Guild Wars 2

Engage more people ? I heard you have only 2 dudes for each profession… what the hell. Stop being greedy and do what you are supposed to.

In reference to your ‘greedy’ comment, you obviously have no idea how funding works:

Any money made by ANet is given to NCSoft, who then allocates a budget for ANet (obviously the more money they make, the higher the budget, but they may not be directly proportional i.e. ANet would get 10% of $100, but only 11% of $200 made).

Out of that budget then, ANet have to allocate funds to all the different depts: customer service, content development, QA, bug fixing and imbalance ect.

Now, out of this budget, they’ve got to pay for people’s wages, maintenance, location costs (electric ect).

You also probably missed the thread where they were talking about how they balance stuff :

As for bugs, it isn’t a case of waving a magic wand and saying the magic words.

First, they got to decide which bugs to prioritise (game-breaking bugs take utmost). Here’s a link you might find interesting: Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing

There’s thousands upon thousands of lines of code to go through. It could be:

• something else they’ve implemented has caused the issue.
• referencing a piece of code that’s broken, in which case, they got to follow the path back until they find it.
• something as simple as a missing letter, bracket, syntax error.
• programmers aren’t given enough time to develop (given that they’re on a time-frame to get tools out, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of the biggest factors).
• poor design logic (tools aren’t up to task)

At the end of the day, they’re only human. They make mistakes, and they can only do so much in the time they’re given.

All you just said lead me to wonder why they don’t have more people to work on that. With the number of copies sold, I’m pretty sure money shouldn’t be a problem.

mamourrir.9641:

All you just said lead me to wonder why they don’t have more people to work on that. With the number of copies sold, I’m pretty sure money shouldn’t be a problem.

Because ANet didn’t get all of that money. NCSoft did. NCSoft give ANet the money to develop the game, and then took it back with profit to recuperate what they give.

The game cost $60 for the base product, and the sold over 2mil. To make things simple, lets say that the 2mil they sold was just the $60 version:

60$ x 2mil = $120mil net income

Now, given it’s a big-budget game, let’s say it cost $50mil to develop. That would have meant NCSoft would have made $70mil profit. Out of that $70mil, they would have allocated ANet a portion of it for the year.

A lot of complicated maths, profit margins and big-suit meetings later, they decide to allocate $10mil (since the cost of keeping it running won’t come anywhere near the cost of development, otherwise it wouldn’t be cost effective, which would result in them shutting the game down).

Now, out of that $10mil, they have to budget.

First, wages. Average American wage was $26,000 a year in 2011 (we’ll work with averages since that’s all we got to go by. Chances are though they’ll be on a higher average wage)

Now, say they have 200 people working there total (including customer support, web maintenance, mods ect), that’s a minimum total of $5,200,000, which is roughly half of their budget. This isn’t taking into account things like overtime, bigger wages, bonuses ect.

Next, security. This is second priority since they’re dealing with sensitive data. They might contract out to a private company, so it wouldn’t come under the wages part.

Next, bills. Cost of keeping the building operational (i.e. Water, Gas, Electric, Maintenance and Repairs ect).

Lastly, they can’t spend all of the money: They need to keep a fair amount aside for the year in the event of emergencies (equipment failing, needing to hire temp staff [sickness / bereavement happens]).

This is nowhere near a detailed explanation on the inner workings of budgeting and the like. You’d have to pick up a textbook for that.

It’s just a rough outline on what goes behind the budgeting, what companies need to budget for ect. And a possible explanation behind why they can’t hire more staff. Because remember: out of all the money they spend, they need to make a reasonable profit. That means keeping costs as low as they can.