Shimonji wrote:
Are you all telling me that a fluctuating population between 4500 and 5000 bringing in $63,000 to $70,000 a month is not enough to pay a couple good devs, bandwidth, power, storage and space to hold the equipment?I know from personal expeirence that it does not cost that much to host equipement in some one else's data center let alone one that should be owned outright.
Anyone remember the Alternate Rules Server comment made not too long ago? Here is an idea. Build a new server and hire a couple of devs with this incentive.
Create a PVP environment that will draw current PVP players from Nagafen and Vox. Bonus is 20% of active players on the new server averaged over a quarter.
Anyone know any good devs that would like the potential to make about 40K in bonus per quarter?
In Silicon Valley, as well as in San Diego, $63-70K per month is pocket change: that would pay for a 2K ft2 office, two dev's, an ISP connection, a couple of computers and the electricy to run them.
Based on what it costs in Silicon Valley for a moderate networked company (such as Slingbox) which is roughly comparable to the Nag server size (excluding the dev's cost) I would guess that SOE is burning about $450K per month on those fixed computing costs ...
As to the $40K bonus per quarter, well, that's nice and all but y'all need to head a little north with that number to attract serious talent -- surf on over to dice.com and browse around a bit in the Silicon Valley/ San Diego markets to see what some realistic numbers are ...