jmmo

Rather randomly, it was Charles Stross's novel Halting State, which I firmly believe all MMO players should read.

@(Unverified) According to PayScale, median developer salary is $50,000 in Iceland and $59,000 in the US. But Georgia isn't exactly known for being a high-salary state, so I'm going to bet the salaries are pretty similar for both offices.

@WonderPenguin

My suspicion is that they've looked at what they're doing and realised that economically speaking, now is perhaps not the best time to be realising a game of this type. Particularly as the implied schedule for its release is similar to the Dust schedule, which would put a heck of a load on their support staff, with the result that they'd likely have to hire more expensive temporary staff to handle the flood of new users for both games.

If they reduce the staff, and perhaps delay release from early next year to late next year, they may get both lower costs and better sales as a result.

Another thing to think about, which may or may not have influenced CCP's decision-making: a game developed over a long period by a small team is like to be both better and cheaper to produce than a game developed quickly by a large team, as small teams are well-known to be more focussed, innovative and productive. I don't know how many developers WoD had, but if it was more than about 30 then they were probably spending as much time dealing with communication issues and team management as they were actually developing stuff. 20% of CCP's staff is about 120 people, although it's unknown how many of those are developers versus support staff, artists, etc. A smaller, more focussed team might actually work better for CCP. They developed EVE with a team of 21 people, including support staff.

@(Unverified) I often wonder whether GamersFirst only manage to offer their games under such good terms because they buy them at knock-down prices after the original subscription-based launch fails. I don't know how much they paid for Fallen Earth, but I'd bet good money it doesn't actually reflect anything like the original cost of developing the game.

@antagonistyahoocom Another thing... I'd hardly call the 13th highest grossing film of the year to date a box-office failure, particularly as 8 of the higher ranked films are sequels (which are known to be more successful on average than first films).

@antagonistyahoocom

You know, you really should try being fair to Beau. I mean, it's quite clear that what he's complaining about is the fact that the most successful titles are derivitive, not that there's a pile of derivitive titles down at the bottom of the heap that nobody cares about. But clearly you know this market better than he does, so perhaps you'd care to point us at these hugely popular and highly original games that he's been looking for?

And as for Android and iOS being so different: no shit. But you are vastly oversimplifying. You can program Android in just about any (compiled) language you want; just download the native application development kit. You can do C, C++, or Objective C if that's your thing. You can also use all three of these languages on iOS. And while the two platforms have totally different user interface libraries, they both share an implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0, which is probably the only platform library the majority of the code in most games needs to use.

And regarding those frameworks, Unity supports both platforms, is mature and stable, and the developers I know who work with it have no complaints about its performance.

@Irem "There is an MMO that caters to ERP"

Care to name it? I looked for a while a year or so ago, but all I could find were press releases about games that apparently never launched and second-life-like virtual worlds designed specifically for the purpose. Nothing that I would actually consider an MMO, though, because the gameplay aspects were lacking in all cases.

Is it just me that turns sound off in MMOs?

@BGExorcist From the release notes:

"Nobility

· Silver Nobles can activate one function of the Noble’s Work Force

· Gold Nobles can activate three functions of the Noble’s Work Force

· Platinum Nobles can activate all seven functions of the Noble’s Work Force"

Sounds like it, yeah. They don't say how much being a noble is going to cost, but let's face it, you could already pay to boost production, buy health potions to keep your heroes in combat longer, and so on, so paying so you don't have to play all of the game is just another small step.

@Seldra French fries are actually from Belgium. :P