#GAMES LIKE NEOPETS AND GAIA ONLINE REGISTRATION#

With a player base in the low five figures, a single boutique developer can, over the medium to long term, earn personal income that dwarfs the Blizzard employeeвЂ™s вЂ“ and yours.Дave Rickey, a designer for EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, spoke in a June 2005 Corporation interview about opportunities at the small scale. Revenue from a successful boutique MMOG would be a rounding error for Blizzard, but it all goes straight to the gameвЂ™s small development team. A rank-and-file animator or designer at Blizzard earns basically the same salary whether World of Warcraft has 2,000 subscribers, or 200,000, or 20 million. Onlookers, too, may sneer at these little games as вЂњnot serious money.вЂќ But there are different ways to define вЂњseriousвЂќ вЂ“ for example, how much money a given developer personally earns as take-home pay. High-end developers might deride the boutiques as вЂњnot getting serious audience numbersвЂќ вЂ“ until they learn about the games with more players than EverQuest. Many are run as hobbies, but some are intended to earn money. Most are lame вЂ“ itвЂ™s been a while since weвЂ™ve seen Commodore 64-style sprites вЂ“ but some look startlingly professional.

#GAMES LIKE NEOPETS AND GAIA ONLINE REGISTRATION#

Some cost in the mid-six figures to produce others launched for the price of domain registration plus 10 bucks a month for cheap hosting.

Some require a downloadable client many others are browser-based. Nonetheless, despite this received wisdom, there are dozens, nay, over a hundred low-budget вЂњboutiqueвЂќ online MMOGs. At the 2003 Game Developers Conference, longtime producer Gordon Walton listed 10 reasons not to run an MMOG, including eight-figure budgets and teams of hundreds of people. How would you create and market a full-featured MMOG?Д«uilding a major game is hard, and there is no harder kind to make than an MMOG.

Assume, hypothetically, you вЂ“ just you, together with maybe two or three other indigent programmers вЂ“ have six months of savings and a budget in the low four figures. To get still more outlandish, letвЂ™s say you cannot easily lay your hands on a paltry $3 million вЂ“ no, really, work with me here вЂ“ so you couldnвЂ™t even produce a smaller-scale вЂњcasual MMOGвЂќ like Puzzle Pirates or Gaia Online or Dofus. Suppose, too, you donвЂ™t have rock superstar Bono on speed-dial, and unlike BioWare/Pandemic Studios, you canвЂ™t finance your new MMOG through his $300 million Elevation Partners holding company. Imagine, for discussionвЂ™s sake, that you donвЂ™t have $50 million, so you canвЂ™t build and market a full-scale World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) clone.

Games like neopets and gaia online