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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
another point in the ad nauseam discussion of in game shop
Letterz
Member, Alpha Two
Hello, and apologies..I know we all have feelings about cash shops. I just wanted to mention a couple brief things
1) the trust I have in the devs. really they are putting serious time and effort into this game and it really shows (which i think is why so many of us are so excited about this game)
2) the demise of the mmo markets because of "the new business model" of which cash shops are certainly a part of, and how they are such a slippery slope. EG watch this, its done with a better research than i could do here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHzsRPmCaIE
3) my personal opinion is that the cash shops should only be for, barber shop type things, server changes (not to new servers!), faction changes to lower factions ect. it should not have play time tokens, fantastic looking mounts/ armor/ ect. thats just my opinion.
for those of you in favor of cash shops, I guess the question is why? and what would you want from it?
not trolling real question, that video really got me to thinking with the unintended consequences of them
Letterz
1) the trust I have in the devs. really they are putting serious time and effort into this game and it really shows (which i think is why so many of us are so excited about this game)
2) the demise of the mmo markets because of "the new business model" of which cash shops are certainly a part of, and how they are such a slippery slope. EG watch this, its done with a better research than i could do here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHzsRPmCaIE3) my personal opinion is that the cash shops should only be for, barber shop type things, server changes (not to new servers!), faction changes to lower factions ect. it should not have play time tokens, fantastic looking mounts/ armor/ ect. thats just my opinion.
for those of you in favor of cash shops, I guess the question is why? and what would you want from it?
not trolling real question, that video really got me to thinking with the unintended consequences of them
Letterz
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Comments
Ashes isn't released yet so I can't tell how the cash shop will link into the game. Steven did say the best cosmetics will be earned in game.
Thats true, i think he said something like no weapon skins (at least at launch) and if i remember the best looking skins will be earned and not bought. if someone has that quote throw it on up.
so what does that leave? follower companions i guess? Anyhow would still love to hear from someone who likes cash shop items, and why?
Letterz
problem with subs - back in the day it was viable. Cost / Wages weren't as high as it is today.
Don't think a $15 sub will be able to secure a GM pay wage, admin wage, dev wage, server cost, CS wage, etc. Inflation and just overall cost from living in the late 90s early 2000s vs vastly different now in 2023.
I want to make damn sure - we always have active GMs on every server 24/7. Minimum 3 GMs per server, working 8hr shift to cover the 24hr cycle.
People are also under the belief / assumption this game is gonna have more than 100k active playerbase. The game WILL SPIKE to 1+ mil initially but the hype will wear off and people will learn "This game isnt for everyone". and Our actual playerbase will be much smaller.
Atleast with COSMETIC ONLY cash shop -the whales can help give more longevity to the game and cover costs. Honestly AoC should lock character creation per server to 1 character. if you want an alt, buy a 2nd account.
New comer whales would have to spend though. The original whales have lifetime subs and free cosmetics for life. Though they paid a lot for the rewards. lol.
eh you would be surprised. wages were lower but technology was more expensive, and maintenance costs arent as high (they can get high over a long period of time, but not per month)
let's take wow for example. blizzard spent 60m developing wow over a few years and then 200 million into maintaining it alive over a 20 years period. that's not a lot of money, considering what we are talking about (the biggest mmorpg). intrepid has spent about 45? to develop aoc, and so far aoc seems more ambitious than vanilla wow. regarding maintenance costs, 100k players a month (pretty sure the game will have more if its good) equals $1.5 millions a month, or 18 millions a year. 18 millions a year equals 180 millions in a decade. so they could make as much money in a decade as wow needed in 2 decades to stay alive. maybe steven wont become a billionaire with ashes, but the game wont die. you also have to consider that people will spend money on the store too, plus they might sell merch, etc. or make more games in the future.
So devs, artists, engineers salaries, CS salaries, GM salaries, accountant/payroll people, HR people, and who knows what other positions is required and needed at the HQ.
taking the very low avg of 100k per year, 18 mil = 180 staff. Now let's take the fact that 18 mil isnt even taxed yet for actual cash in hand.
I think they might be running at a loss just on subs. Im sure I am missing lots more stuff that will also eat into that monthly revenue.
Newcomers would have to spend IF they want cosmetics.
Remember cosmetics aren't required to play the game ... and better versions of cash shop items will be found in-game (according to Intrepid).
how did wow only spend 200 mill in 20 years with more staff than intrepid?
for whatever reason, game devs get payed less than programmers in other areas. there are some salaries here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Intrepid-Studios-Salaries-E1672537.htm not sure if accurate or not.
cs, gm, and other jobs are usually outsourced. spoiler: when u call verizon, seagates, dish, spotify, etc you arent really calling an American making 20-30 per hour. you are calling someone in Latin America who speaks good English making 3 per hour.
also, we don't know how much of the development is outsourced or just a temporary contract. for example, lets say you have 10 areas on the map and each area has 1 type of tree. you would pay an artist to make all 10 trees. however, you know that you will add expansions, and over a 10 years period, you will add 10 more areas. so you ask that artist to make 20 types of trees instead and now you have your art for the next 10 years (which can be reused over and over) and you don't have to pay an artist every month/year for the next 10 years to sit there collecting a paycheck making 1 tree a year and nothing else.
also, you pay income tax on your income...aka after you pay your expenses, which include salaries.
Yeah I understand that, whales tend to spend more in p2W games more than just cosmetic stores. A lot of time paid cosmetics are looked down upon compared to cosmetics gleaned from the hardest raid for example. I'm not the biggest whale but I've spent a lot on cosmetics. The fact remains I have purchase cosmetics to level in and I've not bought many multiple cosmetics per slot etc.
While this is true, keep in mind that WoW was very much a minimum viable product at launch, and aimed at people that didnt even know what sm MMORPG even was, let alone had expectations the developer needed to meet.
GW2 cost about $150,000,000 to develop, and ESO cost over $200,000,000.
The notion of a $60,000,000 MMO is decades old at this point.
didn't nw cost something like 500 million and it wasn't that great? and isn't ashes at 45 millions?
regardless of the initial cost, I'm talking about maintenance costs. its not like u need 5 millions a month to keep the game up and running..
New world fucked up and changed there vision last minute to cater to larger playerbase i feel they would of been better off if they tweaked there PvP version a little than doing a full flip to pve last minute but thats somethign we wont ever know
As for topic i dont mind cosmetic cash shops aslong as you can obtain just as many cool cosmetic in game aswell for work, if you can buy a cool cosmetic fine but if you can earn a different cosmetic piece thats equally cool in game than thats better.
I never bothered looking in to what New World cost to make, because I never liked the game, and didn't even once consider it to be a game that I would play for anything other than a curious look.
As to how much it would cost to keep Ashes running in comparison to WoW, it's hard to say (impossible to say, actually).
This isn't just because we don't have hard numbers from Intrepid (or Blizzard, for that matter), but it is also because each game is using generationally different hardware (multiple generations removed), and are also going about it in vastly different ways (Blizzard running servers itself in datacenters around the world, Intrepid pushing this out to AWS).Trying to get an accurate comparison between the two would be impossible - but if I were to guess, I would say that Intrepid will be spending more per player than Blizzard.
What I will say is that with the staff that Blizzard have maintaining it's server infrastructure (and only it's server infrastructure), that would account for about half of that $200,000,000 - so I have my doubts about how accurate that figure actually is as an overall cost.
if nw is surviving with 20k players on a b2p game just from cosmetics money, I'm sure 100k players a month can keep ashes up and running.
However, Ashes game design will probably require more server side compute power than New World.
I've used AWS in a professional capacity, even at small scale it isnt really cheaper than setting it all up and doing it yourself - the advantage is simply in not needing to spend that time on it.
The advantage to a company like Intrepid is not going to be cost either - it's going to be the speed of scaling up and down. If it turns out that Ashes is far more popular on launch day than predicted, AWS should see Intrepid able to start up additional servers much faster than other games. It will also mean that if player dropoff is greater after a month, 3 months or a year than expected, Intrepid should be able to more easily scale down to lower costs.
I have no doubt that the game would be able to survive on 100k players.
And yeah, $500,000,000 sounds a little more like it for keeping WoWs servers online. I wouldn't include data in that, just server hardware costs, maintainence and power. Data is probably another few hundred million.