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.
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.
Joe Montana is pretty involved in investing in YC companies. So some math of the kind you are describing could have gone on: What is more expensive on the long run? To let Balto through, or stop Joe investing in the other companies.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
* 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)
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.
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 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".
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'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
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGQZfAbsQ6I
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.
You might give it a positive spin and be proud you grow and make it without the need to pay investors later?
YC is a form of VC, and first and foremost validates "Will this make good returns?", not "Is this legit".
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Congratulations on your success!
YC are just people, not some infallible oracle.
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.
> AirBnb probably also looked ridiculous at the time; it's only in hindsight where you have the clarity.
There is a difference between assumptions of the market, and assumptions of the amount of work a team can accomplish.
The latter is easier to estimate since you have a lot of data points of what teams can do in an amount of time.
They invested in the team, who were supposedly one of the best teams they'd ever seen and they knew the immediately after meeting them
Joe Montana is pretty involved in investing in YC companies. So some math of the kind you are describing could have gone on: What is more expensive on the long run? To let Balto through, or stop Joe investing in the other companies.
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.
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Why do you think AirBnB looked silly?
"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
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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.
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Further to the point about pivoting, it’s interesting to note that both Flickr and Slack came out of attempts to make MMOs.
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Yep, the article slates this as "Like a Juicero".
However Juicero was most definitely a thing and attracted a heap of interest and $120M investment.
So comparing this to Juicero is .... undercutting the entire premise of the rant.
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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].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6-qghm4Xo [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/what-is-epic-games-metaverse-an...
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.
It's probably the single most blatant gaming-related fundraiser scam I've personally come across... but they got YC backing.
It'll take quite a bit to beat Star Citizen.
I don't understand the YC backing either though.
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
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Star Citizen is allready a game.
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.
> using a revolutionary peer-to-peer meshed (infinite!) game world
As someone who actually have built a peer-to-peer meshed game world, good freaking luck to them.
Which one?
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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!
That video makes a case for the developers being naive or on-track to make a bad game, but it’s a stretch to call it an outright scam.
Yeah, it is possible that the engineer thinks he can do anything and the other guy trusts the engineer.
The Kickstarter video gave me the same vibes.
sounds like someone making their first post on gamedev.net, trying to figure out how to use gcc.
This is even worse than Star Citizen.
They're really leaning on it, too. Practically the first thing in their kickstarter pitch. Although they can't write the name correctly...
We're a YCombinator Company.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/22656
YCombinator is where Twitch, AirBnB, Doordash, and far more all got their starts! https://www.ycombinator.com/
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.
With $10K you can probably make a nice single player RPG Maker game :D.
Star Citizen wants to know your location
.
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."
> elon had zero background in rocket science before spacex.
He was also a billionaire after PayPal? Sort of different circumstances.
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.
As part of my day job I see a ton of Unreal asset packs. Thus I recognize most of the asset packs shown. Nothing in the shown GIFs appears original.
The infinity weather asset pack is the most "impressive": https://unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/infinity-...
Here is their "voxel engine": https://voxelplugin.com/
Notice how none of the asset packs are shown together. The "developers" are just showing off walk throughs of the asset pack demo levels.
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.
[1] https://www.improbable.io
> What, they're not mentioning "Metaverse" and "NFT", and they don't have a blockchain?
They did talk about NFT twice, in the kickstarter comment section. This project is now officially a scam.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/cjPCcrI.png
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.
You don't own the resource, just a ticket for it. Ownership doesn't keep the servers up.
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I don't understand the hate. Look at what exactly DreamWorld is claiming on their Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playdreamworld/dreamwor...
* The infinite open world MMO
* 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.
> The infinite open world MMO
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)
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> > The infinite open world MMO
yea, the last time a game claimed this, they flopped super hard - and it wasn't even an inexperienced developer! See "No Man's Sky" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky#Controversy
they've fixed a lot of flaws now apparently, but i would be very skeptical of somebody claiming to deliver a skyhigh goal.
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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.
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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.
How about how they say that the game will also include every genre, and all of this work will be done by two people? This is an absolute scam.
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.
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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".
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In the video they say that this game can encompass all genres of game. Clearly total bs.
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.
Another amazing video deconstructing it. "This game has more red flags than a Turkish Embassy":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXDngD70Lw4
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.
..and yet people still give this the benefit of the doubt. It’s so clearly a scam in every sense of the word.
That’s not a pyramid scheme, that’s a referral system.
No a referral system, is "you can invite others to play, everyone else has to wait"
"You can only benefit, after you get others to invest" is almost a textbook definition of a pyramid scheme.
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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.
God's sorry to side track but I have been looking for someone who has tried this game.
It looked so good I was going to pledge today but my PC died last night.
Do you think they will actually get there? I loved the idea and what I had seen.
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.
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In the Kickstarter video the 2nd guy said he, "left his job at Google, Facebook, and Apple to start Dreamworld." What exactly did he mean by that?
You are grouping it wrong. It is meant to be read as:
> He left is job at Google
> He left his job at Facebook.
> He left his job at Apple to start Dreamworld
All of those are true, can see his linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrison-bellack-1a55b165/
The sentence is poorly structured, but it isn't misleading.
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.
According to this the last company he worked for was cruise... so not a FANG company.
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.
True, but presumably he only left a job at, at most, one of those companies to work on the game.
He delivered food to all three via uber eats.
Please don't. Thoughtful critique is fine. Being an asshole or piling on, not fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Keep in mind sometimes YC is just betting on the team. Many founders have a reality distortion field that disconnects logic from the equation.
Lots of batshit has raised tons of money...like Theranos...or Star Citizen...or WeWork.
YC is betting not a large amount of money to get a piece.
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.
At least here we can claim they're virgins :D
> 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.
It's even worse that they saw this team and thought "these guys will definitely build a billion dollar business".
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)
8 years and all games with that got cancelled or never released?
Discussion on IndieHackers, posted late March 2021: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/a-ycombinator-backed-kicks...
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.
But will it have dragons?
For anyone unfamiliar with this reference:
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet...
Science-based dragons*
Is it science-based?
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?
Feels like a great way to torch your brand. I would've expected the randoms to be funded under a separate umbrella.
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.
OneSignal has done great, but they pivoted out of video games quickly.
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.
Ah, fellow gamedev! Hello!
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.
Inexperienced game devs that want to make a huge MMO is very common in the game industry.
But the keyword here is "want".
I love that your dishonest sophistry evades mod and AI bad faith detection.
Keep it up.
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.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jb0FOcImdg
Huh. I'd be really curious to see their YC application.
"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.
I don’t know what kind of secret sauce they’ve got that attracted investors, but I’m really skeptical based on what I’ve seen so far.
The last time a bunch of game developers got a ton of funding for a terrible MMO it ended up becoming a $30 billion chat app.
What's the point of raising $10000 on Kickstarter? Isn't it basically 1 month income for 2 programmers?
Publicity.
That said, games with this type of scope (and no VC backing) ask for something more reasonable such as six figures minimum.
To be able to say that you were "funded on kickstarter in only 9 hours" (which seems very slow for such a paltry amount) and "overfunded by 500%" etc.
I am surprised to see a YC MMO at all. Are there any examples of a YC MMO?
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.
Not MMOs, but YC has funded smaller gaming companies over the years (the names of which I do not remember, which speaks to their relative success)
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
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Inexperienced game devs that want to make a huge MMO is very common in the game industry.
What is new here is that ycombinator is going along in their Dunning-Kruger delusion.
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.
The marketer must have reality bending charisma. That alone has immense value.
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 .
I'd just like to say that the TWO (!) GIFs on that page weigh 40 megabytes (!) in total.
What the fuck. I don't want this.
edit: AND the page makes one CPU core spin like crazy in Safari.
I can’t stress enough how objectively terrible this game looks.
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.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrison-bellack-1a55b165/
I mean, technically he did leave Google, Apple, and Facebook.
How is he lying though? He did, in fact, work at all of those companies.
... as an intern for 2 of them and an SDET for the 3rd.
But he didn't leave any of them to start Dreamworld, isn't that the claim?
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.
So let's lay down what's happened here:
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.