Few Big Budget MMO Games

There are surprisingly only a handful of really big budget free to play MMORPGs.
Nowdays, it seems like every big console game costs tens of millions to
develop. Premium pay to play MMORPGs like World of
Warcraft and Eve Online are also
costly to develop. In fact, Bioware’s upcoming pay to play MMORPG ‘The
Old Republic’ is rumored to cost nearly 100 million to develop. When it
comes to free to play games, the only ‘really’ big budget game is Allods
Online, which is a 3D Fantasy MMORPG
developed by a Russian game development firm, and that had a 12 million
dollar development budget. $12 million may seem like a lot of money,
but compared to the cost of developing console games, $12 million really
isn’t that much. The latest Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy XIII,
cost Square-Enix at least 40 million to develop. Now, it isn’t exactly
fair comparing apples to oranges, but what I’m trying to get at is $12
million isn’t a lot of money compared to console games.  I’d also like
to point out that Allods Online was one of the most expensive free to
play games ever developed.

So if Allods Online costs $12 million to develop, how much did it
cost to develop MapleStory? Or Dungeons and Dragons Online or something
less known like Rappelz? Who knows. These companies never reveal their
actual development costs. My guess is that most of these games cost
peanuts to develop. I say peanuts compared to console games. Millions
of dollars is not peanuts =].  On the other hand though, there are
many… many low budget free to play MMORPGs as well. Games like Magic World Online,
Great Merchant and Mercenary
Wars are all low budget titles. Now, this doesn’t make them ‘bad’
games, as Mercenary Wars is a pretty interesting MMOFPS
game. What I’m trying to get at is that there are a disproportional
amount of ‘low budget’ games in the free to play MMO space and only a
handful of moderate to high budget titles.

I’d like to see more ‘big budget’ free to play games, as Allods
Online is awesome and I’d like to see more games like it. For those
that haven’t heard of Allods, it’s basically a WoW clone, but a damn
good one.