Indie-Resource.com

spending $100,000-$400,000 on an indie game is completely beyond insane

ZeroComp wrote:spending $100,000-$400,000 on an indie game is completely beyond insane

Depends on your definition of indie

Hero engine is not an indie engine

Yes, definitely not. It is aimed at companies who are either going to have shelf space, or $750k+ in marketing for a download-only MMO.

To put it into perspective, Knights of the Old Republic Online is using Hero Engine.

lol you guys are hilarious

Xandric96 wrote:lol you guys are hilarious

Why?

Hero is cheap.

After all, if you are building a AAA MMO, you are also using business intelligence tools to data mine your world to tweak, nerf and hunt for cheater patterns. Just to give you a hint about the kinds of price ranges we are talking for BI deployments, this add on costs $175,000. The tool that it is an add on for has a "talk to us" price and takes an army of consultants (at $3000 per man day) to configure.

Wow, Yeah Hero seems cheap compared to the combined costs of all the other things people don't think about when running a MMORPG server. Many people don't understand that the engine is usually the cheapest part of Game Development. Its the art and man hours thats expensive.

running a server 24 hours a day seven days a week can be kinda harsh

Running a server can be cheap. I worked on a couple of NWN worlds that either ran off a home based broadband, or relatively cheap hosted. A low traffic indie/hobbyist can do it on a shoestring.

You can't do it on a shoestring if you are doing AAA. There is a whole level of infrastructure, etc. that a AAA has to deal with that the small guys don't. E.g. RMT. If your player base is 1000 players, the RMT market is likely too small to even bother. If you have 100,000 players, or a million, then you need sophisticated infrastructure and that sophisticated infrastructure means things like OLAP analysis tools, like the ones I mentioned in the previous post. Then it is a question of licensing Hero versus rolling your own engine and that comes down to cost and then you'll license Hero to save money.

Now back to reality...