http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/05/is-another-black-ops-map-pack-coming-may-3/ If you didn't know The second DLC pack for Black Ops has been leaked(Link above) And I thought about posting this in another Black Ops thread, but I thought this would be more fun. =P
It does seem a little like a ripoff for $3 to buy each map in the pack, basically. If they stepped up the map packs to something like 6 multiplayer maps and 1-2 zombie, I'd feel a lot more confident in buying them (says the person who bought the First Strike map pack...)
I'm looking forward to the pack's release, nonetheless.
@SirNoobalot Think about it this way, $15 times roughly 5 million dedicated players equals is 75 million. Divide that in half which leaves both Activision and Treyarch with 37.5 million. Take the 10.9 million that is averaged to promote a game(and DLC that follows) and divide that in half and subtract it from the sales, 32 million. Take roughly 2,000 employee's at the average game developer and divide that up. That leave's each employee at roughly $1,602.50 as their yearly salary. take into account that they sold more copies originally than they do DLC and doing the math i get on average 69,160 dollars a year, wich is about average to support a family of four. That help you understand?
Gstroy, you left out how much they made from the game itself and that it does not take an entire year (referring to the year's salary) to design 5 maps. If it did, those would be some dam good maps.
@SirNoobalot The last number($69,160) was the original sale and one map pack's worth of salary for 2,000 employees. Its about $1,602.50 for each map pack.
I'm not completely familiar with level design, but I'll assume it takes maybe a month to design a typical level pack for a typical shooter. Most developers tend to wait at least a few months after the original release (in this case, ~3 months for the first DLC, ~1 after that for the 2nd...) I'll ignore the salary and get straight to the concept: If you're only making 5 maps at a time and it clearly doe snot take very long to design these (relatively speaking), why keep on milking all fans of your game for money? LEt's say for 2000 people it takes them... collectively a week to design one level.... given 4 months, how mant levels should that be? About 17. How many are really produced for a black Ops map pack? About 5 (referring to the First Strike map pack for Black Ops)..... Does something seem wrong there? You know, like doing work for 1 month instead of 4?I'm willing to pay more to get more maps, but the process of just releasing 4 at a time every couple months just gets really annoying.
Also, as Freakenstein said early, why not just include these tiny map packs in the original game? Like I said, I don't mind paying say 30 bucks for a big map pack, but something as small as 5 **** maps you might as well include in the original. ThCollectively, for 10 maps, I'm coughing up 30 bucks..... There's [guess] 45 [/guess] maps (including campaign, zombie, and multiplayer), and that cost me 60 bucks. Each map on the original costs me $1.25 . Each map on the map pack costs me $3........ I see a problem here. (Yes I do realize a game takes more than just designing a whole bunch of levels, but I'm stripping it down to get the point across)
They normally start Map Packs before the game comes out, an average map(a well designed and balanced map) probably takes 6 to 8 months from concept to finished product.
