Where Did/Does Our Money Go?

SantieClaws · November 2016

The money khajiit assumes it goes on repairing all the mobs and NPCs before they can respawn.

Since the Dark Brotherhood this has become much more expensive.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

idk · November 2016

@Ch4mpTW

The money we pay Zos clearly goes into continued development of the game, maintenance of the equipment/server matrix, overhead costs such as management that do not directly deal with code or equipment and we can expect there is some profit left over that goes to future game development and profit for the stockholders.

Really just a normal business.

danno8 · November 2016

Egonieser wrote: »

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

Nerouyn wrote: »

Armitas wrote: »

Where does our cash go...?

This game cost a buttload of money to make. It's probably one of it not the biggest budget MMOs ever.

They could do that because they've made a fortune from single player games like the TES ones and Fallout and were banking on the Elder Scrolls IP being a hit. But like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars before it, fizzled instead.

Having those successful single player games means I'm confident ESO won't ever be sold off or shut down. But they'll be expected to try to recoup the original costs of development and pay for ongoing development.

That's where the cash is going.

Damn, that's messed up if that's true. Them basically milking utters until dry, and not really fronting cash for true quality testing and performance enhancement.

Why would you do that to a player base of a franchise as popular as Elder Scrolls though? Driving the game completely away from lore is 1 thing. But not even giving a damn to invest money into making the game better performance-wise to help out those who invested their dollars to lace the developer's pockets? That's grimey. Lol.

ESO is the only game I've seen where the player base has to literally snap out on the game's devs constantly to see major changes. Or rather get really upset to see change. A lot of devs want to try and make the overall population happy. When the majority of people are complaining day in and day out about the same thing damn near, and the stuff lasts for months...? That's a problem.

Investors and suits are not interested about how and why and what goes on in the game. They have a deadline by which time the quota has to be met or devs/publishers are in deep trouble. So there probably isn't enough money to invest into the product itself, but more to pay off the investors their share and somewhat keep the maintenance costs going.
They probably don't make much of a profit, instead they make (just a guess) enough to keep the game running and have a skeleton crew to slowly make little incremental updates (like we see since Orsinium). After the initial costs have been paid off and no more investors are at their throats demanding their millions+interest back, maybe then we can expect some kind of quality.
At least that's how it usually works, but Zenimax Inc is a rich and big corporation so it's probably not as bad as I think it is, but noone knows for sure except ZoS themselves and that sort of info is mostly confidential.

Zenimax and all its subsiduaries are a privately owned company.

Cherryblossom · November 2016

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

After doing some thinking for a bit while playing another game created by a somewhat similar size group of developers, I couldn't help but wonder where our money goes on ESO.

Where does our cash go...?

No seriously. Where does it go? The customer service has gone downhill incredibly fast. There's no more in-game GM's (Game Masters). The testing of ESO seems to have gone downhill, as every single patch there's a load of things that are either still not fixed or are newly broken. The overall online performance is pretty bad with lag having invaded PvE after at 1 point having been only a Cyrodiil thing (but even at 1 point there was no Cyrodiil lag). The combat team doesn't seem to have 'balance' too much of a concern, as patch after patch things seem to have been in favor of stamina-based builds. Not to mention constantly pushing out things that make stamina more and more appealing than magicka. And so on.

So where did it all go? I mean... ZOS apparently was rich enough to give away a boat load of cash to someone who supposedly doesn't even play the game regularly, as well as is doing another giveaway type of thing now. Meanwhile there are more and more complaints about the base of the game, and the game's overall performance. As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't even have an adequate support team. So where is all of the cash going then? Anyone know? Where's my money?

I can only assume you weren't here from launch and think things were different at launch!

arrowzagub17_ESO · November 2016

Nerouyn wrote
They're a business. They're supposed to make a profit. They definitely spent a lot on development.

Just look at the quality and size of the game. It dwarfs most other MMOs.

We know that $300 million was pumped in specifically for MMO development. The same firm dropped another $150 on them a few years later - though that wasn't attached specifically to ESO.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143333/http://zenimax.com/news_pressrelease10.25.07.htm

Most other triple A MMOs cost (we know from publicly reported financials) under $100 million US to make. Many under 50.

Did you read that press release?

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

300 million was not specifically for just ESO. So I seriously doubt they spent 300 million to make ESO.

Rouven · November 2016

SantieClaws wrote: »

The money khajiit assumes it goes on repairing all the mobs and NPCs before they can respawn.

Since the Dark Brotherhood this has become much more expensive.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

This cost was actually offset with the fact that NPCs are not sent to leveling-camp anymore.

They have also gone over to one-size-fit's-all armour - take a closer look next time, you might notice them pulling their guards up before recklessly leaping into the air.