100 developers are going to accomplish more than half of what 200 developers can do simply due to the factor of managing larger teams. The fact is the game industry is poor at managing large teams. Most creative fields are like this. A smaller team and longer development cycle will be the cheaper solution in the long run. It would take quite a long post to explain this phenomena. Considering Star Citizen is developed by an independent company, the management will be worse. Still I would remember that not all the people are needed at the same time. You can get by with a small team during initial development. A lot of the team will be added within the last year of development for testing purposes, marketing, and setting up for deployment. There are also other factors to consider in the cost of a game. On Star Citizen they licensed a lot of technology. Integrating this and working with outside companies adds onto the costs. They switched game engines. This actually isn't that expensive since the majority of assets for an MMO are transferable between engines. The biggest effort will be converting levels over. Art, sound, and the server can be transferred over. What a base game engine offers isn't the biggest hurdle in MMO development, but this is mainly due to the complexity of MMOs. Advertising will be a big expense if they ever get around to release. Most of the budget on new games is advertising.
It's a reality of the industry.
It starts with having to open offices through the world to reach talent, from there the big organization problem starts, ensuring communication and so on, this as they even admitted affected CIG severely as they started with less than 10 people the quick growth was a necessary reality. And as the hiring talent process is slow, they decided to outsource a lot of stuff on the start of the project, what was admittedly their biggest mistake.
DAOC cost 2.5 million and was one of the most successful mmo's ever made. Anyone who thinks is costs 200 million dollars to build a good MMO is a real good sucker.
MMO's these days just suck ass anyway compared to the golden age of MMO's ( 1999 - 2006'ish )
Everything after World of Warcraft 2004 edition is trash.
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It starts with having to open offices through the world to reach talent, from there the big organization problem starts, ensuring communication and so on, this as they even admitted affected CIG severely as they started with less than 10 people the quick growth was a necessary reality. And as the hiring talent process is slow, they decided to outsource a lot of stuff on the start of the project, what was admittedly their biggest mistake.
MMO's these days just suck ass anyway compared to the golden age of MMO's ( 1999 - 2006'ish )
Everything after World of Warcraft 2004 edition is trash.