//Olle

I play maybe three games casually at any given time, right now its call of duty 2 for action, velvet assasin (a cheap hitman clone) for problemsolving, and for a while its been conan for mmo and rpg.

Ive looked at lots of games since i subscribed to aoc, and it often strikes me how hard it is to find even single player games that even comes close to conan in terms of content, immersion and sheer beuty.

One rule of thumb I have heard bandied around though is that in MMO’s for every player playing there are 2 paying and not online, that would put the 35k number potentially at 100k in Europe alone and support a top estimate of 200k.

But then there are the server numbers, at 18 that’s less then Everquest 2, but it could be deceptive since Everquest 2 (and WoW) would have some servers dated back to 2004 which would handle less players I guess then 2008 hardware. They would not merge downto full so I guess there is some slack there, my guess is an average of 6k players per a server with 2k playing at a time, that makes a player base of ~100k.

With all the indications I’m guessing around 70-100k worldwide here, a respectable number.

I guess that’s enough to feed a dev team of 20, probably more likely at least 30, Everquest 2 I know has around 64 devs working on it (programmers, artists and support etc) and is estimated to have a player base of ~150k-200k,

WoW somehow has triple the number of devs that (beats me what they do all day! although they listed ~60 of them purely working on videos, I’m not kidding there either, I guess they have money to burn yet it shows they have a deliberate policy of not creating too much content).

Yet my guild is still ranked quite high and nearly everyone has a couple of alts in the guild.

Your numbers fail