EverQuest II Interview, Part Four

ComputerAndVideoGames.com has published the fourth and final installment of their EverQuest II interview with producer Andy Sites. An excerpt:

Q: It seems to me that the MMOG genre works to a very different dynamic to others. Nobody really complains about there being ‘too many’ first-person shooters for instance, and almost every FPS in development gets a release regardless of quality. MMOs seem to work to an entirely different set of criteria…

A: I think the big difference is just the financial cost. You can take a ten-person team, throw in a million or two million dollars and in theory end up with a really good looking FPS. Our development team on the other hand is 96 people strong, we licensed a professional composer to write the soundtracks, we have all the voice actors. The amount of money required to go into something like this is really frightening for most publishers. By the time we launch we’ll already be into $20 million.

But the reward is that once the game launches, you can get something like EverQuest where we’re almost into its sixth year and we have over 400,000 subscribers still in there. I remember reading about Warhammer and that the main reason behind the cancellation was that, based on the current situation with the development team and how much money they’d spent to date, they couldn’t justify spending the additional money needed to finish it off and get it out.

And yeah, that hurts a lot of developers who are trying to get their games done, but at the end of the day the players are only going to be left with a lot of high quality list of games to choose from.