Here is some candid feedback on our (Hi-Rez Studios) history and thoughts around the future of Smite:
Some players will look at the HiRez history of game development and arrive at misinformed conclusions, so here are more facts to help everyone understand us and the game development/publishing world. Some of the following was already posted in a post several months ago but people were nice enough to downvote it into the negative zone.
The first and most important thing to note is that MOST games fail (remember that most people tend to remember the ones that did well), SOME games break even, and a tiny number of games are very successful. Thats the nature of the gaming industry. So for every WoW, LoL, CoD, and TF2 there are hundreds of games that are dead.
Global Agenda was our first game and it lost a lot of money. It was not a total loss since we did build significant technology and platforms that would help us develop our next games (Tribes & Smite).
We continued to fund Global Agenda for more than a year after it was released and losing money, we continued to create content and new features but no matter how much work we did the user base kept declining.
We created Tribes Ascend since we love Tribes, we made it F2P so everyone can have easy access to it. We didnt think Tribes Ascend would be a financial windfall but it was worth a risk to try.
Tribes Ascend ended up being break-even at best. Its very possible we made some mistakes in how we monetize it, but our priority was to get as many people to play as possible (without losing too much money in the process). Tribes received exceptional reviews, we kept adding new features and content, but
just like Global Agenda the user base kept declining no matter what we did. (That happens to 99% of the games) Some people have asked for us to provide more tools for community content creation, but our infrastructure and development platform does not support that ability well and the cost and time to develop those features is extremely high.
Contrary to the belief that we were milking tribes to support the development of Smite, if we didnt develop another game that could support the studios the company and the Tribe servers would have closed down. Tribes was also reviewed by outside publishers for both console port potential and other regions like China, the evaluations we received from numerous potential publishers was that it was too niche and difficult as a mainstream product (their words, not ours) and they were not interested in publishing it. We would have had to significantly change the game-play which our current Tribes user base would disagree with (for example; much much slower movement, reduce or no skiing, instant fire, etc)
How much did it cost to do the above? At that point I personally funded all the game development with over $30 million of funding (losses) and generated about $10 million in revenue (split fairly evenly between GA and Tribes) so overall we spend about $40 million running the company vs $10 million in revenue. Yes, my wife thinks Im crazy, but what does she know about playing and making video games
Smite is very unusual.
Smite is one of those rare games thats actually growing every month, and is also profitable. This is allowing us to grow the Smite team and deliver weekly updates and content (from 15 people initially to about 80 people now). In addition, many outside publishers were interested in Smite and we are fortunate enough to have made a deal with Tencent who is the most prestigious partner we can have for our type of game.
Given everything we know Smite should have a long and successful future which is why we are very excited as a company and continue to work our butts off to make Smite the best Moba game in the world.
Erez
http://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/1m7ybi/what_will_hirez_do_with_smite/
