Just curious, MMOs seem to cost millions with the cheaper ones being on the 5million $ range.
I can get my hands on a license of a fairly popular game that had around 10 million user accounts back in the day when it was released. It has fairly simple mechanics, and not too many assets. I was just curious about what kind of costs MMOs have.
The main part I am worrying about is not the open world, nor the number of assets or mechanics. I am just worried about the multiplayer aspects.
Somehow this game managed to have hundreds of people in small areas and never get laggy, the servers were tiny and I have no idea how they achieved this. Are there tricks to make this easier? They had a fairly small budget/team initially.
The PvP is sometimes over 100 people in 1 tiny area, and the warehouse area has sometimes up to 300 people. Yet people are running it on servers like this:
Xeon E5-2690 v2
128GB RAM
then some SSDs in raid with constant backup to HDDs.
How did they manage to make it so efficient, and what part of the network creation process is so expensive/difficult? Are there plugins or frameworks that can be used?
If the entire game with no networking in mind costs roughly $100,000 USD. How much would it cost to turn it into a similar MMO?