alanschu

The 7+ million in documented wages alone would indicate that this was a Triple-AAA budget. Greg Zeschuk could say the game flopped and you still wouldn't believe it.

I've had that happen before too. It's very confusing.

Halo 2 = huge. Halo was pretty huge too. Not bad for a new IP :D (Ok not technically, but I doubt that the huge sales were from people that were familiar with the Macintosh oriented Marathon environment).

Just an interesting tidbit, but I'm taking my first formal course in Artificial Intelligence this semester. The very first lecture contained an interesting point regarding trends since the 90s in AI: "Relying less on logic and more on probability theory and statistics."

I'm just saying that maybe by today's standards and what people expect in an RPG is not the same as what the older RPGs provided. Maybe we have a new sub-genre...the Classic RPG!

I was looking for Fable's numbers but ended up getting distracted I do find it interesting that the limited edition of Jade Empire isn't very limited

Interesting.

This was probably already mentioned, but oh well. Hmmmm, assuming Bioware gets a full 15% from every sale, and assuming that every sale is $50, then they get $7.50 from every sale. 500,000 units sold * 7.50 = $3.75 million dollars. I can see where Gaider gets his idea that million units being shipped starts to be key, with the $7.5 million in income that would provide.

Just so you all haven't forgotten:

I think it's been suggested that it will be an "action-RPG." But the thing is, is that "new IP" in and of itself is not a game killer. A good game is a good game. Established IPs can be helpful, but certainly not necessary. It sounds like PNJ is a "spiritual successor" of a game.

Just to make sure it's clear Police are not trained to deal with emergencies of all kinds!

You didn't address any other parts of my post. Probably because you couldn't. Typical for a troll though. Just pick the part of the argument that you liked. I was just asking what the population differences of the cities were. r00fles! But you think that a city block getting destroyed is the same as an entire city getting destroyed. Gold! Then why was the National Guard created? The training regimine of the military is waaaaaaaay more intense than the police officers.

I'm not yet able to score consistently......except when shorthanded

I don't know if it's necessarily a "new IP" thing or not. Maybe it should have the "RPG" qualifier attached to it, if anything. A "new IP RPG" so to speak. As there's plenty of new IP games that are huge sellers.

No, in other words, it's almost 7 million based on two years of salary alone. It's definitely up there in costs with the rest of the Triple-AAA titles that have gone on to sell multiple millions of copies. This ignores the rest of the additional costs that I presented. I never said I directly knew the costs. I mentioned it was in the same league as the rest of the high budget games out there. It's common knowledge that the AAA titles are between $5 and $10 million in development costs. You can ignore "sandwiches and building space" if you want, but unfortunately realy businesses don't have to. Since you were making implications that Bioware's future was directly dependent on the success of Jade Empire, it'd be foolish to ignore it. I am able to make educated guesses on it from that alone. The fact that you ignore them is typical however. I don't care if you do or do not care whether or not I have a friend working at Bioware now. But that's the facts. And his entry level salary was $45k. Unless the rest of the employees all make that exact same amount of money as him, the 3.15 million in one year of wages is a gross underestimate of wages. It also ignores the development cost of an engine. There's a reason why companies like Epic games are able to license their engines for close to $1 million dollars, and it's considered a deal by the licensee.

But there's no guarantee that they would have kept playing hockey this year either.

Police are not trained to handle emergencies in any sort of measure that the military is. That's why the National Guard exists. To suggest that Police are trained in dealing with emergencies of all kinds is, well, asinine. I suggest you research a bit more on the two prior to making such statements in the future. I suppose scale and duration would have nothing to do with it. You're comparing apples to oranges. The situations are very different. That's why they created the National Guard. What's the population difference between New York City and New Orleans?

When you state that his retirement is a reason to hate the new NHL, it gives implication that the new NHL is cause for his departure. If you didn't intend that, then I suggest you practice up making your points a little clearer.

I would think that the genre has evolved though. I don't see why it can't.

Jade Empire had over 70 employees working on the game. Considering my friend just recently got hired there pretty much right out of University (i.e. he's not some bigshot coming in) and is making a $45k per year salary, lets just assume that the asymptotic lower bound of the cost for one person is 45k per year. That means that in one year of working on the game, the cost of development is minimum $3.15 million dollars, and that's just salaries, and that's just for one year. The game was "officially" announced in September 2003. However, development HAD to go on quite a bit before this, and not just because of preproduction. Building a quality engine takes years, and Jade Empire uses an in house developed graphics engine. Now, game ENGINE programmers make substantially more than my friend does (according to Gamasutra), working away on the engine alone before the announcement can even be considered. It ignores the allowances given to employees for books and research, and other benefits. Given the rather generous benefits Bioware seems to have for it's employees (coupled with it's remarkably low turnover rate), I'd suspect they probably got Christmas bonuses as well! Not to mentioned the catered breakfasts and catered suppers (and I'm not talking sandwiches, but roast ham and stuff) given to the staff during crunch time (and only the suppers, breakfast is all the time!) for the staff. This also ignores fixed costs such as those annoying utilities and renting out virtually an entire office building, keeping the workstations up to date with the latest hardwire, maintaining their servers and a host of other fixed costs. But I'll be nice and only assume responsibility of 1/4 of that, given that they have 4 games in development right now (although I don't know if they did when Jade Empire was in development, so it's even generous for that). Not to mention the frequent trips to China for research, and lord knows what else.

I can download roster updates for NHL 2006 as well. But there isn't one at the moment, which means that many moves haven't happened yet. Likewise, the retirements of Messier, Damphousse, Stevens, and MacInnis are not represented either. It's too bad that a player is only part of the NHLPA once they've played in an NHL game, because that means none of the high profile rookies that have never played an NHL game (i.e. Crosby, Ovechkin) are not in the game.

He's already admitted he can't be bothered to show proof in a different thread. Something about "because other people never show him proof" or something along those lines. You'd think he'd quit asking. But proof is all in the eye of the beholder for him, and he beholds his opinion over the statements of Bioware employees and marketters, as well as over trends in business marketting.

Wrong. But a nice try nonetheless (well, maybe not). Stating that Messier's departure is a reason to hate the "new" NHL indicates that the new NHL is to blame for his departure. Tsk tsk Volourn, you've fallen from grace it seems.

Police Officers aren't trained to deal with hurricanes. Even though you grossly compare them to 911, which is a situation that would not result in rampant looting, and for the most part was overwith relatively quickly compared to New Orleans, you wouldn't make such silly allegations. What's more pathetic? Someone that shows fear in a horrible situation that they have not been physically or emotionally prepared for, or someone sitting in his cozy chair passing judgement on those whom he cannot relate to?

I don't consider Dave Gaider a God either. But I do consider him a bit more knowledgeable about the games industry than you. His word certainly carries a lot more weight. You just choose to descredit it, as it goes against what you would like to think. Give me a list of games that have sold 500,000 units (but not more than 600,000), and you'll see how unreasonable your request actually is. However, the other games of Jade Empire's exposure and budget tend to make 500k sales in their first few days. Yeah, the 74k units sold by February had nothing to do with it. r00fles!