THQ spending approximately $50 million on WAR40K MMO

@Dunraven They are using the Darksiders engine for this, they've talked about it earlier. Aside from knowing its not the Unreal engine, i don't know what its called.

@Sephirah where are you from?

it gotta be an awesome country to settle your business, you dont pay taxes for the products you sell,nor for marketing , nor ongoing salaries for development past the release day. and royalties for use of licensed IPs dont exist...

And no matter what I do, I can't get rid of the "unverified" name, despite having this account since 2007...

@(Unverified) I think you forgot to divide by 3 for the 3 years :(

@(Unverified) Don't forget that a live service game's costs don't stop when the "finished" game launchers. Running the game alone is an expensive proposition -- office rent, bandwidth, continued development staff, continued QA staff, customer service, a percentage of each transaction that goes to payment providers and a little off the top in the form of refunds, chargebacks, and fraud.

These costs could easily eclipse a million a month, but for continued simplicity's sake, the default "cost" of the game for those three years jumps from 50 million to 86 million (50 million plus 12 million a year for 3 years).

Yikes

@(Unverified)
Your maths are so wrong.

50,000,000$ / 15$ = 3,333,333 one-month subscriptions are required to cover the cost.

3,333,333 Monthly subscriptions / 12 months = 277,777 consecutive subscribers for ONE year. Not very hard to do.

3,333,333 monthly subscriptions / 24 months = 138,888 Consecutive subscribers

3,333,333 monthly subscriptions / 36 months = 92,592 consecutive subscribers. This is the number for 3 years.

Obviously you can tweak this depending on the different plans, you also have to subtract operation costs. I don't see this as impossible to do.

@Icemasta You're ignoring ongoing development costs. Of that $15 a month you might pay, a substantive portion goes to cover server fees, customer service staff salaries, development staff salaries and other ongoing costs (e.g. interest incurred on debt, marketing costs).

And that's just paying back the US$50m, not actually hitting profitability.

@cowboyhugbees

Really it won't be a barrier to entry. There's no need at all to spend this kind of cash on a MMO or any game, they're basically throwing cash at the title to try to create a triple A game: think shiny with a lot of marketing.

Meanwhile there's someone in their basement eating Ramen hacking away at the next version of Farmville or Minecraft.

@kjhasdfjkhk
First i agree with your first paragraph, WAR was developed by Mythic entertainment (subsequently rolled into Bioware) and published by Electronic Arts (IIRC)

Now to disagree with you. WAR had issues early on and those issues still persist todate. faction imbalance = pick the winning side (most populated) and profit, or pick the 'other' side and suffer a slogfest of pvE monotony to level and then suffer through getting roflstomped for 4 months to gear up for PvP. I played WAR through 3 server mergers and they STILL haven't figured out that just becuase they see 5k Chaos characters and 5K order characters have been created does NOT mean those are "active" players, its like Mythic never heard of the term "alt". basing thier population balance around total number of characters per faction per server is absurd. I wont even get into the other shortcomings this title has (STILL) suffice it to say tug of war is no fun when its boils down to the chess club vs. the wrestling team