Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
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.
Even if there were interactions between everyone, presumably you could still exploit locality, like: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/aaai10b.pdf
But even within an area you can cut down on the n^2 in various ways, with one set of estabilished techniques cutting down server side compute and other set for network communications.
Would love to hear your opinion.
200 players in one map instance.
But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details, if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all after a certain visibility range threshold.
It's certainly doable though.
In fact when they released WoW Classic they had a new technology they called layering where even if you were in the same realm as somebody you could be on a different layer and therefore not see them. People absolutely hated it and went crazy.
So that is why I asked him if he had played it since he said "at a certain point there isn't much difference to players between 50 people and 200 people within visible distance" which is just wrong.
In that case, let's assume that each player waves (/wave). I've done this before with >50 players and took a screenshot and we were all in sync. It's also possible to have 50 players in the same area fighting in real time, e.g., in a battleground. This was back in 2010 when I played ... So I am not sure if it's any fabrication at all, otherwise everyone would die, etc? Given players have health, take damage, get healed, etc.
But I don't believe WoW could do it now, the last time I played WoW, early last year, in a large raid, there would be spells cast from invisible people because the characters wouldn't even load.
But Britain bank with lots of people was always laggy. Especially if there wasn’t a server reboot in over a week.
The said, FTA I think people are focusing on the wrong side of aisle. From what I understand, I don't think anything they said is impossible; it just seems like the team is very inexperienced and MMOs are incredibly complex and given how few MMO developers there are (MMOs are popular, but they aren't diverse) they might have bit off more than can chew. I'm really not seeing how what they are trying to do is anymore complicated than Fortnite or Minecraft from a backend standpoint (I'm very green to game programming)
The underling issue here is the information needed scales exponentially with the number of players interacting. Supporting 200 players means 400x as much information as 10 players instead of 20x as much. So specifically for WOW, there are problems with more than 80 or so players at once in PVP. If you do things like large scale open world PVP getting desyncs, disconnects, heavy lag is common. Also for major cities and other high density areas most servers have 4 or more "phases" where you can be in the same place in the game and not see other people not part of your phase. So you could have 50 people in a guild all together, 200 people in local, but most of the other 150 in another phase.
Basically, WoW gets around it by vastly simplifying player interaction.
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.
The hard part is dealing with 300 players communicating simultaneously with random delays and state changes, in an environment that doesn’t really handle delays very well (a text chat can be 10s late and no one cares. A character moving can only be a frames late before interpolation becomes obvious, and you start teleporting people around). And tracking the state changes across users and passing them around tends to add up, causing further delays.
Of course, you could always change the game model itself too. RuneScape & Maplestory trivially enabled large groups of players simultaneously (pretty sure you could easily find places with 200+ players visible and active). Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second, so much larger room for delays. Maplestory capped actual active play to relatively few players, but enabled large quantities in towns acting as glorified visual chat rooms — which solved 90% of the feeling of being in a large community. The Maplestory strategy I think nearly every MMO implements.
Why can't you just send the new position of other visible players, and then client-side play those characters' walking animations to the new position from their current (client-side) position? Unless the accuracy of another player's targeting is relevant why is there a problem with their position always being delayed by, say, a second?
Look at Eve Online; you have a spaceship, you travel around and shoot stuff (this is simplifying it, but that's a big part of it). Sometimes there are 100 or 1000 ships all involved in one battle; what do you have to deal with in that case? You need to send all ship data (model, loadout, customizations) to every client so they can load in the right assets. You need to track where each ship is (in 3d) and where it's going at any given time. You need to track what weapons are firing, and who they might hit (there are missiles, interception missiles, "bombs" with an explosion radius, lasers that hitscan, guns that have tracking projectiles, etc). You need to compute status effects that may change based on distance between given ships. You need to send all this data to each client regularly (every second at least).
This really adds up, both in compute and memory on the server and in amount of data that needs to be sent to each client. It gets difficult quickly. Let's say all the info above can be described in 1kb/ship/tick - you get up to the larger battles, which in Eve have hit 5000+ (rarely, yes) - and you're dealing with 5000kb/tick going to every one of those clients.
You really dont need to be send accurate per server tick information about a rocket hitting a ship 5000km away from you.
It is, though! In most games you're only actually interacting with one or a few people at a time - even if many more might be visible.
Part of it, of course, is that the existing MMOs are designed for small-group gameplay. But even outside MMOs - Minecraft, CoD, etc. - you're not ever going to interact with hundreds of players. A human can't manage that!
Eve runs into problems because it has large-scale PvP. That says almost nothing about PvE scenarios.
Anyways, with an FPS or Action RPG (anything where you can act/react quickly, then you expect your peers to do the same) low state/latency is absolutely vital.
With WoW style games you could probably get away with a LOT of interpolation before it becomes a problem (it’ll quickly become obvious as people get unnaturally tweened across the screen in straight lines, but that’s ok) largely because there’s really not much for you to be doing off-cool down anyways.
The main problem is that like RuneScape/Maplestory, in WoW supporting 200 players in the same spot doesn’t really do you anything (except for those group fights, where latency becomes important again) — towns are just glorified chat rooms, because what else are you going to do? You’re not pikmin requiring x/200 to proceed
VR chat it literally accepts that chat room aspect, and so it’s more than acceptable — it’s part of the fun
That is, you can change the gameplay to better support the issues relating to large groups. The bigger problem really is do you even want 20000 people in the same session? There’s not much to do in a crowd — in a real-world crowd you basically lose all autonomy and the crowd itself becomes the unit of autonomy with “a mind of its own”. Ultimately it’s a dumb goal to have in a non-competitive setting.
What you really want is 20000 people able to affect and manipulate the same “world” — the way we do in reality. We don’t look for everyone being there in front of you — we realize things have been changed by other people when we weren’t looking. You want object persistence and manipulation with a consistent world state, shared by thousands. Which is a much different problem — you want, really, a proper simulation.
actually, runescape still has 0.6 sec ticks. it has become part of the meta-game to input commands at exactly 0.6 second intervals for optimal efficiency, and is basically mandatory for high-level pvp combat.
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Tick_manipulation https://runescape.wiki/w/Tick_manipulation
This is like Programming 101 for player position updates, to avoid them running or jumping through walls. A classical novice mistake. I'm surprised to see it in such a mature game.
We know this because what this game is trying to do is done already a long time ago. It's a description of the original vision for Second Life. In fact Second Life was explicitly an attempt to create "the metaverse", with all user-generated content. Linden Labs used to write about the challenges they faced in making that vision real so we have a good idea of where the challenges really lie, or at least did 10-15 years ago.
First problem: physics. LL sharded their world, which was indeed infinite. The problem is each shard required its own dedicated high end server, which made "land" extremely expensive. Amazingly, people bought it anyway, LL developed a small but extremely rich customer base who were willing to literally rent high end (what would be today) cloud VMs just to have a very small space to call their own online. For a brief period it was also trendy for companies to open up spaces in Second Life.
The reason land was so expensive was that physics (collision detection and movement, mostly) required the server to constantly iterate every object within the zone and the calculations scaled with number of objects. Shutting down physics when nobody was there also wasn't possible because the metaverse concept implied allowing arbitrary scripting, and scripts frequently expected the world to keep running even if nobody was there. The answer in SL to "if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound" was a resounding yes.
The second big problem they faced was that user generated 3D content was extremely un-optimized. The biggest complaint users had about SL was always performance. Eventually they gave up promising to improve it and came clean with the userbase: SL was slow and always would be because users kept making slow content. In particular SL was set mostly outdoors, and even when indoors, people loved doing things like creating semi-transparent windows. The ability for any object to change at any moment (users created content in-game) also implied they couldn't use all the "baking" techniques professional games use to optimize rendering. So the rendering algorithms had to be very primitive, and there was lots of overdraw, so SL really chugged even when drawing scenes that looked very basic compared to what high end games could do. And of course hobbyist metaverse users are not pro grade 3D artists so they tended to make a lot of ugly stuff anyway.
So syncing player data was certainly a sub-challenge, but compared to the difficulties posed by cost effective sharded physics and totally un-optimizable 3D scenes, it wasn't that big a deal.
User content can probably be limited as well so that people don't upload overly complex/poorly performing 3d assets.
I'm not saying that this isn't a tall order, but I think it's far more manageable by a sufficiently determined and talented team than it was decades ago.
No true server source of truth, no common sense packet parsing, just sand castles and cheats allowing you to fly around and spawn items.
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...
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.
Some examples:
You only need to send an updated position and direction on every frame, which can fit in 10 bytes (16-bit screen space fixed point coordinates, 3 position coordinates + 1 orientation + one 16-bit animation/action ID).
With a 100mbps connection you can send 160 KB per frame at 60fps and thus support 16K characters.
A "fantastic" customer connection speed currently would be 2.5gbps or 10gbps.
I don't. (But maybe I just don't know any professional gamers.)
And 100mbps is not realistic for modern WiFi setups.
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.
IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
When readers email about a title complaining that it's breaking the rules (as happened with this one), you know it's bad. However, I don't think I'm going to change it, even though it shamelessly distorts the article's meaning and adds extra linkbait on top.
The reason I'm not inclined to change it is that we moderate HN less, not more, when a story is about YC or a YC-funded startup. That's explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... More on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978.
Even if there's a vetting accuracy of 99.9% (for the sake of argument), there's still a chance that some lemon will fall through the cracks. So after 1000 seeds, there should be 1 lemon.
Now does that make the program any less prestigious? No, but these things happen.
This isn't that great of an analogy because there are plenty of "hard" cutoffs at both elite companies and elite schools. For example, no matter who you are, you'll never get into Yale Law with an LSAT of 125.
Yeah, we do live in that world. This shit might be the most valid textbook case of white male privilege ever.
Edit:
I usually have a very high bar for throwing around while male privilege thing (I’m talking Joe Rogan levels of defense against the claim), for what it’s worth.
But my spidey senses are tingling on this one from a mile away. This shit looks worse than the Asian mmo’s that are still being built on the Unreal3 engine.
Um... me? I _built_ it. It already exists and I have users and I said that several times but apparently the idea of me being able to do that on my own was simply too confusing for him to understand. His next question? “Who’d you hire to build it?”
facepalm
But, I don’t want this fight, and you are probably right I’m off base and too quick on the trigger here.
Why not use the more accurate term for people like this, who went from a wealthy or upper-middle class home, to an Ivy, to a FAANG, to an easily funded startup? They're the elite, or the 1% of whatever similar term you want to use.
Because "white male privilege" sterotypes millions of white males incorrectly. But I know it's a very popular stereotype right now among part of the population, and so often hard to resist.
I’ll just add this though, I promise you 2 girls would never have gotten this funded lol.
And I ain’t a girl either, or a white knight.
You mean "girls", like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the infamous Theranos [1]?
Incidentally, she fits the mold I describe above: highly privileged childhood (Dad an Enron VP, highly politically connected), to Stanford, to a well-funded scam start-up with a board packed with our nation's elite (eg, former Sec of State George Shultz).
And she's just the best known - there are other examples of scammy or poorly-conceived companies founded by (actually) privileged women.
Yeah, most of these wealthy, privileged founders of scammy companies are white men, but some are women, and some are not white. Crucially, even if most of them are white men, they only represent a very small fraction of us.
And the 1% are doing a tremendous job of playing us off each other for reasons of gender, race, etc, while they consolidate their power and privilege.
Screaming at the top of my lungs:
Hey PG, I’m not a white dude or girl that went to Stanford. In fact, I did great and bad at school. So fuck you. I’m gonna take over your whole shit, so stop discriminating.
Dumbass couldn’t even spot a half assed mmo clone.
- A scam MMO
- Terminal autocomplete as a service
- A Splitwise clone
- An app that puts your next meeting in your menu bar (for $10/month!)
YC gets 5K+ applications/cycle, accepts 1-3%, so they rejected 4500+ companies for these?
These ideas are the starting point, but it's difficult to tell what they might turn into. Quite possibly they evaluate the ability of the founders to shape the company into something interesting during the program.
But more than that, they're probability are trying to figure out how well the founders will perform at demo day, after they've helped them polish the play.
Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money.
Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art.
Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™!
Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out of the bag by hand, no fancy device needed. It is less convenient than pouring from a bottle! Does it really taste better than the delicious organic juice you can buy at any grocery store in every city for a lower price?
Lets put one hundred and twenty million dollars behind it and find out. Hahahahahahahahaha big swing and miss! Survey said? No.
You can of course have a great team with the smartest best credentialed people working on the idea motivated by tons of money. If the idea is bad they still fail, maybe they can pivot, but probably not.
>it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
Engineers do not build bridges that barely stand. They build bridges that they reason will stand for an amount of time in the conditions they predict the bridge will be subject to versus the cost required to build said bridge. They build realizing that no bridge will stand forever but it must stand for a specified amount of time.
They build to "Correct",
Not "Perfect"
It can get you Juicero, or it could get you Android. That's the whole thing with investing, isn't it? It's rather uncertain.
VC is about funding the massive winner and much, much less about avoiding funding the runners-up.
It's Peter Thiel's "Great Stagnation" decline accelerated by the capital allocation of short-sighted VCs.
I'd like to see a postmortem on how these _blatant_ con artists got through.
Though it took us a while due to engineering challenges, our company survived and became profitable by minimizing spend and focusing on revenue/profit, just as YC advised.
This notion that YC backs/encourages companies to flush money down the drain is a mistakenly applied stereotype spawned from a combination of different eras, different companies and different investors. Notably, YC has never been involved with companies like Uber, WeWork or Theranos, or any other company that SoftBank has tried to artificially pump up by pouring billions of dollars into.
It reminds me of the "but you fuck ONE goat" story: one misstep like this surely can and should have more impact than all the good steps.
None of us has any idea what was presented in the application form and interviews, but given YC prizes its reputation above anything else, we can reasonably presume it wasn't obviously a scam.
This is the moment in an online discussion where we all lose 50 IQ points, so thanks for that.
"Scam" has a well understood meaning in modern legal and economic systems, and that's obviously what I'm addressing, not some other ideologically-charged alternative definition that you're now invoking as a debating move that amounts to little more than trolling.
(As for middlemen - for as long as commerce has existed, middlemen have been derided for inserting themselves into transactions that were already happening, by people blithely handwaving away the fact that those transactions were not, in fact, already happening.)
Your insinuation was that YC trains the founders it invests in to deliberately build long-term money-losing companies, which is demonstrably false and also highly implausible.
Philosophical discussions about the deeper nature of things are also of great interest to me, but not like this.
I doubt it'll affect the brand.
EDIT: The technical founder came from Apple and Cruise, and he graduated from the Univ of Michigan. He has the same cred as most YC founders. They probably didn't vet them as much since he came from a successful YC company, and I'm sure they talked to his former bosses. YC's system just had a public failure after using what seems like the same process for 15 years.
EDIT: If YC was too careful, Stripe and AirBnB wouldn't have happened. Those guys didn't have any experience in their respective industries either.
By the way, I wouldn't like to be those three YC interviewers who valitaded this idiotic project into ycombinator !
"Le bonnet d'âne pour tous les trois ! "
So yeah, I don't think they are nearly as good as they say at judging startups. I believe a lot of it is based on signaling from founders and already successful startups applying.
> Y Combinator has a rigorous vetting process topped off by an exclusive demo day with "selected investors."
I don't think anyone whose been through the YC interview process would describe it as rigorous. It's streamlined, and I suspect design it minimize false negative rate while spending a minimal amount of time reviewing companies. They have a huge number of companies to evaluate. Personally can't imagine they spend more than 30mins evaluating each company (including the interview).
Then later in the article:
> The most serious accusation is that DreamWorld only got its Y Combinator backing through nepotism. According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence
I don't know what "appropriate due diligence" is here. I don't think YC generally check references, or dive into code... maybe a quick look at the demo in the 10m interview? It probably helps knowing people on the panel.
> "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
Doesn't make sense to me. Do YC ban companies from demo day if they don't have enough to show? It's not part initial DD? Have they raised from demo day investors?
The real skill is in (a) raising funds from LPs, and (b) creating a wide enough deal funnel to service it.
The individual investments aren’t that important, just like a single bet doesn’t matter when you’re playing poker. It’s more about spreading the money over as many hands as possible and letting your mathematical advantage do the rest.
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...
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.
Tech cofounder apparently has some reasonable credentials and particularly if he's known to people within Ycombinator it doesn't seem absurd at all to me that they'd invest largely on the basis of "guy we know to be reasonably competent wants to try his hand at entrepreneurship".
Like its a hundred grand. They throw that at all sorts of companies. This aint softbank throwing billions at wework. I think any sort of "omg ycombinator funded that?" response has to come from people who havent ever bothered to look at the long tail of stuff ycombinator funds instead of their top few investments. It's not an elite club. It's the most throw shit at the wall and see what sticks style VC fund out of any VC fund.
It is hard for me to call anyone competent, when they are either this delusional, or purposely setting up this scam.
Edit: taking peoples money through kickstarter like this is the main scammy part here I guess.
It's not that YC 'throws shit at the wall', but rather that it throws shit at very particular walls, and the reason it picks those walls are not obviously 'good'.
While that shouldn't surprise us, I do understand that it's disappointing to feel that YC is not quite the nerdy, rational, investing-in-good-ideas-no-matter-the-source outfit that it's thought to be.
"This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"
> "I think we use the word scam as a colloquial term mostly and there's some nuance to this. I don't think either game's developers have the actual intention to not deliver."
So it's not a scam, not to speak of blatant scam.
> "I think for me, the base intent matters very little when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone throughout."
If it's true that the game developers promised this:
> The campaign promises, among other features, "multiplayer with the population density of real cities" and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction points.
Then it's clearly a scam. And both statements really are on the kickstarter. There is also this gem:
> We plan to expand to every internet connected device with a screen very soon!
Ridiculous.
Would be editorialized enough to provide context, but not as much of a click-bait title.
An early-entry comment carries a lot of weight in steering conversation, and quoting the portion of the story citing YC's involvement as well as the alleged fraud would be proper.
Unless unclickbaiting titles or working with arbitrary text (e.g., a Twitter stream submission), changing titles is strongly frowned upon, especially where the source does in fact have a viable title.
I'd lose the preemptory "This" from the original source, but otherwise recommend the original title be used.
(Meantime, the discussion is now derailed by title discussion, which dang will have to clean up.)
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.
I don't think that's a nit. Intent matters, and it's entirely possible to have a well intentioned fiasco.
Over time I've come to believe that our desire to understand and sympathize with the perpetrators of scams and the like is not a good thing in the end.
Sure, we 'understand' why Walter White became what he was in Breaking Bad, but in the end he was a despicable person that destroyed many lives. as much as the show /does/ try to make that clear, we still sorta empathize. We like Walter and hate his wife. Same thing for Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey (The Shield).
But that 'understanding' shouldn't preclude us from coming down hard on these people, however 'well intentioned' they might be. This project is obviously a scam, or alternatively delusional. In either case YC's involvement is not a good look.
If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam? What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
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.
The problem is when said venture later lies about progress, or otherwise obfuscates, especially to get more money. That's certainly what Theranos did, and I think what GP was suggesting happened here.
They did say they were backed by SV investors in their kickstarter, though, I'm not sure if that had anything to do with their success there.
This website trains people to rely on the YC endorsement.
I understand if you don't think people should, but I agree with the sentiment YC has some responsibility to do a better job vetting.
But that adult investors fall for this, is beyond belief.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-produced MMO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to create, and it has to be turned around fast
That thread mostly focused on how unrealistic it is for one person to develop an MMO by themselves, which is not exactly the case here. But it gives a bit of a taste as to why MMORPG is one of the most challenging game genres to succeed with. "Half of all MMOs commercially developed never release; half the survivors immediately fail", and the remaining successes almost all have staggeringly huge amounts of art & lore like you mentioned.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet...
Minecraft is a good example of a game that has almost not content but sold amazingly well.
> 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 "market" cannot predict innovation or success. This startup will probably fail, yes, but ycombinator is a private initiative and it matters to give the benefit of the doubt. I agree about possible nepotism, but I still believe in what I said about procedural generation and hand crafted content. Hand made content is crazy expensive, and I really think that procedural generation is a good solution.
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.
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.
Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
Demo day comes after being accepted to YC... Do YC ban companies from demo day? I thought everybody presented. I can't see any reference to them having raised any money at demo day either.
(I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)
A google search returns a lot of stuff on patent litigation but no "human readable" articles
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.
"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?
"Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"
What is this about?
But I think this is just an example that shows investment is merely gambling.
> According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence. "Originally, I thought this was a bit of a joke, but they called me and validated all their information and their sources. This person is actually higher up than just investing," he says. "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
This debacle will cost them a LOT more than the cash they gave to the scam.
> 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.
If they doubled down on the team after demo day, then I am with you.
Compare this with hiring. I have heard successful people say they do get 1 in 5 hires wrong, even after a process which is 10x more thorough.
The article suggests this game isn’t possible, as described, even with an infinite budget. Is this true?
If the game were 2 dimensional (either top down or side scroller) would it be possible?
This game idea is incredibly banal. It's like the pitch you'd get if you asked a kid to design a game. Pitches like these are punchlines in game dev circles.
Throw in the article's claims that people are working 80 hour weeks and the owners are offering 20% rev shares with streamers, I just don't see anyone who knows what they're doing taking these guys seriously.
With a more professional pitch, one which describes accurately the constraints, it's possible. For example, you can have a hundred million DAU if your game is primarily asynchronous multiplayer. This was being done a decade ago on Facebook. You can have user generated content cover your content gap if you rev share with content creators as Roblox does.
They are basically pitching a game platform but never tell you why their game platform will even boot.
$100k won't buy you a stripped down alpha vertical slice, even if you cut 90% of promised features.
And yet I played this game in the 90s. It was called Ultima Online.
I think it's a bit of an offense to pair DreamWorld to Ultima and the legacy of people like Raph Koster, Starr Long et al. That game had a wealth of gameplay loops, progression, deep economy, and interesting world.
DreamWorld has no design, it's just all things. A plate full of every food you like does not make a good meal.
Fixed the title for you.
it was obvious, default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs and people asking for 10k to make an MMO, LOL
what people can do for a quick buck, this not only expose the pseudo "scripters & asset flippers", but also everyone who promoted the project
I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later, when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around, people would be criticizing them for focusing on looks first instead of writing game code.
All that said, the rest of the criticism appears damning.
(Not that I think that "user-generated" content will work well. If any of it is owned, or merely claimed to be owned, by litigious copyright holders, that's a good way to get YouTube to ban gameplay videos. There goes your free advertising. I wonder how Second Life deals with this.)
A lot of that depends on what kind of UGC they actually allow. I'm not certain whether they intend to allow users to upload their own content, or if UGC actually just means "build structures in game out of built-in assets". I suspect it's actually the latter.
> I wonder how Second Life deals with this.
In large part, through technical barriers. Second Life historically used a lot of rather idiosyncratic formats for its 3D models (like "sculpted prims" -- in short, XYZ coordinates stored in a texture), making it effectively impossible to import models which weren't created for SL. They did eventually allow users to upload meshes, but that capability is still gated behind some special permissions to prevent abuse.
The Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playdreamworld/dreamwor...) says (emphasis mine, also highlighted in the article): "Creator centric crafting economy : Using simple tools and guided by quick tutorials, you can learn how to create your own 3D models for items that you and others might need or want in your builds and adventures. Imbue them with useful function like lighting, extra damage, low weight, knockback, and a plethora of exciting magical properties! Not artistically inclined? Import 3D models from anywhere online, and DreamWorld will help you turn them into exactly what you were looking for."
We'll see how much of this actually ships.
Thanks for the Second Life information.
Code reuse is fine, but when 90% of your game is from various art pack, it's kinda like a software project thats 90% copy-pasted from StackOverflow. Sure, reusing 3rd party code is fine, but at some point, they've cross the line into "Do they even know what they are doing?"
If there is a scam, where are the victims?
All I can see here is only a lot of speculative and targeted hate and smear that makes me wonder why on earth it is on Hacker News.