Employees

IRL EMPLOYEES NEEDED TO MAKE & ADMIN THIS MMORPG

How many people, exactly (or ballpark figure), will it take to make this MMORPG possible (factoring in more modern, advanced, streamlined, and automated features/tech these days)?  Let’s take a look at the employees other MMORPG-makers, such as Blizzard Entertainment, have had over the decades:

  1. ~5,000 total? Blizzard had ~4,700 employees at its prime in 2010-2015, spread out across 11 cities, with ~750 of them assigned to development and marketing for a few games including World of WarCraft (WoW).  ~600 were laid-off in 2012, so let’s assume that a total of 100-200 remained working on the game post-development; just for expansions and maintenance/legacy stuff.
  2. ~4,000 during its prime? 2009 article:  “what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades, and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running.”
  3. 51: “The team of 51 artists has created 1.5 million unique assets for the game, with a handful of sub-teams dedicated to weapons and armor; environments; animation; props like torches or fence posts; dungeons and large objects like houses; and technical art to polish what everyone else creates. There are 37 designers responsible for creating classes, professions, events, a library of more than 70,000 spells, and a population of nearly 40,000 non-player characters.”
  4. 123: “there’s an entire cinematics department of 123 people that does more than just cut-scenes.”
  5. 218: “There’s also a QA testing team, which employs 218 people. That group’s job gets tougher as time goes on, Brack said, because the amount of content in the game expands, but the size of the team does not. The original World of Warcraft contained 2,600 quests, with the Burning Crusade expansion adding another 2,700, and Wrath of the Lich King contributing another 2,350 to the game–a total of 7,650 in all. Also adding to the QA team’s woes, Brack said, is that Blizzard promotes from within, taking some of the most talented QA testers out of the pool to work on other parts of the game.”
  6. 68: “Blizzard Online Network Services, a group of 68 people who run data centers where servers are hosted in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.”
  7. 1700: “international offices, which employ about 1,700 people across France, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Ireland dealing with local concerns and customer service. Customer service is one of the biggest chunks of Blizzard, Brack said, with more than 2,500 people worldwide dedicated to the team.”
  8. 150: “150 people on the team are responsible for Battle.net, from maintaining billing and the account system to creating the infrastructure that will let the 12 million active Battle.net players keep persistent friends lists across games when StarCraft II launches. ”  (*do this for Inisfree MMORPG expansions, and the other 30+ games I’ve thought up)
  9. unknown number: “Pearce talked about the eSports team, which has been involved in more than 1,600 tournaments around the world. They also act as a direct line of communication for feedback between the developers and the highest end of high-end players.”
  10. unknown number: “Blizzard also needs an events team to put together BlizzCon, which Brack said is operated at a substantial loss for the company. While the company doesn’t turn a profit on the annual shindig, Brack said the cost is worth it for marketing purposes.”
  11. unknown number: “Speaking of marketing, there’s a World of Warcraft-specific team for that as well. They’re responsible for TV commercials, promotions, and tie-ins like this summer’s World of Warcraft-themed flavors of Mountain Dew.”
  12. unknown number: “A separate licensing department handles board games, plushies, statues, novels, and anything else with the World of Warcraft logo on it.
  13. unknown number: “There’s a creative development team responsible for chronicling the lore of the series, working with licensing and novelists to ensure the World of Warcraft story is consistent across products. They don’t create the lore, Brack said, but they do maintain it.”
  14. unknown number: “human resources, finance, facilities, legal, and information technology teams.”

So:  ~2,500 employees in 2001 at the start of WoW, ~4,700-5,000 at its peak in 2010-2011, ~4,000 and dropping by 2015, and probably <1k employees in the 90s BEFORE the development of WoW began.

Details on other MMORPG-makers here and here.

 

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GAME-MASTERS (GMs)

GMs are the admins of the game; they work for WMKM Studios.

They offer player help in the following forms/locations:

  1. in-game chat windows
  2. in-game trouble tickets
  3. website-based trouble/support tickets
  4. website-based forum Q&A
  5. website-based wiki building & editing

SexCraft is hosted from Inisfree, and all its GMs are ICVs working in WMKM Studios.  The Grid Mind can also assist in the capacity of multiple virtual GMs.

 

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Our Estimated Total:

In conclusion, it only took a few people to make the original Warcraft, and over decades that number grew to a few thousand employees once the game had millions of subscribers and products other than the game itself.  SexCraft only had one designer/writer for the first couple of years in its infancy, and this was enough.  A few dozen people will be all it needs now to build up the in-game environments based on all that was typed and uploaded to these webpages here.  Once players start subscribing, 1 employee per ~1,000 subscribers will likely be the ‘best fit’ employee scenario.

Again, at its peak, World of Warcraft had more than 12,000,000 subscribers, the accounts they’d opened totaling more than 100,000,000 (many different characters and accounts for the same subscribers).  Compare that to the maximum number of employees Blizzard has ever had; ~4,700, and you get a ratio of 1 employee to every ~2,550 players/subscribers.  1:4700.  Even that was sufficient, as players rarely ever needed GM-intervention in the game.  I think I only ever spoke with a GM once in 2 or 3 years of playing that game.

As long as SexCraft has an employees-to-players ratio of between 1:1000 and 1:5000, gameplay and incident-reports should all run smoothly.  And that’s long-term and peak; in the beginning, and for the first few years, there may only be a few thousand players, meaning we’ll only need a few dozen employees working at WMKM Studios on the upkeep of this game.

 

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