PC Game Development

[Aikouka]

I've got one great thing going in my favor: My Uncle works for Lockheed Martin, has been there 30+ years and is actually the reason I started pursuing the SE Degree. He told me it is their minimum requirement for entry-level programming positions, and he can easily get me one of those positions provided I pass their intense background check and acquire the clearance.

Part of me wants to tell you to run screaming away from defense work, and another part of me wants to wish you the best of luck with a cheeky grin. I'd like to think that latter part of me is a masochist!

Anyway, I figured that I would clarify one part of what you said. At least from what I know, you're typically hired prior to receiving a clearance, because a company cannot submit a clearance request for someone that isn't an employee. However, there's usually some sort of contingency clause in your employment that your job requires you to attain and keep a clearance. You're pretty much useless without a clearance in the defense industry.

A lot of people assume you have to be a WoW-beater to be a success, meaning a budget of a hundred million, infrastructure for three million players on launch day, and good odds of spectacular failure. I haven't done the math or looked at the business model, but why can't you be successful with a million or a half-million subscribers? Bandwidth, hosting, to some extent support, could be amortized across a number of titles drawing crowds of that size in different genres. I think it might be a successful approach.

Mark, I don't think anyone here has even tried to suggest anything about besting World of Warcraft; however, I do think it's worthwhile to consider that MMOs (and arguably any online-heavy game) are definitely a far more arduous task. A standard single-player game is going to have one question that they need to answer: "What's going to make someone want to play my game?" An online-focused game will also need to follow up with, "...and what's going to keep them playing?" I think there are quite a few MMOs lately that are great at giving us reasons to try them out initially, but ultimately, they fail to deliver on a plan to keep people playing. That's why I'm talking about things such as your niche. To be able to answer (arguably) both of those questions, you need to understand who this is being developed for and avoid trying to have too much overlap as that tends to weaken the experience in all areas.