He also told me that it takes three to four years to create an MMO, and that 100 million USD is needed not just for development of a market-competitive title, but also for a safety net."If you don't want to compete with these games, then certainly you could do it for less," he said. "It's 100 million if they want to be sure that when they mess up, that they have the money to recover," he clarified. "A lot of start-ups fail because they run out of money. It's not because they don't work hard; it's like 'Oops, it took an extra year or two, now what do we do?' If you look at the history of successful MMOs every one of them, except for 'Camelot,' took longer than was expected."
| "When you have an experienced team with great tech who's done this before, how much harder is that for somebody who's never done it?" |
I asked if Mythic's parent company EA spent 100 million USD on "Warhammer Online." "No, but you look at what we did spend, it was lot of money," he said. Jacobs would only tell me that they've spent south of 100 million USD on "Warhammer Online," and that's because he and his team have the experience and the technology behind the game. "We are one of the most experienced MMO teams in the industry, and we had to delay the game obviously more than once," he said. "And if we had that happen, when you have an experienced team with great tech who's done this before, how much harder is that for somebody who's never done it? No matter how talented the team is, they're going to make mistakes."
German Questioned Over Gamer's Murder
