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Comment by Folcon | Hacker News Reader

I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?

The team have proven credentials at this point surely?

Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia

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Having the prebuilt client and art assets you hack and change on saves you million of up front cost.

The foldingideas videos about decentraland talks about this. "Dead" mmorpgs work on a small skeleton crew despite the original game having taken 100s of people years to make. Looking it up the turtle wow server was like 5-10k concurrent players? A lot for sure but bordering on that category.

It takes a lot of work to manage that but nothing compared to making an original IP from scratch.

Don't disagree, just thinking it's a shame as it's non-trivial to create a good team that creates something new, even if it is on top of something old

Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO

I wouldn't be surprised if this is not the last we hear from them. The server itself is not based on proprietary Blizzard code so they could keep using it and they already started developing their UE5 client. Maybe they will go the full way, create their own art assets and relaunch as TurtleMMO in the future.

There is no shortage of game dev talent or adjacent creatives. It’s doubtful they will go on to find roles in the industry given the current climate and they presumably don’t have the capital to gamble on multiple years of game dev for potentially no return.

It's not a small thing to create a team who's proven to ship a successful offering, trust me I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and hitting that bar is hard

Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting

I’ll never understand modding in this day and age, I got it back in the quake and half-life 1 days when teenagers didn’t have access to commercial game engines but modding total seems crazy to invest time into building on infrastructure you don’t own, you can’t successfully monetize and will likely be taken from you if you do.

Instead of just building something you own.

> you can’t successfully monetize

this wasn't the goal of modding.

but there will be a point you'll wish you did.

So much has to go right for a new game to see even moderate success. In addition to the programming, you need an art director to give your game a coherent style, 2D texture artists, 3D model and terrain artists, UI designers, music composers, narrative writers, etc, and on top of that you need a compelling universe and concepts for all of these people to work from. And then once that's all done, you need competent marketing so people actually know about this game so they can want to play it.

By comparison, with a pre-existing game much of this is already out of the way and amateurs can get pretty far by just kitbashing existing assets and occasionally mimicking them when creating new assets. Marketing can be as simple as, "this thing you liked, but more, in the way you want it". It's a much smaller lift.

If you just make “wow but with different graphics” how long until Blizzard sues you?

Wow but with different graphics is pretty much every MMO that has come out since 2004.

I guess you haven't played many MMOs. Unless you just mean "it moves like wow and and has quests" because that is not what I meant. I meant that you have to make a whole new world with its own lore and all new quests and NPCs and monsters and spells and classes and whatever. You can't literally just slap a coat of paint on WoW and expect to get away with it.

Part of the settlement might prevent them from launching a similar game for X years. Wouldn't be unheard of.

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