And the most important part about using a game engine is how ridiculously productive we can be.
There are teams of highly skilled developers working on them full time so we can focus on the actual game. If we don't create our own game engine and instead use a game engine like Unity (feel free to check out our Unity Tutorials), then we already save a few millions of development costs (or in our case, maybe something around 5 years of work) for a decent graphics-, physics-, networking-, scripting- and audio library. There are secretaries that have to be paid to deal with boring paper work. There are admins that have to be paid to watch the servers. There are still lawyers that need to be paid in order to not get sued one week after the release and there is still a data center that has to be running 24/7 in order to support thousands of players each day.
That's a lot of time.Įven if you manage to come up with the code all on your own, there are still no 3D models, textures, sounds, story or skills in your game. Assuming you can work on it 10 hours a day and assuming that you work twice as fast as the experts that worked on WoW did, that makes it 5.000 days or 14 years of work just for the code. If we assume that about 30 million of those 50 million went into paying developers to create the code, and if we assume that those developers worked for 30$ per hour this means that it took about one million hours to create the code.
And since the major costs in Software development are personnel costs, a major part of those 50 million dollars would fall away, if you were able to come up with the code all on your own. Now the thing about us indie developers is that we work on our games without anyone paying us for it. If you just got into game development, chances are high that you don't have that much money to invest into a game. Expensive, Expensive, ExpensiveĪccording to rumors, the early version of World of Warcraft did cost about 50 million dollars to develop. If you think about it for a while, even making a simple MMORPG with just the basic features is about as big as making an early version of Firefox, Photoshop or whatever other big software you can think of right now. Developing a architecture that big is a really hard task. What most people forget about MMORPGs is that they are huge software projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. MMORPG servers have to be able to handle thousands of players at once, they have to be secure, fast and stable. Making a massive multiplayer one is almost impossible. If you are only interested in a solution, then check out our Unity MMORPG Asset - uMMORPG, which uses Unity's new UNET Networking System. This article focuses on the MMORPG development challenges. Making a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) as an indie developer is actually possible.