noamineo wrote on Apr 21
st, 2022 at 12:25am:
See I work in this industry, too; and I know $10K won't even cover monthly colocation charges for the kind of hardware needed to virtualize DDO's servers.
You are completely insane and know next to nothing about virtualization, servers, hosting, colocation, or anything related if you think that:
A) 70k yearly is an acceptable salary for anyone competent to maintain a server at a location.
And
B) 30K for the database is an acceptable cost.
I have worked on several major titles. Ranging from peer to peer to regular server hookup. Not even the AAA companies I worked for spend more than $15k yearly on *all* servers, including their website machines and internal file-sharing cloud solutions.
And they easily would spend more if they could, since to someone like Ubi it's a tax write off.
We don't know what SSG does. We can guess.
My guess is they have a local machine to test. They build and deploy shit, test locally.
Proceed to Ignore all the problems the actual game everyone else plays has, and call it day.
Regarding "who paid for the initial game".
Again you know absolutely fucking nothing.
Today's good salary for a 3d artist is $90k yearly.
Today's good salary for a decent coder is $150k yearly.
With the paper sales alone they probably paid off 20 employees at various rates, the servers for all years to come, and still made a huge profit to whoever the investors were.
On top of also paying for the WOTC licensing, which was probably more expensive than anything else considering they granted it in perpetuity or some such shit where apparently they cannot revoke it.
Also, no one told them to keep the initial staff around for maintenence. The reason they were not making a profit was the fact they kept useless staff and still do. Like fatsovan.
If you have to pay minimum wage full time yearly stipend for incompetence, going under is kind of inevitable...