I don't get it then? How can one guy and a community working together for free create this?:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/43eIjvoYfos?feature=oembed
- Because "one guy + community" is a lot more than one guy (in fact, the core programming team on it's own is 8 people).
- Because the game has been in development since 2004 (Doom 3 / Halflife 2 released, Wii announced).
- Because that guy was releasing tech demos and even complete games back in 2006 that were the prototypes / predecessors of this game to develop the engine.
- Because that guy is turning it into a pay-for MMOG and thus expects to recoup his investment someday.
- Because you can put awfully huge amounts of work into something for yourself that doesn't expect recompense (this is how programmers used to do it "back in the day" too... a lot of homebrew, indie and other games are developed after man-years of effort for free. I've spend years of my time solving programming problems only to give that code away later. The entire freeware / open source movement only collates and organises what's always existed amongst programmers which is a desire to have cool stuff they dream of working, and to share knowledge, whether it means they pay their own money / time / effort or even hire others to do it for them and then give it away - I know, I'm in the process of hiring an artist to work on a game of my own that I'm writing in my spare time that will probably never be played by anyone but myself).
- Because that game uses procedural generation - for years (read: Amiga / DOS days, if not before) you've been able to make realistic random landscapes, predetermined by an initial seed factor (get a copy of VistaPro for example) that can be extended to produce such infinite worlds quite easily (for a certain value of easy), and since the game that one was based on (Elite, 1984 - eight galaxies each with 256 planets to explore which could never normally fit in a computer's memory of that day) you've been able to produce "infinite" worlds based on such techniques. The problem is that they tend to be quite boring, that you have to populate them with "life" of some kind (i.e. I bet that space station in the video was manually inserted, but maybe the asteroid belt is "real") and although it prevents you from having to store Petabytes of universe models and "design" a universe, it has lots of associated problems (saving it, reproducing it, modifying it - e.g. destroying / modifying a landscape, populating it, calculating it, making it interesting and playable, storing the interesting stuff separately which means your savegames get bigger and bigger the more the player explores even if they never interact etc.) - basically your world / asteriods / stars are just the results of a function that ALWAYS returns the same worlds / asteroids / stars and everything else in the game has to be manually added, programmed, stored, etc. Zooming to another world takes no time or extra storage but the second you want to *DO* something there, you suddenly have to save every modification done on that planet. They also run into lots of gameplay problems (e.g. Elite had planets that were produced by the algorithm that was basically unvisitable).
But even a texture or model in that game, if developed by a commercial process, could costs tens to thousands of dollars. Some people, though, do things to that standard just to learn, to show off for potential employers, for their own amusement, or just because they can and then give it away for free.
P.S. programmer's fees vary greatly from area to area, depending on age, experience, sex, quality of work, previous employers, corporate culture, and even how much someone can make a case for a pay rise themselves. I can earn more than $50 an hour and have done pretty much since I left uni (starting with basic IT technical stuff like switching on machines and installing software) - it's just a question of the local employment arena, your skillset, personality, experience and being given the chance to demonstrate that. It's undeniable that to *hire* people to do the equivalent amount of work is roughly equal to such prices because it assumes an average, first-world company that has to undertake certain precautions (e.g. patent-searches, pension plans, employment law, etc.) - what you see in your pay packet is only half the story of what your employer pays to put it there. You wouldn't be able to produce Linux for less than several hundred million dollars and COCOMO estimates things like that pretty well - it is only a statistical average and of course you can't say that something with more lines of code costs more, but there's a correlation in professionally produced, business-critical, tested code between the number of LOC and the cost.
Put simply: Some people do amazing shit and give it away for us all to enjoy.
