The fact this made it past ANY cursory inspection at YC is kind of... hilarious?
There's a good video[1] breaking down just how ridiculous this entire venture is. They have absolutely ZERO background in game development, yet are claiming to be making the biggest MMO ever attempted (with a team of 2), using a revolutionary peer-to-peer meshed (infinite!) game world, with every single game genre merged together.
It's probably the single most blatant gaming-related fundraiser scam I've personally come across... but they got YC backing.
All their videos are just assets from the store, thrown together using open world youtube tutorials, and long-winded posts filled with every buzz-word and game-dev fantasy you can think of. The video is really worth a watch if you want to see just how ridiculous this is, especially the latter half breaking down their technical claims.
As someone who unsuccessfully applied for YC W21, and who also launched a product on Kickstarter in the last month, I'm going between "kind of funny" and "I'm so confused".
We didn't make it into YC, though I did get the "you were in the top 10%, please consider reapplying" email. I thought I had some idea of why we didn't make it, and what I'd change if and when we were to reapply. Hell, given that our business has grown a ton, I figured we'd have a strong application.
But seeing this makes me think that I might have some really fundamental misunderstanding of the application process.
Are you serious? Legitimacy (not being a scam) and ability to execute contribute heavily to successful outcomes. Any VC who invests in every shady startup claiming to become the next Google/FB is gonna go broke
Seems like Theranos, UBeam etc have no trouble raising money, despite every domain expert saying their goals are impossible according to our current understanding of physics
Y Combinator didn't invest in either of these companies. With Theranos, most of the investors weren't VCs. The ones who were were had family/personal connections to Elizabeth Holmes. They've been made to look stupid, and everyone knows if they kept doing deals like that they'd go bust. UBeam had several top VC investors, but they must have been convinced that the original technology demo was legitimate, and that it could be productized and scaled. The skeptics against UBeam only came out later, after they'd already raised their big money. Again, they know if they keep doing deals like that, they'll go bust.
And I suspect many of those early investors in Theranos made a very nice return on that investment, so obviously ignoring the domain experts wasn't such a bad move for them.
Nobody is likely to have made money from Theranos - it went bankrupt. Maybe there were some isolated cases of private stock sales by early investors, but this doesn’t normally happen with big investors, as it’s a sign of no-confidence in the company, so major investors can’t do it without harming the reputation and value of the company, including the value of the stock they’re trying to sell.
YC invested in a company called Balto that was easily the most absurdly weak idea/company I've seen pass through. It was basically a crappy free-to-play fantasy sports platform that was lightyears behind the incredibly well-established, deeper-pocketed, and totally change-resistant market. The only possible advantage it had for it was that one of the founders was Joe Montana's son, as sad as that sounds.
I'm not sure who they have advising them, but in the areas of games and sports, they're so bad at identifying opportunities that it's borderline comical. Where I will however grant some defense is that ideas like AirBnb probably also looked ridiculous at the time; it's only in hindsight where you have the clarity.
AFAIK YC invests in teams, not products, and are ok, if not expect the team to pivot once or twice. I mean, AirBnB looked equally silly in the beginning. I presume the team (not their product vision) was the reason for investment.
Small teams can bootstrap the creation of billion dollar IP (notch created Minecraft singlehandedly).
Not taking a stance on this particular case. But you can leverage the outsourcing economy quite far if all you want are generic high quality assets. Code - well, that is the thing here, isn't it.
Game industry experience? Baldurs Gate or the original Witcher teams had zero of it also in the beginning.
Hustling? Founders are expected to hustle.
I don't see anything super weird about this. All startups are a dice roll in the beginning.
>Game industry experience? Baldurs Gate or the original Witcher teams had zero of it also in the beginning.
I agree with the spirit of your post but these are bad examples. Baldur's Gate wasn't Bioware's first game and the first game in The Witcher series wasn't exactly received as a masterpiece.
Single Player RPGs and Minecraft style games can easily be simple enough to develop with a small team. So when people are criticizing the size of the team and lack of experience of that tiny team, it has to be taken in context with the type of game they are trying to develop.
What's more important than game industry experience is game dev experience or even software experience in general. Even if that experience is as a hobbyist, it can make a big difference in my confidence level for a project. So my questions would be, what did these guys do before now, what kinds of projects have they worked on, etc.
>Yes, you are quite right. My point was past performance is not always a good indicator of future human potential.
I agree. People can shift into an entirely different field and get fairly good at it quicker than many would imagine. Once you've proven successful in one intellectual pursuit the biggest factor in becoming proficient in another is passion, because passion leads to putting in the work. In this particular case I just think they may not realize the scope of the work their game idea is going to involve due to their lack of experience. I wish them well and if its looking good by the time it hits beta I'll probably be trying it out.
True. Claiming you are going to make a huge MMO when you are an inexperienced game developer is pretty common. Therefore we also know at which stage of Dunning Kruger they are.
>Claiming you are going to make a huge MMO when you are an inexperienced game developer is pretty common.
Yea its so common its basically a meme that the first question a beginner asks when they join /r/gamedev or another gamedev community is "How do I make an MMO?"
I have no idea at which point of Dunning Kruger they are. For example have they digested all of the technical material available on MMO:s available publicly? If they have and have fair software engineering savvy that puts them already way ahead.
Past failures by third party actors should not be taken as discouragement for startups.
To take a blunt example, before Elon Musk started SpaceX there were failed rocket companies started by millionaires all of whom dreamed of commoditizing space...
Sure, their success is improbable. But in this context longshots and improbable bets are the whole point.
> For example have they digested all of the technical material available on MMO:s available publicly? If they have and have fair software engineering savvy that puts them already way ahead.
I can see you have no experience in game development. Let me explain: with 2 people and a budget of 200K you can make a tiny indie game. With a team of 15 experienced game developers you can make a single player RPG. MMO's are built by huge companies, with lots of experience under their belt.
Newbies that want to build an MMO is a running joke in game dev communities. It basically says you are so stupid that you don't even realize how stupid you are.
>with 2 people and a budget of 200K you can make a tiny indie game.
As an example I remember reading an article explaining how something like angry birds probably cost approximately this much money to develop, but everyone was treating it like it was a tiny indie project that was made in a garage over a few weekends.
I agree with previous commenter: it's impossible to make an MMO on a shoestring budget. Until someone does it. Saying something is impossible because you've seen many failures indicates a lack of imagination, not wisdom.
It’s entirely possible, there are a bunch of small team MMO games. There’s even a few one man efforts. For example familiars.io. But the important thing is their scopes are hugely reduced from the promises made by this project.
Exactly. As a small team, the main thing is to decide the things that you will drop.
I remember Powerhoof Games (a 2 person team) had to downgrade their pixelated graphics on Crawl, so they could have really awesome animations. Think about that: deciding to have some awesome animations in there, and therefore also deciding your pixelated graphics will be very flat and basic.
I would say that as a small team the main thing is to decide when and how to scale (if you know what you are doing). If you need to stay bootstrapped then that is fine but it does not need to be the template for all small teams.
I hope this does not turn out into a duel of irrelevant anecdata :)
To counter your specific point Studio MDHR started with a team of two and eventually produced a game with outstanding graphics and animations. Scale and outsource. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead)
Sure, but they dropped anything related to gameplay innovation. The gameplay is a tried-and-true platformer, which is not that hard to implement (might be hard to get right though).
Putting together an MMO requires knowledge how to make your software systems scale. Putting together a demo in Unreal is the exact opposite of that. That is why you see so many bad MMO-s, they can make a demo, but they could not make that scale in 100 years.
If going by the above logic that just showing expertise is enough to get funding, then why was an Unreal demo valued as expertise at all?
If they showed expertise by demoing a network server/cluster, or world streaming, or asset import workflow, then i would say that there is some relevant expertise.
But they didn't even import a custom character into Unreal for their demo, how are they going to make a character creator and a clothing system?
The rocket market is not anywhere near as developed as the games industry. Everything related to the development part of games is very much cleared out.
There are plenty of small studios that have huge successes, and they are all smart enough to not develop a huge MMO. Simply because they know they don't have the resources to pull this off.
Starting a rock band is a long shot. Beating the best NBA team in basketball is a delusion.
My point was that if the state space of the market has lots of undiscovered areas all bets are off who is going to succeed an who is not. I would not call gaming tech "complete" by a long shot.
I would argue the NBA example is not a good one. In that the parameter space is quite fixed, whereas in technology and games, I would claim the state space of what success looks like is much broader.
Yes, if you have super accurate metrics of what success looks like and the domain is highly competitive and lucrative then the scrappy upstart has poor chances.
I dont' think you can have a Billy Beane/Moneyball/Sabermetrics moment in NBA like you had in baseball.
But I think gaming and technology still has lots of unfound angles to be discovered.
I would guess the question YC pondered was not "can these guys create an MMO" but "could they have a small chance to bring some value adding innovation to some place in some market".
> Yes, if you have super accurate metrics of what success looks like and the domain is highly competitive and lucrative then the scrappy upstart has poor chances.
According to their Kickstarter, this is exactly the place they placed themselves. Head on competition with huge competitors. That was the point that I was making. You can of course create a 2nd "Minecraft" and be successful, but that is clearly not what is happening here.
Their claim is basically "we can be 1000x more productive than any of the established game developers". I can give you my estimate of those odds ;).
I agree with you 100%, ab-initio any teams chances to create new successful MMO IP are astronomically small. Even more so if the team is tiny. But a small team can generate valuable IP - whatever that turns out to be. The key thing at this point is that they are clearly engaging with the market (enough to warrant an angry rant).
"After moving to San Francisco in October 2007, roommates and former schoolmates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the idea of putting an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast." -Wikipedia
Agreed. This mythology keeps getting repeated, where the only thing that happened was a couple of rich VCs (pg and others) didn't like the idea originally. But as many others have pointed out, Couchsurfing was already big, and VRBO/HomeAway had already received huge funding rounds. Was it really that hard of a leap to see how people (especially millennials) would flock to cheaper urban rentals if a company made the safety and payment aspect of it much better than what existed before?
Seeing a market and implementing a unicorn class product are quite different things even if you have the accurate perception of market needs. There is a reason unicorns are called unicorns and not justsurveythemarketfortrends-corns.
I admit AirBnB was perhaps not the most relevant example given it's a different industry.
I have no reason to champion the team but having a fairly good knowledge of games and software development I don't see the need to criticize the YC investment based on the context of their pitch.
"Didn't like the idea originally" is no different from "looked silly". And it wasn't just "a couple of rich VCs" who thought that. (Btw, the word 'rich' seems gratuitous there.) YC wasn't going to fund them but did anyway because they liked the founders. It's not mythology.
"Was it really that hard a leap?" - yes it was. That it seems otherwise now is pure hindsight fallacy.
It keeps getting repeated that the original AirBnB idea was "crazy and outlandish" at the time, but it was only with hindsight that we see how it could be successful.
My argument is that that is false, because at the time there were already numerous examples of successful lodging sharing platforms, just none of which had the special combination of features (e.g. social reviews, ease of payment) that AirBnB had.
As another analogy, when Facebook launched there were already many previous social networks (MySpace, Friendster), but FB was the first with a unique combination of features (uncluttered design, real name policy, eventually the feed, etc.) that made them the primary social media winner. But nobody repeats the false myth "Oh wow, social media was such a crazy and outlandish idea before Facebook came along".
Sorry, but this strikes me as classic hindsight fallacy. Here's Fred Wilson in 2011: https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/, and the original email thread between him and PG from 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html. PG went all the way to using an exclamation mark (has there ever been another?) and even that wasn't enough.
Anyone who thinks VCs would have been happy to fund a Couchsurfing knock-off in 2008 is looking at this history through many filters, for example the fact that startup fundraising became much easier in the subsequent decade.
The reason I strongly disagree is that I was intimately involved in the VR (vacation rental) space at that time. I have seen those articles before, and yes, both Fred Wilson and pg missed seeing the potential benefit, but in my opinion despite their phenomenal success otherwise, this "miss" here was just the miss in their minds, not the space more broadly.
My understanding is that one of the first big investors in AirBnB did so because he was familiar with the VR space. Being very familiar with the holes in user experience and technology at the time with VR websites, it was not a leap in my mind at all to see how a winner was destined for the space.
Ah, this context makes things clearer—and is quite interesting! I think we may have been talking at cross purposes. I was talking about the mind-misses.
> "Was it really that hard a leap?" - yes it was. That it seems otherwise now is pure hindsight fallacy.
Not diminishing building an $xx billion dollar unicorn, but I think the poster has a point about couch surfing.
Couch surfing really was one of those beloved and deeply embraced communities that also had that early underground internet feel to it. I don’t think it’s fair to say taking couchsurfer.com and the concept more generally and commercializing backed by vc money is hindsight fallacy, even if pg didn’t like the idea when YC funded Airbnb.
Now if the concept and strong organic community it inspired didn’t previously exist then I’m totally on board with your sentiment. But maybe I’m wrong too and Airbnb bears no relation or resemblance to couch surfing before it.
Edit: read the email thread you linked too, in it also confirms within the VC debate the old guys didn’t get it while the young guys did. This may be why the poster felt it was relevant to use the adjective “rich”, older or more established VCs were less likely to be or know couchsurfers. The other thing the vc noted were the Airbnb customers were already listing on multiple marketplaces.
The connection to Couchsurfing was obvious at the time. But taking that seriously as a venture investment was not. That is the hindsight fallacy part. Calling that "mythology" is inaccurate, as that email thread plainly shows.
"Not funding" and "looked silly" is a difference, but perhaps it's my limited understanding of the English language.
My wife bootstrapped a startup, got "no funding", scaled it and sold it successfully to a competitor. I guess the idea "was silly" because no one wanted to fund it?
What about all these successful "one person bootstrapped SaaS" companies from time to time in HN threads that didn't get funding?
That didn't end up being the actual business model though. The vast majority of AirBnB's current revenue is from renting out private apartments or rooms, more in competitition with VRBO or hotels. You can definitely still rent out an air mattress in the living room, but that's not what AirBnB is making its money from.
There are good stories of their beginning out there.
The wikipedia summary really does not do justice to how hard their start was.
I enjoy especially the ones as told by their founder in the excellent startup school lectures. They were scrappy, lacked clear direction and hustled and struggled.
I mean, AirBnB looked equally silly in the beginning.
One big difference is that AirBnB wasn't trying to obviously scam people on Kickstarter as part of their core business plan.
I mean maybe the dude is a genius programmer who has come up with a truly novel way of building a single world Peer to Peer MMO, but if so why not lead with that? Instead all their sales videos are obvious minimal effort Unreal Engine asset flips that show no creativity or technical innovation.
Hustling is showing pre-rendered videos to simulate gameplay, or promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is flat out lying and saying you're going to build something that massive mega-studios struggle to even build, then throwing in a few dozen promises for stuff that's not even possible with current technology.
>promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is also flat out lying, its just that most people will realize its not true. Simulated gameplay that's labelled as "simulated" is fine but if you end up not delivering anything close to that then you'll rightfully lose all credibility.
Scalable simulation worlds are more or less just a networked cluster of nodes with an octree topology. I suppose there are limitations to local node density but other than that providing a seamless experience is more about how to architect the core system than rocket science.
Yes, it's hard. I have no idea if people even want that.
Or can you make the node-to-node transit non jarring for players. But I don't really see it as lying. Ambitious certainly.
I don't think many people expect a literally unlimited world. I'm almost 40 so I don't have enough time to finish most of the non-infinite games I start. I just take issue with his statement that promising literally unlimited content and then delivering a lot of content isn't a lie. I'm not a great programmer (or a pro) and I suck at math so I don't actually know what's possible in terms of infinite worlds.
There have been attempts at delivering more content than a person could play in a lifetime. However, the broader the scope of a game is, the less compelling the content becomes. For example, No Man's Sky is probably the best attempt thus far at a literally infinite world (I don't know if it actually is or not). Its a really great game and I sank about a hundred hours of time into it, but after a while even though you're going to different places it begins to feel too familiar.
The 2nd Elder Scrolls Game, Daggerfall wasn't infinite but it did have 16,000 cities and quests generated in all of them. Supposedly someone figured out it would take about a week to walk from one end of the world to the other but you could actually do it (unless it experienced one of its many crashes while you were attempting it) Its one of my favorite games of all time. While by today's standards the quests were frequently shallow, there was enough hand crafted content to make the overall experience feel pretty authentic.
I think "Infinite" has to be understood not in the mathematical sense (as obviously nothing is infinite) but in the sense of letting the player experience as many new environments as they like. No mans sky is a good example of this, I think.
I also don't find too large game worlds intrinsically interesting, but there are many popular things I find boring so I'm not using my own sentiment as a gamer as a benchmark here.
Hadean is a general-purpose distributed object system. People have tried to use those for games. EvE Aether Wars used that. They got 10K players in the same space. But it's all spaceships in a big space, not interacting much. Xsolla’s Game Carnival was only 500 users.
Spatial OS is more geographical. They have regions, and dynamic boundaries between them. If more players are in a region, the regions get smaller. Inter-region interactions are possible but slower.
Second Life has fixed-sized regions. Each region talks to its neighbors on four sides. The user's viewer talks to all the regions within visual range of the viewpoint. Assets are stored on AWS front-ended by Akamai. The servers are mostly single-thread per region, because the design is old. Crossing regions works most of the time, and since moving to AWS with faster networking, the delay is usually under 0.5 second. The whole system is sluggish but works reasonably well. (I'm writing a new client for it in safe Rust, using Vulkan and multiple threads. It's going well. The existing C++ client gets CPU bound on the main thread and can't keep the GPU busy.)
Disclaimer: I work at Hadean, thought I'd clarify a couple of things
Yes, the Hadean Platform is a general distributed compute platform. But 'EVE: Aether Wars' used Aether Engine, our spatial simulation engine built on top of the platform (and works similarly to how you describe Spatial OS). Some updated numbers: more recently we've hit 2 million entities with a few hundred CCU.
In terms of cross-cell ('cell' being our region) interactions, entities moving between cells has been a single tick (at 15-30Hz depending on sim) in all simulations we've built so far - 'EVE: Aether Wars' did torpedo and player transitions, as well as torpedo target tracking across cells and torpedo-ship collisions. We also have a demo of cross-cell PhysX - this has some pretty strict requirements on inter-cell interaction latency.
Out of curiosity, what would you see as a litmus test for 'simulation with lots of cross-region interactivity'?
No, that's too hard. Crowd scenes, basically. How big a crowd of players, reasonably close to each other although not in physical contact. Clubs, ground battles, etc.
We look at CCU alongside number of entities in the sim, since they're both axes of interest for customers - 2m+ entity scale is tricky, netcode at 10k+ player scale is tricky, we target both.
That said, I've found it interesting that people _generally_ want one or the other. Game companies like the idea of loads of entities/logic ('high fidelity'), but that ramps up cost per user - ultimately they just want more people in-game for cheaper. Whereas companies willing to put the money behind resources for high fidelity simulations, generally 'only' want a few hundred concurrent users.
Yes. The scaling problem with Second Life is that it scales in size, but not in density. The number of regions you can have is limited only by the available funding for servers. But the number of players per region is limited by how much work the single thread that does most of the sim work can do. Right now, this is 20 to 60 per region. The architecture could probably get to 100-500 per region if multi-threaded, a bug in the dispatcher for the Mono engine used for scripting was fixed, and the viewer was modernized to avoid choking when displaying that many avatars. Beyond that, a different architecture would be needed.
Improvement means more CPU cores per region, though, which increases cost. Especially since Linden Lab moved the sim servers to AWS, where you pay by CPU. Server cost is a big problem with this approach. Server cost scales with land area, not usage. Second Life land costs about US$175 per month for a 256 x 256 meter square.
I thought Improbable was going to crack this, but after the first three Spatial OS games shut down due to high hosting costs at Google, it looks like that's not it.
Sominium Space is on Spatial OS, but their world isn't very big. If it was big, the NFT land scheme, which depends on scarcity, wouldn't work.
I want to see a Metaverse that looks like an AAA title. This is probably possible now but may not yet be cost-effective to operate. Linden Lab lacks the will, the staff, the management, the money, and enough understanding of their legacy code base. The really good people who built the thing all left years ago.
Linden Lab has a job opening for a VP of Engineering. The old one retired. If someone competent wants to go over there and kick them into forward motion, please go for it. Really. There's probably someone reading this who's qualified for the job.
Starting a new world of user-created content is hard because it takes years to acquire the creator base and for the culture to settle. So far, Roblox, Minecraft, and Second Life have achieved that. In each case it took over a decade. That's the hard problem. Upgrading the technology is easier than the decade of building a world.
(I'm looking at this from the outside, not as a Linden Lab employee. The Second Life client is open source, and after a few months of writing a replacement client in Rust, I have a reasonably good idea of what's required. There's a third party replacement for the server code, written in C#, so that's relatively well understood by others. The C++ code Linden Lab uses for their servers is still proprietary, but the protocols are not. Nor are the bug reports.)
In fairness to Slack, the MMO they put together worked and was truly innovative. It just didn't find a big enough audience. Huge gap between that and something like DreamWorld.
While I have never played it, the brief description in the opening paragraph:
> Glitch was officially launched on September 27, 2011, but reverted to beta status on November 30, 2011, citing accessibility and depth issues. Glitch was officially shut down on December 9, 2012.
I think you misread that. It says you could spend your money on something better. like a juicero. Hard to know exactly how the author views juicero in terms of being a good product but I think the point is it's a much better kickstarter than this game. Seems you agree on that.
In their Q&A [0] they sound very passionate about raising money now and figuring everything out later. I wish them the best, but definitely feels like a project that will fizzle out, or dramatically change in scope. I've never seen a more vague and generic description for anything - they want to combine:
an infinite world, millions of players, upload anything into it, every game genre, thousands of "biomes", craft anything, factions, pets, enemies, loot, Photoshop/Zbrush/SketchUp clone, PvP and PvE, mac & windows with mobile coming soon
Their vision for the game reminds me of how Epic Games reportedly raised around a billion dollars to fund their idea of the Metaverse [1].
They talked a lot about Minecraft but I'm not sure either of them played it.
> You look at Minecraft and yes there are multiplayer Minecraft servers, but the majority of gameplay people experience as single-player
This doesn't ring true to me at all. The vast majority of people playing MC regularly are playing on MP servers, and on those servers a lot of the gameplay is directly with other players – tournaments of all sorts (PvP, building, games like "Spleef"), fully-formed market economies with payments/shops/etc, small-scale building with friends, exploring the world together / team PvE, and of course huge collaborative building efforts that can have 100s of people working towards a unified goal.
Star Citizen is a decade-spanning imploding trainwreck, but there’s no doubt that it’s helmed by ambitious and notable gamedev veterans.
Dreamworld doesn’t even have notably padded resumes, and it’s flimsy even by the low standards of shoddy Kickstarter MMO campaigns. To be honest, when I saw it claiming to be a member of YC, I assumed it was touting a participant award (i.e. it applied to YC, but wasn’t necessarily accepted), or was engaged in some other outright deception. Anything seemed more probable than them actually getting YC investment
It's not particularly good one[*], and it's missing a lot of promised features, but you can actually, fly the ships, have combat, trade some, walk in ships etc.
I am not defending them, because It probably will end up in tears, but they already delivered some.
Although clearly in pre alpha state, is more stable than some recent releases by major studios.
I can't remember the name of it but there was another one a year or maybe a few years ago where they were it was going to be an MMO that's an alternate earth where you can be anything. AAA photorealistic graphics, lots of IRL jobs exist in detail. It could be an action game but for example cars would have all of their IRL systems modeled realistically and would require maintenance.
They launched with a trailer that looked so cool everyone knew it was a scam and everyone called it out immediately so it got pulled.
They might just have gotten a "wow these guys have no shame and can sell anything while stabbing your mother in front of you without you batting an eye" feeling that many people in the SV circles like to glorify.
The Wild Eight, you can get it on Steam. It's only a 8-person multiplayer game though. I was brought in after the original team decided to sell the project to the publisher, and turns out that their idea of peer-to-peer multiplayer (which is the central feature of the game) was to just send all the events generated by each player to all others, without local game logic built on single-player Unity primitives and local time — without any lock-step or anything like it. Unsurprisingly, it got into a complete desync state after a couple of hours, with different players seeing a completely different picture of the world on their screens. And the game, without any mechanism in place to detect it, happily carried on.
There were a few theoretical solutions for it. One would be to have authoritative client-server architecture. But all the game logic was very tightly coupled with Unity primitives in the most naive way, so to simulate a part of the game world, you had to have this part of the game world loaded on your computer, with textures, sounds and everything. After spending a little time on that idea, I concluded that we would need to rewrite all game logic to decouple it, and it was simply unfeasible. There were a lot of custom quests.
Another was to use dedicated servers. But we only sold the game, didn't take any subscription or micro-transactions, so even if servers were cheap (they were not), it wasn't a viable strategy long-term.
And finally - the true peer-to-peer. Since the game world was already split into shards for loading and unloading, I decided that every shard was to have a different "master" player who would play a role of authoritative server — this way he had to load roughly the area that he saw on the screen anyway. We implemented the API which repeated the Unity Multiplayer API, but instead of sending calls and returning RPCs to and from one central server, we routed it to the local "master" player. Of course, this architecture was very susceptible to cheating, but since our game was a coop for friends, and not something even remotely competitive, we decided it was okay.
And even with this much smaller scope, the amount of pain, stress and screwed deadlines we endured was just too much. These kinds of systems are very hard to get right, and even harder to debug — you end up running between different PCs comparing hashes, writing gigabytes of logs and doubting if you even chose the right career after you rewrote your packet-packing code the 6th time. Still, a lot of fun and new lessons learned.
It would be nice if they didn't take on scams so hard, because there are people out there who are a lot more talented than these guys and also really love and care about games.
We’re well into the start of the Metaverse fad for VC funding. I expect the bet is that they’ll pickup large investment quite quickly off the back of that and hire in expertise.
Not sure why they’re running a Kickstarter though!
Elon used his billions of dollars to hire hundreds of the top industry professionals to get the job done.
These guys are live-streaming themselves inserting asset store objects into downloaded game templates then saying that's them developing the biggest MMO ever made. Just a bit of a difference there.
> Boom aerospace founders had zero aviation engineering background
"Joe (co-founder and CTO) came to Boom with significant experience in the aerospace industry. He played engineering and leadership roles on aircraft and certification programs at Hawker Beechcraft, Adam Aircraft Industries, Eclipse Aviation, and ICON Aircraft, and he has been an early employee at three aerospace startups."
He has degree in science and was admitted in the Stanford's PHd physics program before dropping out to do business. And he has billions dollars behind his investments, not Kickstarter.
In the video I posted elsewhere in this thread, he actually breaks down all the assets and every single one of them is from the asset store. There's literally nothing original in the game at all.
There's nothing wrong with buying assets off the store. But the game has to have some original mechanics, and a proposition value that makes it worth investing in. That value can't be "everything that has been done before, but all in one game". The idea has to be original or unique, and that's what's missing here in this MMO!
What, they're not mentioning "Metaverse" and "NFT", and they don't have a blockchain? They're missing the hype train.
Right now, there's a huge boom in "blockchain metaverses". Search for "metaverse" in News for info.
The idea is to have a virtual world in which you can buy scarce land and maybe scarce objects. There are at least a dozen of these things. As virtual worlds, they're awful. The graphics are bad, the worlds are tiny, you can't do much, and nobody goes there. It's all about selling land and "rares". There are at least two such things where they skipped building the virtual world and just sell land on a map. On top of this fluff, there's now a virtual land real estate investment trust.
I want to see a good big "metaverse". Right now, 19 year old Second Life is still the best recreational virtual world, despite a lack of forward progress in the last few years from Linden Lab. Roblox is getting steadily better, moving past their blocky origins. IMVU is trying harder. Epic keeps talking up the "metaverse", but all they have shown so far is a level editor for Fortnite.
Improbable [1] raised US$400 million to build a back-end system for really big virtual worlds. It even works, more or less. But you have to host on their servers (Google's, actually) and the thing is so expensive to run that the three indy games that used it all went broke.
Since they raised too much money, they now have two in-house game studios, which have shipped nothing.
You don't need to scroll all the way down to a couple random comments mentioning NFT to see the project is a scam. It's very obvious just by watching the video or reading the first paragraph, it's just ridiculous.
Well, the good part about these metaverses is that they can actually create an income for people who own this virtual land/resources. I personally know people who earn a substantial income from owning land in games like MegaCryptopolis.
I understand the skepticism, but to me, it seems like a better model than you paying a video game developer for virtual resources and getting nothing in return. With these metaverses, you at least get to own the resource and perhaps even make money off of it.
If you can trade it, keep it in your own wallet, transfer it across accounts, that’s ownership. These are all ERC-721 tokens so they are under your control at all times. The servers can die but you can always still interact with the smart contracts and sell it on any marketplace.
Happened with a lot of older NFTs like Cryptokitties and CurioCards. The old servers died but you could still recover the tokens through smart contracts.
* Sculpt the world and create with a massive catalog of objects
* One single world, millions of players
* Explore thousands of unique biomes
* Fight and tame DreamWorld's incredible creatures
Those claims just don't seem very outlandish to me! They aren't even very unique among videogames. There is no standard for what constitutes a "biome" so it seems quite plausible that you could procedurally generate different biomes. The most questionable part is whether millions of players would really be in "one single world", but it seems quite reasonable than an actual limitation would be something like "they are all in the same world, but different areas of the same world require a loading screen", and on the backend it's just implemented with multiple servers, nothing fancy.
Everyone who's familiar with "early access" video games or Kickstarter video games should know, one cool demo video doesn't guarantee a fun game, at all. That's just how video game development works. This one is no different. They aren't a "scam", they are just trying to make a video game.
That bullet point alone is essentially enough to make me extremely skeptical that a 2-3 person team could deliver this.
To give me any hope, I would expect that team to have a significant amount of mmo (or at least significant netcode experience).
I'm not saying a 2-3 person team could never deliver a simple MMO, but it makes me very skeptical right off the bat.
Though, I tend to be quicker to jump to "naive" than "scam" as an explanation of why someone might try to tackle more than they can deliver.
MMOs are hard, and there's a reason you are very few tiny indie MMOs out there. They are a significant up front development cost to build out.
It feels like someone is promising to build a multi-story apartment complex, but quoting a budget more in line with building a single family home. And the developer hasn't ever built an apartment complex before.
This was literally the topic of my PhD thesis and it is absolutely not trivial. It's one of those things where it's easy to think it's simple from the outside, so I'm thinking naive over scam too (I was there a decade ago)
I once thought about how to make Minecraft multithreaded. There is no way its going to happen without a from scratch redesign and a massive increase in code complexity.
But it's also a startup. Don't those usually gather up investment and hire more people?
Just looking at it casually I would have guessed that there's a small founding team, and they are trying to snowball the investment to a point where they can actually do it, with a much larger team.
That's how they all work, isn't it? There's not a whole lot you can do with just two people, it's a matter of attracting investment.
> But it's also a startup. Don't those usually gather up investment and hire more people?
In the kickstarter they describe their team as: "2 full time devs, 1 part time dev". That's where I got 2-3 person team.
They also say: "If we raise enough, we'll be able to hire an additional full-time engineer to bring you Alpha features even faster!"
So, by their own terms raising an additional team member would seem to be some kind of a stretch goal, and such hiring isn't in their plan for delivering the features they've promised in the timeline they promised.
Yes, if their promise was: "We need to raise a large amount of funding, so that we can hire a medium sized team to build out all of these features" I would be a lot less skeptical. But, from reading their Kickstarter page, that doesn't seem to be what's being promised or proposed.
I would be mildy skeptical of those claims from a AAA studio with MMO experience and a multimillion dollar budget. Making an MMO with a persistent, procedurally generated, infinite, and player-modifiable world is an extreme challenge and I am unaware of any major success at it.
When you add the fact this is a team of 2 with little to no game dev experience asking for only $10k I conclude this is just impossible unless they have discovered a secret everyone else making MMOs hasn't.
It is literally impossible to deliver on even half of their promises with their budget and team. Even 10x that budget and team size is not enough. It is a scam that works because most people don't have an understanding of the challenges and costs involved in game development, much like how most people don't understand the challenges involved in operating an online service like Facebook or even Hacker News.
Companies with ~100m worth of funding and 100+ member teams have tried and failed to do less than these con artists are promising on a shoestring budget.
I would hesitate to call it a scam, but it definitely seems like they're inspired by Ready Player One at least a little bit, and may well be overzealous.
It sounds like they want to compete with VRChat since VRChat can do almost all of their stated goals with the added bonus of users being able to create and upload content, and despite the name, you don't need VR hardware to play it. The only thing listed that VRChat doesn't have or can't do is a single, giant world.
Also they state worldbuilding will have a "catalog of objects," but VRChat worlds are just Unity levels, so you can put whatever you want in there. You're not limited to a "catalog."
I'm pretty convinced they wanna compete with VRChat.
It depends where you put a limit on genre. Minecraft for example covers a surprising number of genres using just the basic mechanics + user mods for goals/limitations. Same with Roblox. If you can modify the world, you get them "for free".
Minecraft wasn't marketed as having "every genre", while showing exactly none in their demo videos.
When you design a game you come up with a core game play loop, Minecraft had this, and notch was competent and humble enough to make his game from scratch, and release a MVP people could play.
This game doesn't have a core game play loop so it hides behind nothing burger statements like this.
Whenever someone makes claims that are both grandiose and vague you should take it with a grain of salt.
But do you know what it does have? it doesn't describe in ambiguities? kickstarter rewards, you get pets, and you get to put your name on a billboard, and the more you donate the bigger your name.
I'm not saying they're right, but given we know games can lose the core game play loop and succeed, maybe starting without it isn't a terrible idea. Secondlife is still around without one. Roblox doesn't really have one. Kids can spend hours in Scratch creating their own.
It's not that the promises are impossible, it's that the promises are completely inadequate for their proposed team size and budget. Many components of what they would be building are well known, nothing fancy, they simply need time and work - but much more manpower and budget than they expect; so their promises to do it with an unreasonable budget indicate they don't even expect to fulfil these promises - ergo, a scam.
On top of it all, it's a pyramid scheme. They claim you can only play the pre-alpha if you get 2 other people to pledge, and when you get 2 other people to pledge they put you on a waiting list.
I think the missing part for it to be a true pyramid is that you don't profit from your referrals referrals and so on. That's what is usually called a downline in MLM/pyramid schemes.
But yeah, it is getting very close to a pyramid system IMO.
I've been playing an MMO called Dual Universe. It's really amazing given that you can build so many things with voxels. But it has a team with 40 people and has struggled to deliver on much of what was promised during it's kickstart.
There is no way this game will deliver on a lot of this stuff. I can tell you too, in my most recent Dual Universe experience, all those kickstarters who spend 40 bucks one time backing you five years ago will be your worst complainers and will try and sink your ship when you don't deliver.
Why would YC fund this unless they think some of the technology will be salvageable and sold a few years from now without the MMO attached anymore.
I was an early backer and played since the first playable teasers. For background, I played EVE Online for 10+ years, and have played almost every single space-based open-world game other than Star Citizen.
Unlike the game talked about here, it's actually a technically impressive game with some properly unique ideas and some really fun aspects. It's also a total buggy mess and half the time I can't even get through a half hour session without it either hard crashing, or coming across game breaking bugs. Plenty of people seem to be having a fine time, building huge bases and impressive ships and running some pretty decently sized operations, but that's not me. Whether it's my hardware combo or just bad luck, I've struggled to ever get a solid session in at all. I still don't give up on it though, and check back every few months, as I think they ARE building something awesome, it just needs a lot more work.
Considering his jobs at both Facebook and Google were internships, and he was an SDET at Apple, I would argue the sentence is exceptionally misleading in several different ways.
It’s not hard to find his LinkedIn etc. He legitimately did work at (or at least “for”) those companies but seems to be hyping it up a lot more than is probably warranted.
There's no reason to believe this team will do anything.
Look at the guys LinkedIn and you'll see the graphic designer is a really bad graphic designer, look at the game itself, it's just an asset flip, they have no artists, the demo videos show no game play, but they're happy to show how you can chase your clout on their wall.
This project looks like Theranos, more than Star Citizen or WeWork.
Star Citizen was founded by the guy who made Wing Commander, he has a history with a product that actually was successful, It looks like they merely bit more off than they could chew, for example they released a road map for their road map, which reeks of middle management problems more than it being an outright scam.
WeWork had a viable product it's just impossible for them to monopolize on it so they were quickly beaten by their competition.
Saying "we believe in the team" just shows the people who a-okayed this were easily manipulated by scam artists, or are in on the scam themselves.
WeWork's _type_ of business is viable, but they way they've ran the business since day one was an obvious money pit and hardly makes objective sense.
The real estate deals primarily structured to enrich the founder should have sent investors packing, but greed for the unicorn overrode their self-preservation.
As a result they're enjoying a massive downgrade of their investments after pouring billions of good money after bad.
Sorry but Roberts has a long string of failures behind him and his games succeeded despite him. This is even worse than the present case since people paying for Start Citizen (I'm a pigeon too) should have known thanks to his long past of failures.
> Lots of batshit has raised tons of money...like Theranos...or Star Citizen...or WeWork.
and all of them have not yet delivered much, or are frauds. If i were the VC, i'd be skeptical of founders with reality distortion fields. There are more fraudsters than there are Steve Jobs out there.
Compare with actual company building an engine that can power a huge scale MMO - for over 8 years, stuffed with FAANG alumns and Cambridge graduates, and probably valued over a billion dollars:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improbable_(company)
OP mentions they used a throwaway to prevent this "smack talk" from affecting any of his future YC prospects. I don't think YC management/judges are that petty, or at least I hope they aren't.
Didn't YC say they were going to do a percentage of randomly selected applicants to see their success rate vs random? Could this be part of that decision?
Its kind of catch 22, if you include them in the brand people might questions your decision. If you dont include them in your brand, they dont get the benefit of access etc it would give for the test.
I always assumed the random must have some vetting otherwise it would encourage some people to spam applications and developer the 'accepted' business beyond an initial phase.
Anyone know how many games YC has backed and how well they've done?
A quick google suggests they've backed at least one other, but I'm not getting a good sense of how much experience they really have with gaming companies. Maybe this is just not their forte?
Mino Games is YC backed, as their job ads pop up on here occasionally. Interestingly they seem to have shut down their older larger scale Mino Monsters games and are focusing on (what i assume to be) smaller scale collecting games.
Most of the comments I see here are people going along with the author's rant, so I'm going to take a different perspective.
Many of the author's criticisms of DreamWorld may actually be viewed as strengths. Examples:
>people with no credentials or history in the gaming industry, and try to get funding for some massive project that multi-million dollar corporations haven’t been capable of producing
Isn't this what YC is all about? This team is attempting to disrupt an industry, to do something that a large, bloated and bureaucratic corporation has trouble achieving. Why be hatin'?
>it’s definitely the first time I’ve seen it done while using the default Unreal player model.
This sounds like an intelligent move to me. If this small, two-person team wants to ship, why would they spend time creating custom models? Using default assets for as long as possible seems like the right move to me, and exactly the kind of attitude you want in a team that delivers.
>the mission statement here as well because it grossly oversells what CORE AEGIS actually creates.
The author fact-checks a corporate vision statement for accuracy, which makes me think he has little experience in the corporate world. Therefore, I wonder, what makes him a credible judge of what is or is not a viable business?
Honestly the biggest red flag to me is no artist or artist background.
Sure MMO's you need competent programmers, but what you also need is artists and someone who can manage multiple artists to create a cohesive whole.
The fact that they have 0 artist on team is just ...
As far as your strengths theory goes.
It's like somebody who has only done some web programming said he would create a better phone than iPhone.
Sure it's theoretically possible, but with no expertise in hardware, logistics, low level OS, legal (patents) ...
My example is just slightly more ridiculous, than what they are purposing.
The telltale sign of an experienced gamedev: someone who appreciates how important an art pipeline is. And how hard it is.
S2 Games had one of the best I've seen. Someday I should do a writeup about it. They were able to deliver a new Dota-style hero in less than a week -- concept, modeling, animation, polish, effects, sound, everything.
>Many of the author's criticisms of DreamWorld may actually be viewed as strengths. Examples:
people with no credentials or history in the gaming industry, and try to get funding for some massive project that multi-million dollar corporations haven’t been capable of producing
Dual Universe's owner NovaQuark listed the SAME "strength" and it is clear by their most recent backtracking and company changes (including replacing the CEO) that NOT having gaming experience is a HUGE detriment.
>> people with no credentials or history in the gaming industry, and try to get funding for some massive project that multi-million dollar corporations haven’t been capable of producing
> Isn't this what YC is all about? This team is attempting to disrupt an industry, to do something that a large, bloated and bureaucratic corporation has trouble achieving. Why be hatin'?
No, YC is not about doing something without experience. On the contrary, YC partners have been known to say that you should work on something where you are a world class expert. The better you know something, the more likely it is you can disrupt it.
I do indie game dev as a hobby, and I have taken multiple classes on networked multiplayer, and I've also implemented VERY SIMPLE proof of concepts for multiplayer fighting games in Unreal Engine.
I think what a lot of people are missing here is the context that there is STILL not a "make it multiplayer" button in game engines. They do NOT do most of the work for you for any facet of game development. Making games is still a ton of work.
To name a few things that Unreal Engine does not do for you: networked movement prediction, acceptable LERPing to positions when client/host disagree, anticheat... basically it has a nice client/server model API you can use. You can annotate structs to efficiently be transmitted over the internet, and query the API to see if you are "host" or "client".
There is an amazing talk on this from the Mortal Kombat creators about how long it took them to get their netcode right[0]. Now make that much harder when dealing with millions of players in one world, with mold-able terrain and an exotic networking stack.
"We're here to revolutionize online gaming! As you may know, video games are a multi-billion dollar market! Something about MMOs being the next Bitcoin! Fortnite! Synergy! We got our teeth whitened and professional lighting for the video interview! Totally casual! We are extremely hyped to deliver to you the future of online casinos!"
I'd write more buzzwords, but that made me feel a little nauseated, so...
But yeah, it's basically the video you send that matters.
Zenith is a VR MMO that went through YC https://zenithmmo.com/. Multiverse isn't exactly an MMO, it's more of a tabletop RPG platform (think Roll20), but is also YC funded https://www.playmultiverse.com/. There might be more.
Machine Zone is relatively successful. They also funded Mino Games https://minogames.com/en/, which might not be "successful" on your terms, but they've stayed in business for 10+ years which is better than many game studios
A family member of mine played Game of War (owned by Machine Zone) and made friends with some of the highest ranked players. The biggest whales were dropping $5-10k a day on power-ups.
Despite probably being correct in their sentiment, I think the attack on the team of "ragtag nobodies" is a bit out of order. I'm sure many of the world's best programmers are "nobodies".
Pure programming skill, however you imagine that being measured, is a very small part of building and designing a successful game and game world.
Do you honestly believe that anyone more skilled at PHP than Mark Zuckerberg had been as a Harvard freshman is on the cusp of building the next Facebook-killer?
No, Mark Zuckerberg was a nobody too. Having clout helps things along considerably when it comes to marketing and acquiring non-nobodies, but being a nobody is neither here nor there when it comes to potential. Replace "programmer" with whatever skills you think are most relevant.
If you’re clever I believe you can get pretty far in this space. But it won’t be easy. Defining an MVP with an MMO is harder than probably any other application .
Guy is straight up lying when he says he left Apple, Google and Facebook to work for Dreamworld. Just check his linked in. He has less than a year at Google and Facebook, then he left Apple in 2019 and started Dreamworld in 2021.
I admit, I'm mostly confused as to why this article was written. The kickstarter goal is $10,000, and they've only raised $60,000 so far. Is this really the biggest scam to be writing about?
If it reached millions I could imagine it warranting some level of scrutiny.
1) Company proves there's a market for the product with collecting revenue with the equivalent of a slideshow
2) Raises VC money to actually build the product (Kickstarter page claims: "We know MMOs cannot be built with just $10K. We've secured the majority of our funding from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley. We know that we'll be able to deliver our Alpha and beyond with the money we already have!")
What exactly makes this different to any other Silicon Valley high risk bet?
Because there is no original thinking going on here. The idea is basically what a 5 year old would come up with if you told them to invent "the bestest most coolest game ever", with all the complete lack of deliverability that entails. Except the founders don't even seem to have game dev experience.
Silicon Valley high risk bets are bets made on market and solution.
In this case, all elements are well known: Market, distribution, effort, etc. It's a well established market with a lot of different players (indies to huge studios).
In this case, you will have to outperform the big studios. Basically you will have to compose a basketballteam and compete in the NBA. Good luck!
Any experienced game developer can see that this is the Dunning Kruger effect in action. Nothing new perse, but the new thing is that ycombinator is going along in this delusion.
Fair game. I don't know practically anything of game dev so I believe your explanation. The video itself seemed to be mostly critical about the lack of funding to fulfill their promise so thought that was the main problem here.
There's a good video[1] breaking down just how ridiculous this entire venture is. They have absolutely ZERO background in game development, yet are claiming to be making the biggest MMO ever attempted (with a team of 2), using a revolutionary peer-to-peer meshed (infinite!) game world, with every single game genre merged together.
It's probably the single most blatant gaming-related fundraiser scam I've personally come across... but they got YC backing.
All their videos are just assets from the store, thrown together using open world youtube tutorials, and long-winded posts filled with every buzz-word and game-dev fantasy you can think of. The video is really worth a watch if you want to see just how ridiculous this is, especially the latter half breaking down their technical claims.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGQZfAbsQ6I