I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though).
Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity with the random latency of so many streams using prediction. Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on ground" sort of world).
Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to do even a small subset of what they want requires people with lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation, lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support huge numbers of"local" players either.
This was part of the exciting suggestion of the original Stadia trailers: with the entire game and all the interactions happening in Google datacentres, you would only need to receive a rendered version, and suddenly all this would be possible.
Of course none of that has happened and Google folded their games studio, which is par for them, but does go some way to reinforcing this point that there's a reason this stuff isn't done.
Exactly, on the server side player interaction is an N² problem (where N is the number of players who are currently interacting). Each of N players need updates on the (N-1) other players they can see. And without strong in-game reasons not to, players will test the limits, no matter how efficient your code (see EVE where despite them making huge improvements to their servers and code as well as already using an extremely low update rate, player battles are still basically limited by how many you can get into a system before the server topples over).
Eve could go more granular than single threaded Server Blade per Solar System, go down to at lest server node per Grid, or even per 250km mini grid with BSP tree partition mechanism. They could also work on real dynamic scaling.
Instead last time I looked into it they migrated Solar systems around once a day during mandatory downtime relocating the ones where huge battles were pre-planned to happen in near future to the dedicated high MHz blade nodes, and everything was single threaded. Result was two small battles in different parts of one solar system loaded the node as much as one bigger battle.
Oh, and they ran a lot of Stackless Python code for that extra slowness.
There's a 5,000 human player experimental event happening tomorrow [1]. As a participant in a previous invite-only event, I can assure you that it works very well.
Disclaimer: I work under the same company as the developers of this tech (although I am not involved in this product). My opinions are entirely my own.
> 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior
I participated in a tech demo test about 2 years back, with roughly 3000 players interacting in non-trivial ways (server authoritative). UDP exists. GPGPU exists (NVIDIA helped improve PhysX for this specific scenario). A massive amount of users is not impossible.
I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant, motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many) times as well and were rejected (YC is mega-competitive after all).
IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926.
The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago.
Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know:
If you're thinking "how bad can it really be?", please treat yourself to watching a couple minutes of "gameplay".
It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.
You're not meant to editorialize titles like this on HN. People who submit stories have no more claim to their viewpoint than any commenter does. The title here should be:
"This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"
If the reason for the rule is to avoid the submitter pushing through their viewpoint, this particular case shouldn’t be a problem. The “Y Combinator” part is a reason why it’s relevant to this site, and it’s not a viewpoint.
I do think calling this a "scam" is difficult to defend from an intent perspective, but it does not appear like it has any realistic chance of succeeding. At some point projects cross a line from being optimistic to being negligent and deceptive. YC should know better and I think using hyperbolic rhetoric is a legitimate counter to a company that seems to be sleepwalking into failure with other peoples' money.
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
The answer to your question in isolation is no. However people with some experience in game development would largely agree that these people can't have believed they were going to deliver it, and YC certainly should have known.
Its totally possible to make a large online game with proper procedural generation of geometry and sharded servers for zones.
It's a bit of work but it's doable.
Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background. A game without story is a software product.
Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2 people.
Realm of the Mad God was able to build a successful game because they were extremely conservative on features -- low-res 2D graphics, no user-generated content, simple game mechanics, limited persistence. DreamWorld is... not that. They're promising features which nobody has successfully brought to market before, with a team which doesn't appear to have any meaningful experience in the industry.
This is very rare in MMOs. Most are not really sandboxes but theme parks, where most multiplayer is through interacting with the content cooperatively.
> Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience.
The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your position on that.
"Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background."
With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here and comment on it:
Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every year or so and they made good money.
TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely would not have hit without the content.
Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it comes).
Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay footage to be confident about this.
Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content). Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain.
EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this anymore, though, for good reason.
Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements.
Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but this game is entirely about story content and roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion.
Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more so than the original.
EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay and character customization... and players soundly rejected all of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core game.
Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not procedurally generated, though.
Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's leading story game studio (BioWare).
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or professional reviews, they all mention the story.
Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well. Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose.
World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot.
Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger games market, and some of them do make good money. However, even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content", because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps.
Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
The big issue relevant to YC is "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through" (if true), but the people being affected are the LPs who were likely aware such things would happen to their money.
Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
A rule of thumb in the games industry is that it takes $100+ Million to get a competitive MMO launched. Followed by ongoing $ for maintenance, new extensions/assets etc. The claims made by the inexperienced founders are beyond laughable. People who haven’t worked on large scale game projects have no idea how hard it is compared with your average web/biz application.
Dang — we need a title change on this one. The article itself discusses the scam accusation but never makes that assertion itself, but the title here is heavily editorialized.
(I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)
So it's a "scam" because they are promising something they can't deliver straight away? Isn't that basically a description of every startup company ever?
There are a couple reasons it's a scam. First, they've apparently overstated their relevant credentials. Claiming nine years of experience in something they don't have any professional experience in is a scam. I wouldn't open a restaurant and claim decades of cooking experience when my experience is just cooking for myself at home.
Second, and more importantly, it's a scam because they are charging money for something that they have no viable path to delivering the thing people paid for.
> [DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through
"It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?
Maybe this is only funny in my head, but I suggest to the VC's to go to some GameDev forums and start funding the total newbies that ask "I'm gonna make the best MMO out there, where do I start?"
"Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"
this is extremely embarrassing for YC. whether or not it's an intentional scam, anyone remotely involved w/ the tech industry should have seen how implausible the whole project was
[+] [-] coldcode|4 years ago|reply
Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity with the random latency of so many streams using prediction. Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on ground" sort of world).
Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to do even a small subset of what they want requires people with lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation, lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support huge numbers of"local" players either.
[+] [-] MattieTK|4 years ago|reply
Of course none of that has happened and Google folded their games studio, which is par for them, but does go some way to reinforcing this point that there's a reason this stuff isn't done.
[+] [-] rcxdude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|4 years ago|reply
Instead last time I looked into it they migrated Solar systems around once a day during mandatory downtime relocating the ones where huge battles were pre-planned to happen in near future to the dedicated high MHz blade nodes, and everything was single threaded. Result was two small battles in different parts of one solar system loaded the node as much as one bigger battle.
Oh, and they ran a lot of Stackless Python code for that extra slowness.
[+] [-] aaronetz|4 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I work under the same company as the developers of this tech (although I am not involved in this product). My opinions are entirely my own.
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/scavengers-large-scale-m...
[+] [-] zamalek|4 years ago|reply
I participated in a tech demo test about 2 years back, with roughly 3000 players interacting in non-trivial ways (server authoritative). UDP exists. GPGPU exists (NVIDIA helped improve PhysX for this specific scenario). A massive amount of users is not impossible.
This MMO does otherwise otherwise impossible.
[+] [-] dvt|4 years ago|reply
IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments)
I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926.
The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago.
Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[+] [-] KuiN|4 years ago|reply
It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.
[+] [-] tptacek|4 years ago|reply
"This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"
[+] [-] tobr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serf|4 years ago|reply
Feels weird to nitpick scam versus fiasco, but whatever.
I'd be upset either way as an investor, but just flag it if need be -- as per guidelines.
[+] [-] qzw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wearywanderer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsks|4 years ago|reply
If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam? What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
[+] [-] aeturnum|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
The Lesson of Peter Molyneux
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...
Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
[+] [-] serf|4 years ago|reply
I think I can squeeze water out of rocks. Pay me now to do it, and i'll figure it out. Everyone around tells me I can't, but I know I can.
>What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
I absolutely believe I can do it if I set my mind to it. Fund my company so we can find out.
Do you see any possible issues with this style of transaction?
[+] [-] DetroitThrow|4 years ago|reply
I don't see why this is not a similar case of fraud if investors have not been informed about current expectations of their original promise.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|4 years ago|reply
It's a bit of work but it's doable.
Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background. A game without story is a software product.
Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2 people.
[+] [-] duskwuff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcxdude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your position on that.
[+] [-] kevingadd|4 years ago|reply
With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here and comment on it:
Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every year or so and they made good money.
TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely would not have hit without the content.
Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it comes).
Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay footage to be confident about this.
Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content). Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain.
EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this anymore, though, for good reason.
Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements.
Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but this game is entirely about story content and roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion.
Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more so than the original.
EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay and character customization... and players soundly rejected all of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core game.
Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not procedurally generated, though.
Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's leading story game studio (BioWare).
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or professional reviews, they all mention the story.
Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well. Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose.
World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot.
Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger games market, and some of them do make good money. However, even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content", because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps.
Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
[+] [-] dbg31415|4 years ago|reply
Did you play Fallout 76 at launch? Oof. It was terrible. They've since added NPCs, but it's really hard to fix a bad first impression.
[+] [-] sombremesa|4 years ago|reply
Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
[+] [-] deterministic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eganist|4 years ago|reply
(I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jVinc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredophile|4 years ago|reply
Second, and more importantly, it's a scam because they are charging money for something that they have no viable path to delivering the thing people paid for.
[+] [-] kkotak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousab|4 years ago|reply
"It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?
[+] [-] OutThisLife|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyxuan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|4 years ago|reply
"Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"
[+] [-] ultrastable|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xmly|4 years ago|reply
What is this about?
[+] [-] ffhhj|4 years ago|reply
But I think this is just an example that shows investment is merely gambling.
[+] [-] djyaz1200|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|4 years ago|reply
> a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame creatures
Ultima online was released in like 1997 and did all that.