Final Project - MMORPG
The final project for my current class (Systems Analysis and Design) is to “upgrade” a fictional company’s systems. The instructor’s suggestions were systems for inventory tracking, help desks, employee time management or payroll but other suggestions could be made.
It is a group project and we are a group of three. I actually had the first idea while sitting in the project management seminar at the ATA Conference. I thought it would be nice to “globalize” a company. I was thinking of a company with a few software products who are English only that wants to enter a global market. I think this appealed more to me than to my group mate - no surprise.
Luckily, I know he is a gamer - also no surprise considering he is a male Computer Science major in his early twenties - and the other idea was to have a fictional game development company that wants to add an online multiplayer environment (not MMORPG, but along those lines) to an existing game.
Today, I spend some time looking into server requirements and I was in awe by some of the stats I found. It seems like some of the games, for example WoW (World of Warcraft) have a HUGE user base. I knew some games were popular, but some of the head lines simply floored me. From the News section of WorldofWarcraft.com “In its first 24 hours of availability, the expansion sold over 2.8 million copies to become the new fastest-selling PC game of all time [...]“. According to the Wiki entry, they have more than 11 million monthly subscribers, “with more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and about 5.5 million in Asia” and with a peak of almost a million players online at primetime.
Anyway, our fictional game will be quite a bit smaller than that and require less server power and bandwidth though for a mock analysis, it wouldn’t really matter.