I think live teams can be extremely cost effective. The problem is that we’re really bad at separating out the different facets of effectiveness. AC1 had a very small, very active live team. AC1 supported Turbine for many years, but is rarely used as an example of an overwhelming success. Did it “fail” because the live team was too small? That certainly wasn’t the only factor, and it’s really hard to say if that was even an important factor. So what lesson do we take away?

In all honesty, I think that most of the live teams I’m aware of today are too large. Certainly EQ2′s was when I was on it — and I told my boss that several times. :> The reported size of WoW’s live team scares me; I’d never want to be in charge of that monster. The problem is that our current management techniques aren’t capable of dealing with a team of more than about 20-30. We stumble through pre-launch development with much much larger teams because we have to, eyes ever on the shining Valhalla of being done. But post-launch development never ends, and it takes a very different approach to hold everything together.

Luckily, you can do amazing things with a small, dedicated live team who loves their game. Just four developers is a little too small, but something in the 10-20 range (including core devs, QA and Community, but not CS or other services) would be prefect for my dream team: large enough to handle a decent volume of content and features, but small enough to hold the vision and focus in common. (Although I should note — my estimates here are based on a classical MMO like AC1 or WoW. Other types if games with other audiences will have other needs.)

I think the biggest concern about live team size will ultimately be, very simply, budget. A live team on any kind of budget has to be relatively lean and mean at launch and until everyone figures out exactly how much money they’re going to be taking in. At that point, one could probably draw up various scenarios and projections for subscriber retention based on various levels of live team commitment.

I suppose one could throw caution to the wind and go with a larger live team, whether it’d potentially put the company into the red or not (at least in the short term), with hopes of increased content and dedicated ongoing development bringing more people in… but there’s a question of cost effectiveness there. We’ve certainly seen strong ongoing live development work out for games like Eve, etc. But more often than not, do players even notice? Isn’t this the case with EQ2? Or, has the straight Diku niche just been filled too well by WoW for anyone to notice? This can be an expensive gamble.

What’s amusing is how small a team a live game CAN be run on. I don’t think most players would guess how few people are behind the scenes sometimes. The problem here is that, while a skeleton crew may look good on paper for a while, eventually players ARE going to wander away if the game doesn’t change, new content isn’t added, there are no events, etc. The problem with live MMO development seems to be that, while players *all* think that they want things to remain exactly the same forever – they really, really don’t.