Thread by @RaphLife

The "I'll pay $10k for someone to add MP to BotW" thing is not so much funny as scary. It shows how little the average person knows about the cost and effort that goes into game development, which drives a lot of player discourse and pushback against devs.

We have industry associations who should be doing more work to educate the populace around what we do, and media could also be more helpful with this (although some journalists genuinely try). I think devs are generally quite open about how we work and the effort involved.

It also shows a complete lack of understanding for how IP works. Even if you were willing to spend $100M to add MP to BotW, you wouldn't be able to, because only Nintendo has the right to do that (or to permit someone to do it via a license of some kind).

We're fortunate to have an amazing player community around #thelongdark but even we see it at times -- "how hard could it be to add ___ to the game?". It's also often couched in anger, "Lazy devs, why don't they just make it an option?"

One of the absolute wildest fallacies that exists within player communities around games is that you can easily add MP to a game after the fact. This idea has persisted for decades. It's been debunked and discussed countless times in countless discussions, and yet...

Do devs a favour and don't signal boost this sort of thinking. It's disrespectful and can be very harmful. Try to allow for the fact that if you don't actually know how to do something, maybe it's harder (even a lot harder?) than you think.

The "war on experts" that social media tends to encourage is one of the worst things to come out of platforms like twitter, FB, etc. Just b/c you have a platform doesn't mean you know what the fuck you are talking about. Haven't we learned that yet?

So as to avoid just being a complainer and not a solver, let's see if we can't help frame the discussion in a more positive way by finding things in games that can be done for roughly $10k, or explaining what some typical features might cost from an implementation standpoint.

I'll start.

* $10k will get you between 5-7.5 minutes of original music from a good composer.
* $10k will cover the cost of translating about 50,000-75,000 words of text into one language (depending on the language).

* $10k might cover the cost of trademarking your game name in ~1-2 territories, depending on how many Classes you try to protect yourself in.
* $10k might cover the cost of a small number of relatively polished (better than sketches, but nothing near final) pieces of concept art.

Flipping it the other way around, creating a single region in #thelongdark costs about $300k+, considering design time, art, testing, etc. And this is only if the artists are using mostly existing assets. The cost goes way up if you're adding new custom structures, etc.

Each of our Episodes costs multiple millions of $ to develop. And we are a relatively low-cost game in comparison to something triple-A like BotW.

Without having given it too much thought, if someone came to me and said, "we want you to add MP to BotW", and we had Nintendo's blessing/support to do so, it would probably cost...$15M? To do it right. IF it were even possible given how the tech works and how the game was made.

(And that would assume Nintendo provided access to the engine, all their assets, engineering support, translators (I assume all their code comments are in Japanese so we can't read them), etc. And EVEN THEN I would not do it b/c we have no expertise in MP games and we'd fail.)

(Update: Sorry if you are trying to have a reasonable discussion with me about this thread; I can't even read my twitter right now. Also I don't have a Soundcloud, but you can find our soundtrack on Bandcamp if you like: hinterlandstudio.bandcamp.com/album/music-fo…)

(And by "can't even read" I don't mean the content is too maddening or whatever, I mean there's so much of it incoming that I can't even really read it. I'll check back in a couple of days when things slow down a bit...)