Top Of the Line Gaming Software
Developing a poker software is a tough challenge each step of the way, from project launch to close, it is a complete process unto itself and you require highly motivated individuals to see it through. At the outset, any project plan tries to incorporate strategic, market, operational, and financial information into a single document.
The Project Team and Executive team will use this document to evaluate the attractiveness of the project and to establish benchmarks, milestones, and metrics if the project is approved. Creating good software requirement specifications involves creating the infrastructure for the requirements process and then following it for each specification.
Now, imagine that you are responsible for managing a software project that has an estimated cost in excess of $9 million and requires approximately 3 million man-hours to complete! Add to it the expertise required to handle something like gaming, casino or poker software. Does this sound familiar? Not to many, I’m sure. That is what it takes to build a really, really good one. Minimum!
I recently read that a competitor poker software developer spent $45 million in just revamping their current poker software to interact more with social media. Are you kidding me one would ask, but that is what is probably a norm in this fascinating world of massively multiplayer gaming monoliths.
When the costs are this high, the people involved with it would have to be among the cream of the software developing community, and they would have to be ably supported by a battery of line managers and experts from business analysts to marketing.
Service-oriented coders simply won’t cut ice here, you’d require hard-core developers, who love coding with that passion when they discovered it at a very young age, mostly. SDLC models from waterfall models to fountain models are exhaustively used by managers trying to meet deadlines with the ruthless efficiency that is seldom seen in the business world, but that’s a minimum norm too. (System Development Life Cycle SDLC models help in the complete development of a system, right from the conceptual stage to the delivery stage)
Poker Software
My programmers time and again show me requests for poker software plans at sites like getafreelancer and some other sites where vendors post requirements for software developers to develop poker software for amounts ranging from $1000 to $3000 budgets – we all have a good laugh at such weird requests, and I’d like to tell these vendors looking for poker software at such prices that their money is going to go down the drain, guaranteed.
If anyone can make a poker software or a casino software in $3000, we would all be out of a job. Try fitting in 3 million man-hours for 3000 USD, and you get the picture!
Also, look at it this way: many of the top 5 poker sites with the most state-of-the-art poker software out there, supporting hundreds of thousands of players, still crash once in a while – one reason being the software was built with changed architectures now and then and as players kept on being added, patches and fixes were actively supplied.
The result becomes sometimes a horror show from the coder’s point of view. In terms of stability and robustness, poker software plans are still inadequate in several aspects. New technology and architecture is being built time and again to manage this inadequacy and it will be some time before it is fixed properly.
Where then, do these 3000 USD a software people stand? On the other hand, there are some folks who offer to sell poker and casino software for anything between USD 30000 to 50000. I recently inquired at such a supplier, quite well-known with their name cropping up on quite a few searches on search engines.
Great SEO, that! But I found that their software was a low-end java client version which is totally outdated technology in the 21st century’s 2nd decade and that it couldn’t support more than 600 players. Why, then, would I spend my hard-earned moolah on it?
What it Takes, Whatever it Takes!
While on poker software project management, I love Pete’s estimating laws, they go something like this:
1. Everything takes longer than you think (sometimes a lot longer).
- Thinking about everything takes longer than you think.
- Project Managing and leading a project team is a FULL TIME job, and then some.
- Software Engineers are always optimistic (generally REALLY optimistic).
- Schedules are (almost) always wrong.
Well, life is always looking up and there is a learning curve that defines the best within each of us. In ending this post, let me demonstrate the formula for “learning curve” as developed by managers:
Tn=time required for nth item produced
C=constant, which is equal to the time to produce the 1st unit
s=slope constant, always negative
Take it whichever way you’d like, casino or poker software isn’t something that you would be looking at to buy for a few thousand USD – it’s not a small video game or flash game that you play on your consoles or xbox or browsers. It is something much more advanced and developed at the cost of millions of dollars for it to be worth its salt.
