It's more like Destiny, World of Warcraft or Diablo in that there are RPG elements, a grind for loot and the possibility to meet other players.
Minecraft as a project over the years easily cost more than 20x to make than The Division, I'm glad it's successful, but I don't know if it's really apples/apples.
At that time there were 25 employees, all living in Stockholm Sweden, the cost of a developer there in 2011 is roughly 60-75k SEK/mo (lets say 60).
(25x(60x12))x9 = 15M SEK in Salaries.
Not including: marketing (usually more than half the total cost of making a game), build servers, distribution servers.
To put that into context: Final Fantasy IX is on the list of most expensive games ever made and cost 40M EUR.[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
Massive seems to take three years per game, and according to Wikipedia has 650 employees. It's pretty hard to see how you get to 20x from there.
(Genuinely curious)
I'd love to hear an insider's opinion on: Why aren't more games developed like Minecraft? Bootstrapped, slowly crafted over years rather than months, soft launched, minimal marketing, iterated on, etc.? Why is "pump out and hype an AAA game as inexpensively as possible" the only option Serious Game Companies™ go with?
Most Indies (early access on Steam) either never come out of early access or come out relatively Luke-warm.