Over on Forbes.com (Ordinary Hero) comes a chunky business-oriented low-down on Michael Lewis and the success of City of Heroes.

Plenty of detail for the suit in you, here is a taste.

...Lewis spent $2.5 million of his own money, plus loans of $4.5 million from his distributor, the U.S. arm of South Korea game company NCsoft, to create City of Heroes. NCsoft is spending another $18 million a year to market and operate the game and provide customer support...

...In the 18 months before the Heroes debut, Cryptic's staff of 35 made the art and story come alive in 480,000 lines of code. The code is separated into 740 computer instruction files that handle everything from dressing up a character in an almost infinite selection of outfits (a total 10 to the 27th power, in fact) to flying through the city, as well as 25,000 graphics files. At peak hours 30,000 automated villains roam each of ten versions of the city. All the possibilities are managed by 600 2-gigahertz chips (from AMD) in ten servers. They can manage four teraflops, equivalent to the world's biggest supercomputer...

Here was what I was wondering... 480K lines of code... $7 million initial development budget... Based on a software (lines of code) valuation/methodology described here for GNU/Linux, one might believe that for that amount of code one would have seen a development budget of, say $16.8 million ($35/line * 480K), instead of a paltry $7 million. Besides the obvious "an MMOG is not an Operating System" - what else can we say?

Thanks Slashdot!

-nathan