surgile please?

I'm guessing 20-50 at the very very most....

After working in a development farm, you would be amazed at how much unmotivated and not so great developers can accomplish.

Especially with the hard release mindset of today's business model..  Focus is usually placed more on meeting deadlines than actually releasing a bugfree and complete product..

Look at WoW.. 

If it's flashy enough or has a big enough novelty, people will stick around.

The MMOFPS market is ripe for the picking, in my humble yet non business minded opinion... 

You really wouldn't have to develop the whole thing for it to be lucrative.  A simple proof of concept and plan would probably get you picked up by a larger company  and/or attract a bit of venture capital pretty quickly.  Corporations don't want to get stuff like this off the ground, they would much rather someone else do all the grunt/leg work and then pick them up when there is a possibility of profit..  If I'm not mistaken, that's how SOE came to run PS, right?  BF2 is another prime example..  The downside is that when you do get picked up, the soul of the project dwindles REALLY quickly (and the corporation funnels all attention and profit to themselves), again, look at PS... 

Aye, I believe PS was originally the "side project" of 3 EQ devs (hence why there are 3 empires, each wanted to define their own faction) who had a knack for the FPS genre.

It was nothing more than a persistent 3d world with basic weaponry, bases and 10 or so vehicles (I'm sure you've seen the screenies, I had been following PS development for at least 2 years)... eventually SOE saw potential, funded a project, and worked from there.

Sol is right, dev teams are always excited when they start something new, especially in the gaming industry, but it only lasts a few weeks, and some games take well over a year or more to complete. By the end, the programmers are sick of debugging the code they've worked on for months.

I visited the EA and Ubisoft offices in Montreal a while back, it was pretty cool seeing them work on titles I would be playing, but the morale, it just wasn't there. I remember this one dude trying to debug the AI code in Splinter Cell 3, he spent the whole day just trying to figure out why the AI was getting stuck moving into crates instead of walking around them... poor guy, he didn't look too good, half asleep, unshaven, stressed...

It's like that in almost every dev situation, some project manager having no idea what the realistic time scale for production is and conveniently factoring out any possible mishaps.. the guys work like animals trying to meet the deadline, only to realize the release date will be pushed back... again.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, but today's games (keyword: today) require more than just a background in game development and ideals. 10 years ago, man any team of 5 could release a title, games were simple: no fancy AI, textures, animations, you played it for content. Now it's all eye-candy and fancy physics engines - the Unreal 3 engine itself costs 100,000 to license.

 

Over worked and under paid!