On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Kimes, Dean W. wrote:

>
> I'd buy this except that with the money they have rolling in it wouldn't be
> a big proposition to do the minimal testing/consideration they aren't doing.

I suspect most of the money is going back to Sony. At 100k
customers at $10/mo, that's $1 million/mo. If all the profits
were being reinvested in the game, they'd have 40+ employees
working on it all with salaries around $100k/year, with
per-employee expenses running around $100k/year. The numbers
were about the same for UO.

It's for this reason that I think the first truly successful
persistent MMORPG will be made by a small company, not a giant
like EA or Sony or Microsoft. So far, they've all been
treating this genre like any other game - code it, sell it,
rake in the dough, slap on a few bug fixes.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...