Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Interview

The folks at Stratics have conducted an interview with Sigil Games' Zack Karlsson, in which the director of business development answers questions about the business side of developing an MMORPG. If you're looking to better understand the behind-the-scenes of game development, the interview has some information to glean...
Q: Roughly how much of the development cost goes into hardware and software licensing compared to the actual game development?

A: That entirely depends on the project. Some projects choose to license their engine, as we did with Epic Games' Unreal Engine. We also licensed SpeedTree and EMFX for our character technology. With the growth of middleware providers, a developer and publisher can choose how much of their budget they want to invest in these solutions and their integration versus the actual development of the game. Sigil's stance is, if someone else has already done the work and it would cost us the same or more to reproduce that work, we'll gladly license the technology to reduce our overall spend.