The online communities for every single Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs from now on) are a vocal bunch. For some reason, MMORPGs have always attracted the most outspoken people. The players complain, yell, beg, cheer... Sometimes constructively, sometimes not. But the makers of MMORPGs can't complain about the lack of feedback from the community. Good or bad, the fans are very vocal.

But in some cases the feedback is questionable.

The Case of the Million Dollars CD's
In the last week of July, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) made an announcement that momentarily made the hair on the back of my neck raise slightly in shock. While surfing the web I came upon a news bit saying that SOE would charge for their BETA on Star Wars Galaxies. Well there goes the neighborhood, I thought. Before panicking though, I clicked on the little link to read the full story. It turns out that SOE will be charging $6 US for the shipping of 2 BETA CDs to those who signed up for the first phase. Six dollars... I scratched my head, looked at the calendar to make sure we really were in 2002 and not back in the 1930's when $6 meant A LOT, then went back to read some of the hateful posts made on the site's message boards. Six dollars. Is that it? Is that really what all the fuss is about?

People seem to be furious at the fact that SOE is charging $6 for the shipping of 2 CDs, questioning the possibility that they might be turning out a profit from this. Turning a profit? How could we even think that? There are only a few hundred people signed up for the first phase of BETA. If they even make $1 of profits for each set of CDs they send, it wouldn't cover up for what it will cost them in bandwidth to service those few hundred BETA testers. Why the outcry?

The Money Pit
There is a big doubt in players' minds about the kind of profits these online gaming developers actually make when talking about MMORPGs. Most players have a feeling they are being ripped off. With good reason. When you add up the numbers, it's quite staggering. Someone made the exercise just for Everquest : 400,000 users x $13 US = $5.2 Million per month! That's a lot of money, over 60 million American dollars per year! No wonder people think they're being screwed.

But are they? Are we being screwed? A few years ago, one of the developers behind Star Wars Galaxies decided to answer the question about the inherent costs of an MMORPG on the SWG official website. Raph Koster, Creative Director at SOE, gave a rather lengthy answer. If you read the whole post (thanks to Ammon777 for the link), you'll quickly realize that it's detailed enough to believe that the person who answered is at least knowledgeable enough to be believable.

Raph Koster tries to explain how much Bandwidth is expensive. I hope no one doubts that. If you do, just go to your nearest Service provider and ask them how much it would cost you if you just want to rent some space on their server to have a web page of your own. If you have heavy traffic, the price goes up, way up, very fast. The degree to which those companies need bandwidth is staggering. When a single server can host around 3,000 players at any time, and keeping in mind most of these online games often have many servers on which you can play, the cost must be sky high.

But most of these developers use their very own servers. Koster explains the need of redundancy for these high-traffic servers :

" For one thing, the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have at home, because you want lots of redundancy, the ability to hot-swap parts out, all that jazz. "

Redundancy means money, LOTS of money!. And these guys have to get the most redundancy you can get in a server. That means clusters. A cluster is a set of multiple servers functioning in parallel so that if one fails, the traffic is automatically shifted to the others. All the client sees when that happens is a slight delay in service (less than a second in most cases) or slightly more lag than usual. We all know what happens if the servers goes down… The players get unhappy, and no one wants that. When Koster says that the servers and their deployment costs millions, they do. There is absolutely no question about that. Still, this is a fixed cost and could be largely covered by the sales of the boxed game if it is successful.

The developers needs to be paid throughout the life of the online game. Of course the team might grow smaller over time, but these guys are still paid a good amount to keep track of bugs and fix them, and also add new content to the game world. The servers need to be maintained, and the technicians that look after the servers are paid a LOT of money for their technical expertise. Not to mention that most of them are on call 24 hours a day!

These costs all add up very fast. It's a money pit. Whether you want to believe it or not, we as users cost a lot of money to these guys. Wait, I'm not saying they don't make money, I'm just saying that maintaining such an ambitious game is like throwing money in a bottomless pit. It never fills up and you constantly need to throw money in it if you want a return on your investment.

The Customer is Always right
But that's not really what seems to be the biggest problem for these developers. Koster mentions :

" REAL customer service people have a multitude of skills, and cost a lot more than minimum wage. You can train people to be real customer service people, of course, but then you have to pay them real money, too. So support eats up another huge portion of the monthly fee... "

Even more revealing is this quote :

" Consider the fact that if you call a support guy in-game ONCE and keep him tied up for an hour, you just burned up ALL the monthly profit we make off of your subscription fee "

This only means one thing. The ball and chain of these games is customer support. It's an ongoing cost, it never stops. I can vouch for these people's work, it's very demanding. Sometimes they have to receive massive amounts of crap with a smile, and that's a very hard thing to do. And for that they get paid well, maybe not nearly enough.

Now, I hear you already saying that you don't even contact customer support, or very rarely. But unfortunately these people are busy because the major part of the player base on those games are not very knowledgeable of computers. They just want to play games, and when it doesn't work, or when there's a problem, they are very quick on the call for help.

Unlike other costs, customer service is not necessarily tied directly to the game itself. It's support to the end user. Some of these users need lots of support, more than the average player. Unfortunately everyone pays the same price for any given game, whether they require more help or not. So in fact, these few players that need customer support the most often cost more money than they are worth for the developer. Since every month sees its share of new players, that means a constant flow of newbies into the game world who might need to call the support line.

To Be Continued...
So if the customer service issue is what the developers consider to be the most costly, and potentially the issue that could mean the difference between a loss and a profit, what could the developers and publishers do to alleviate some of those costs? What could they possibly ever think of that would solve this problem once and for all? What could they do to allow them to make even more money, if that's possible?