- Iron Realms' Matt Mihaly has posted a new post discussing the minimum cost of an MMO, seguing off Brian Green's post on the same subject, and it's neat to see dueling specifics as far as cold, hard cash numbers.

I'm just going to cite Mihaly's specifics, because they're pretty interesting: "So, does it cost $2 million or $3-$3.5 million to make an MMO that garners 10,000 players? Neither. It can be done for less than a million.

- Puzzle Pirates was released for less than $1 million (30,000 active players). (Though yes, it was released before WoW.)

- Sherwood’s total development cost to date is whatever the sole team member values his time at plus the cost of some (a few dozen I’d estimate) low-end art assets. That is almost certainly far less than even a quarter million and that’s being generous I suspect. (100,000 unique monthly players currently, monetized via Adsense.)

And of course, we’re doing Earth Eternal for less than $1 million. I’d say I’m willing to bet quite a bit that it’ll be capable of garnering at least 10,000 active players but I’ve already bet the development budget! (And happily, we need less than half that number to run in the black if we keep it lean and mean.)"