on consoles. The console market being much larger than the PC one for the TES franchise it has potential to be much larger.
If you see anything way too how of this world, let me know.

But god the sub model is so much superior. I knew it but I didn't expect that much. Oo

danno8

eisberg wrote: »

Kilandros wrote: »

I would be shocked--SHOCKED--if Bethesda didn't sink a couple of hundred million into ESO. TES is one of the most marketable game titles in existence. They aren't going to be stingy with a title that has the potential to be ridiculously profitable.

Besides, remember that ESO is built from the ground up. ZOS did all the coding, engine, etc. themselves in house. That ain't cheap.

ESO uses Hero Engine, they didn't create the engine, same engine as SWTOR.
http://www.heroengine.com/2012/05/heroengine-licensee-zenimax-announces-elder-scrolls-online/

Not quite:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/25/why-the-elder-scrolls-online-isn-39-t-using-heroengine.aspx

Wifeaggro13

Gyudan wrote: »

Detailed numbers here.

You can find some info on their FAQ and in their own press release about the first $300 million investment that they received from Providence Equity Partners in 2007.

In 2010 they got an extra $150 million from the same investors, announced here on their website.

Who's FoS now @SFBryan18?

You realize this is not for just ESO they have other projects. The cost of starting a new studio is not cheap i would be shocked if the actual cost of ESO launch product for PC was even 180 mil. Securing funds is not spending it all on the game. there are other irons in the fire man relax

c0rp

eisberg wrote: »

Kilandros wrote: »

I would be shocked--SHOCKED--if Bethesda didn't sink a couple of hundred million into ESO. TES is one of the most marketable game titles in existence. They aren't going to be stingy with a title that has the potential to be ridiculously profitable.

Besides, remember that ESO is built from the ground up. ZOS did all the coding, engine, etc. themselves in house. That ain't cheap.

ESO uses Hero Engine, they didn't create the engine, same engine as SWTOR.
http://www.heroengine.com/2012/05/heroengine-licensee-zenimax-announces-elder-scrolls-online/

OH GOD..here we go again...(makes popcorn)

Faugaun

Tamanous wrote: »

People really need to stop posting stoned.

When the rumor started a long time ago at $200 million there was someone who then posted the cost was $300 and his defense of it was that "$300 million isn't much different than $200 million".

SAY WHAT?!

So if I give you $100 million dollars and then take it away you won't notice the difference? Most here likely don't even know what it feels like to have more than 4 digits in their bank accounts. If you spend over 50% of your net worth on a video card for your computer PLEASE stop talking about corporate level investments ... PLEASE!

@Tamanous‌


Can those of us who received a 4-digit dividend check last month and 5 digits in income tax returns keep talking about corporate level investments?

Faugaun

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate.

ZOS has 250 employees now according to wikipedia.
But during dev had more QA and had more voice actors bills to pay. Probably more marketing costs as well.
So let's say $1.5M a month for, or $18M a year to stay more than afloat.

Let's consider your 473 employees figure is accurate. Let's even beoverly generous and consider it was that number for the whole 7 years.
473 is a 83.2% increase from 250, so 18M a year become $34M.
For 7 years that's $238M.

We've been generous several times in these estimates, so it is likely less, but it's better to have a worst case scenario.

From what we can gather from some sources of average fiability, ESO pulled $111M in the first 6 months. This includes the box sales, the steam release and sale and the fact that the imperial edition outsold the standard edition by 5 times the numbers, alegedly.
Still, reimbursing nearly half of your investment in the first 6 months is impressive.

Even if subs are extremely low now, let's say 200K, and we use the $18M a year in costs, that's still $36M revenue, $18M profit a year.
The chinese chicken industry is soiling itself over this kind of profit with Warframe.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-16-digital-extremes-sells-61-per-cent-of-shares-for-usd73-million

If you add in the console launch which has the potential of selling at least a million copies accross both platform, they can get ROI in under a year.

That's what motivated the b2p switch, not long term profit. Investors just wanted to get their money back quickly to go spend it on another short term venture. They have no interest of seeing ESO become a cash cow.

For the record, if a more "niche" game like Eve Online has 700k subs, $126M revenue, so can ESO with a susbcription.
But heh, that will unfortunately never happen now.

Reference funcom...TSW was designed to be cheap to maintain and cheap to rapidly produce new content in the future. This came up multiple times before the game left p2p and was released by the devs themselves. I don't have the sources off hand but its what happened. They had planned on a smaller subscriber base (...less income) and implemented appropriate systems to produce a niche game.

TES is completely different and I don't think it is fair to compare operating and development costs between the two.

kenpachi480

Tamanous wrote: »

People really need to stop posting stoned.

When the rumor started a long time ago at $200 million there was someone who then posted the cost was $300 and his defense of it was that "$300 million isn't much different than $200 million".

SAY WHAT?!

So if I give you $100 million dollars and then take it away you won't notice the difference? Most here likely don't even know what it feels like to have more than 4 digits in their bank accounts. If you spend over 50% of your net worth on a video card for your computer PLEASE stop talking about corporate level investments ... PLEASE!

people need to stop posting stoned you say, maybe i am stoned for noticing, but shouldnt your hole (i striked it out for you) be directed at the person in the thread where you first came across this frustration, the only thing your message relates to the topic is the subject of your frustration,.

Kilandros

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate.

ZOS has 250 employees now according to wikipedia.
But during dev had more QA and had more voice actors bills to pay. Probably more marketing costs as well.
So let's say $1.5M a month for, or $18M a year to stay more than afloat.

Let's consider your 473 employees figure is accurate. Let's even beoverly generous and consider it was that number for the whole 7 years.
473 is a 83.2% increase from 250, so 18M a year become $34M.
For 7 years that's $238M.

We've been generous several times in these estimates, so it is likely less, but it's better to have a worst case scenario.

From what we can gather from some sources of average fiability, ESO pulled $111M in the first 6 months. This includes the box sales, the steam release and sale and the fact that the imperial edition outsold the standard edition by 5 times the numbers, alegedly.
Still, reimbursing nearly half of your investment in the first 6 months is impressive.

Even if subs are extremely low now, let's say 200K, and we use the $18M a year in costs, that's still $36M revenue, $18M profit a year.
The chinese chicken industry is soiling itself over this kind of profit with Warframe.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-16-digital-extremes-sells-61-per-cent-of-shares-for-usd73-million

If you add in the console launch which has the potential of selling at least a million copies accross both platform, they can get ROI in under a year.

That's what motivated the b2p switch, not long term profit. Investors just wanted to get their money back quickly to go spend it on another short term venture. They have no interest of seeing ESO become a cash cow.

For the record, if a more "niche" game like Eve Online has 700k subs, $126M revenue, so can ESO with a susbcription.
But heh, that will unfortunately never happen now.

You cannot, quite simply, break down the assets of a multi-million dollar corporation in a few speculative paragraphs. Its assets are far more complex than this. End of story.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

Faugaun wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate.

ZOS has 250 employees now according to wikipedia.
But during dev had more QA and had more voice actors bills to pay. Probably more marketing costs as well.
So let's say $1.5M a month for, or $18M a year to stay more than afloat.

Let's consider your 473 employees figure is accurate. Let's even beoverly generous and consider it was that number for the whole 7 years.
473 is a 83.2% increase from 250, so 18M a year become $34M.
For 7 years that's $238M.

We've been generous several times in these estimates, so it is likely less, but it's better to have a worst case scenario.

From what we can gather from some sources of average fiability, ESO pulled $111M in the first 6 months. This includes the box sales, the steam release and sale and the fact that the imperial edition outsold the standard edition by 5 times the numbers, alegedly.
Still, reimbursing nearly half of your investment in the first 6 months is impressive.

Even if subs are extremely low now, let's say 200K, and we use the $18M a year in costs, that's still $36M revenue, $18M profit a year.
The chinese chicken industry is soiling itself over this kind of profit with Warframe.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-16-digital-extremes-sells-61-per-cent-of-shares-for-usd73-million

If you add in the console launch which has the potential of selling at least a million copies accross both platform, they can get ROI in under a year.

That's what motivated the b2p switch, not long term profit. Investors just wanted to get their money back quickly to go spend it on another short term venture. They have no interest of seeing ESO become a cash cow.

For the record, if a more "niche" game like Eve Online has 700k subs, $126M revenue, so can ESO with a susbcription.
But heh, that will unfortunately never happen now.

Reference funcom...TSW was designed to be cheap to maintain and cheap to rapidly produce new content in the future. This came up multiple times before the game left p2p and was released by the devs themselves. I don't have the sources off hand but its what happened. They had planned on a smaller subscriber base (...less income) and implemented appropriate systems to produce a niche game.

TES is completely different and I don't think it is fair to compare operating and development costs between the two.

Kilandros wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Funcom has 288 employees and has positive cashflow at $1.43M a month. The equivalent of 95k subscribers.
http://gamepolitics.com/2014/03/05/funcom-q4-revenues-down-thanks-poor-secret-world-performance
This makes sense, the average employee is not going to be an engineer or a top artist. There are a lot of QA and other lower paying jobs. Inclusing taxes and work conditions, less than $5000 a month per employee is a fair estimate.

ZOS has 250 employees now according to wikipedia.
But during dev had more QA and had more voice actors bills to pay. Probably more marketing costs as well.
So let's say $1.5M a month for, or $18M a year to stay more than afloat.

Let's consider your 473 employees figure is accurate. Let's even beoverly generous and consider it was that number for the whole 7 years.
473 is a 83.2% increase from 250, so 18M a year become $34M.
For 7 years that's $238M.

We've been generous several times in these estimates, so it is likely less, but it's better to have a worst case scenario.

From what we can gather from some sources of average fiability, ESO pulled $111M in the first 6 months. This includes the box sales, the steam release and sale and the fact that the imperial edition outsold the standard edition by 5 times the numbers, alegedly.
Still, reimbursing nearly half of your investment in the first 6 months is impressive.

Even if subs are extremely low now, let's say 200K, and we use the $18M a year in costs, that's still $36M revenue, $18M profit a year.
The chinese chicken industry is soiling itself over this kind of profit with Warframe.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-16-digital-extremes-sells-61-per-cent-of-shares-for-usd73-million

If you add in the console launch which has the potential of selling at least a million copies accross both platform, they can get ROI in under a year.

That's what motivated the b2p switch, not long term profit. Investors just wanted to get their money back quickly to go spend it on another short term venture. They have no interest of seeing ESO become a cash cow.

For the record, if a more "niche" game like Eve Online has 700k subs, $126M revenue, so can ESO with a susbcription.
But heh, that will unfortunately never happen now.

You cannot, quite simply, break down the assets of a multi-million dollar corporation in a few speculative paragraphs. Its assets are far more complex than this. End of story.

I get both your points. That is why I over evaluated things several times.
First of which is that I took what Funcom considers good revenue with positive cash flow, then added a bit on top, considered it as the operating costs as if there were no profit, expanded it to be proportional to ZOS at its maximum number of emploees and then considered that that maximum number was constant throughout development.

For instance, with the estimates I did, it would mean that an employee and the resources necessary for him to work, would cost $8800 a month.
Seeing as most employees are QA or other low income jobs, this is just a gross overestimation.
I live in France as a programmer. Here taxes and rents are huge, yet not even a senior developer would cost that much to a company monthly. There is simply no way that the cost of their most expensive employees is the average of the company.

In short, I attempted to estimate a worst case scenario. I am certain that I am wrong. However it is more likely that the actual costs were much lower than higher. But we can't know that for sure.

mutharex

When trolls get desperate....

LuxLunae

For sure we know they are now at the break even point as that would only be the time I would ever go B2P if I had an online game. I think that the quality of the patches will be far better now. As if I was one to program a game, I would like the leeway to actually think of a better solution to actually fix something rather than having to be forced to throw something out in a timely manner thanks to my loyal subs. Throwing money at me can NOT make my brain work better or faster!!

The sub money could be used to hire more people to find a solution faster but at some point the brain limit occurs. So they may not be able to find the solution in the time allotted. It would take a lot of trial and error phases to make sure the problem went away.

I prefer the slow increment upwards model instead of the perfection model on day one. The perfection model is rigid and is hard to change code as many things depend on certain constants. However the increment model is more versatile as everything isn't intertwined.

Darkintellect

@egosumacunnus
Zenimax Media used the money in...

1) Development and marketing of Skyrim
2) Purchase of Fallout series from Interplay (hole operation which this money 3 years later helped reallocate)
3) Purchase of office used in Zenimax Online ventures (not just for ESO)
4) Other licensing ventures and interests
5) Development and Marketing of ESO
6) Aquisition of id Software, Arkane Studios, Tango Gameworks, MachineGames and the founding of Battlecry Studios
7) All other expenses to include umbrella funding for failed projects or failed joint segments.

You look at a blanket figure and post inane babble. At least acknowledge that Zenimax Media is a division of Bethesda Softworks. Zenimax Media is the parent company of...
-Bethesda Game Studios
-Zenimax Online Studios
-id Software (aq 2009)
-Arkane Studios (aq 2010)
-Tango Gameworks (aq 2010)
-MachineGames (aq 2010)
- Battlecry Studios. (fnd 212)

Merlin13KAGL

LadyNerevar wrote: »

In short, tens of millions of dollars, or even a hundred million dollars, are absolutely a normal price to go into the development of an AAA title. Especially if that title is an MMO, which takes many years (something like half a decade, in ZOS' case) to develop.

@LadyNerevar‌ , I'll counter that by mentioning the income from the ridiculous number of collectibles helped pay for a good portion of things, as well.

Lotta $ from that stuff, which is mostly profit.

Brittany_Joy wrote: »

Kilandros wrote: »

I would be shocked--SHOCKED--if Bethesda didn't sink a couple of hundred million into ESO. TES is one of the most marketable game titles in existence. They aren't going to be stingy with a title that has the potential to be ridiculously profitable.

Besides, remember that ESO is built from the ground up. ZOS did all the coding, engine, etc. themselves in house. That ain't cheap.

Eh, not really. They still used the champion engine, all they did was make a few adjustments. They have a lot of money in advertisements and multiple platform support which is very bad because it is just a money sink without any of it going towards the actual game.

@Brittany_Joy‌ ( @Kilandros ) , eh...most definitely.

It was the Hero engine, and it was only used for initial development so the artists could get started with meshes and modeling. It was later completely replace with ZoS proprietary. Every ES title has always been a custom engine.

It was in the initial development. It's the only reason it receives mention in the loading sequence, just as Bethesda (consulting only), though they had nothing to do with the initial code.

LadyNerevar

I'll counter that by mentioning the income from the ridiculous number of collectibles helped pay for a good portion of things, as well.

Lotta $ from that stuff, which is mostly profit.

It'll have helped after the fact, yes, but not during the development of the game. I'm also not entirely sure how much profit they're making off of it all, especially since it's split between Zenimax Media and Treehouse, rather than going directly to anything Zenimax Online does.

egosumacunnus

Think i have sussed it.

499 Million paid to Bethesda to make the game world and engine. Explains how amazing, rich and detailed it is.

999,999 "Business meetings"

1 left to pay Zenimax to hire some monkeys that made all the ancillary systems, mail, store ect. (Seriously original e-Mail worked better)

Nice little no risk venture for Bethesda as it all goes down with Zenimax. Fallout 4 should have appeared by now but they where busy doing this.

Going on past competence i expect the move to pay to win will involve charging laughable amounts for imaginary stuff instead of something everyone can afford. Especially bank space and character slots, the latter being preped months ago then not released and the former requiring changing the quantity integer in the new code.

High gold price for horses, yeah we sell those.
High gold prices for bank space yup they will sell that
High gold prices for respec, that too i reckon. (Obviously reduced but still high to a new player)

It all starts to make sense..