There is a game called Business Tycoon online that I played for a while. It has 600k active players apparently over 11 servers, the game has been live for 100 days.Cayle wrote: 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.
When a new server starts they have competions which you gain a score based on how much gold you use on a treasure hunt "RMT", their support is terrible. It consists of chinese tech support, who can barely understand english.
They have no tech in place to verify email addresses, they cannot tell if someone is using a multi account and if you run into a bug they just deny it and say the game is working normally.
Now my point, when a server starts up and you see the amounts people spend even though there is none of the tools you speak of at work. One server I saw over $50000 spent in a week. And that is only when people bought the item to get into the competition, there are many many more who spend in otherways so I cannot say exactly how much it makes.
It is a browser based game, im not sure which language is used but it is by no means super graphical or anything like that. It all comes down to the fact, you can have a successful game if your idea is good enough and better then what is out there at the moment.
