So Forbes has an article on why games cost so much breaking down where your $60 goes when you buy a game. (Be sure to click on the graph at the bottom of the article). But there’s a lot of stuff off with this analysis.

To start with, you don’t take 20% on every box sold for the programming cost. Once you have made the game, the costs are known and fixed; you recoup, and then this chunk turns into publisher and developer profit (mostly publisher). Same goes for the art costs and so on. In fact, in general, this graph tends to mix the categories of costs in this way.

It also ignores the fact that this isn’t really how the business works. There’s a portfolio of titles; not all will have the same mix. You rely on tentpole titles to carry the losers — which are most games made, really. And major tentpole titles often have far higher programming and art costs.

It’s also curious that this doesn’t actually give the story as regards how developers get paid…

One thing’s for sure: lots of folks noticed the Areae announcement. Herewith, a small roundup of sorts.

Susan Wu cheated. She actually works at one of our investors, which means that she actually knows what we’re doing. She was very good about not actually saying what it is, though.

Though Areae is still very stealthy, Areae sits at the intersection between Web 2.0 and MMOGs. If you think about it, the Web 2.0 and the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming communities have largely been pretty siloed – gamer developers go to game industry conferences and Web 2.0 folks go to Web 2.0 conferences, and there has not been enough intermingling between the two communities.

But both industries have been inching closer and closer together. I predict that the successful online communities in the future will continue to more strongly resemble MMOGs. And MMOGs will continue to extend their reach and exposing their data to other Web applications.

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The Shadowclan shirt

Today I got a Shadowclan shirt in the mail. The back of it says “Hoowah!”

Shadowclan is, of course, one of those game guilds that crosses over multiple games, and it’s been around since the early days of UO. It got its start after an enterprising roleplayer decided to roleplay being an orc. I don’t think anyone quite knows what happened to that player, but for a while, he captivated roleplayers across the shard with his odd relationship with the players based out of Trinsic. He served as the inspiration for a lot of people becoming orcs, which we helped out unintentionally via orc masks and polymorph spells.

Eventually the Shadowclan was born: a large guild that took over one of the few bits of static content in the game, the Orc Fort, and defended it against human players. They developed a pidgin language all their own, perhaps inspired to some degree by the Warcraft games, which eventually migrated over to EverQuest (no orcs there, but that’s where the trolls got their lingo), DAOC, and thence to SWG (Rodians… odd fit, but you make do), and then to WoW.

This shirt is hardly the only bit of guild memorabilia that I’ve been given. Over the years, players have come up to me and given me all sorts of things. It ends up forming part of the tapestry of how you touch players emotionally, and they touch you back.

So today I thought I’d give you a little tour of just some of these things, and tell you the stories.
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