Comment by sen
5 years ago
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.
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".
Are you serious? Legitimacy (not being a scam) and ability to execute contribute heavily to successful outcomes. Any VC who invests in every shady startup claiming to become the next Google/FB is gonna go broke
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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.
Yes, you are quite right. My point was past performance is not always a good indicator of future human potential.
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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
Agreed. This mythology keeps getting repeated, where the only thing that happened was a couple of rich VCs (pg and others) didn't like the idea originally. But as many others have pointed out, Couchsurfing was already big, and VRBO/HomeAway had already received huge funding rounds. Was it really that hard of a leap to see how people (especially millennials) would flock to cheaper urban rentals if a company made the safety and payment aspect of it much better than what existed before?
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That didn't end up being the actual business model though. The vast majority of AirBnB's current revenue is from renting out private apartments or rooms, more in competitition with VRBO or hotels. You can definitely still rent out an air mattress in the living room, but that's not what AirBnB is making its money from.
There are good stories of their beginning out there.
The wikipedia summary really does not do justice to how hard their start was.
I enjoy especially the ones as told by their founder in the excellent startup school lectures. They were scrappy, lacked clear direction and hustled and struggled.
I mean, AirBnB looked equally silly in the beginning.
One big difference is that AirBnB wasn't trying to obviously scam people on Kickstarter as part of their core business plan.
I mean maybe the dude is a genius programmer who has come up with a truly novel way of building a single world Peer to Peer MMO, but if so why not lead with that? Instead all their sales videos are obvious minimal effort Unreal Engine asset flips that show no creativity or technical innovation.
Hustling is showing pre-rendered videos to simulate gameplay, or promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is flat out lying and saying you're going to build something that massive mega-studios struggle to even build, then throwing in a few dozen promises for stuff that's not even possible with current technology.
>promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is also flat out lying, its just that most people will realize its not true. Simulated gameplay that's labelled as "simulated" is fine but if you end up not delivering anything close to that then you'll rightfully lose all credibility.
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What's specifically not possible with current technology?
For example the "infinitely large simulation world" is an off-the-shelf system (or was the last time I looked https://hadean.com/) .
Sure, it might not work in production but that certainly is not a lie.
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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.
In fairness to Slack, the MMO they put together worked and was truly innovative. It just didn't find a big enough audience. Huge gap between that and something like DreamWorld.
The wikipedia page has lots of detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
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That is really interesting and something I hadn't heard before. Got any recommendations for detailed write-ups on their histories?
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.
I think you misread that. It says you could spend your money on something better. like a juicero. Hard to know exactly how the author views juicero in terms of being a good product but I think the point is it's a much better kickstarter than this game. Seems you agree on that.
In their Q&A [0] they sound very passionate about raising money now and figuring everything out later. I wish them the best, but definitely feels like a project that will fizzle out, or dramatically change in scope. I've never seen a more vague and generic description for anything - they want to combine:
an infinite world, millions of players, upload anything into it, every game genre, thousands of "biomes", craft anything, factions, pets, enemies, loot, Photoshop/Zbrush/SketchUp clone, PvP and PvE, mac & windows with mobile coming soon
Their vision for the game reminds me of how Epic Games reportedly raised around a billion dollars to fund their idea of the Metaverse [1].
[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
Yeah I had to go back and forth between the HN headline and the page 4 times. I couldn't believe I read it correctly, did it really, REALLY say "YC".
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?
The Wild Eight, you can get it on Steam. It's only a 8-person multiplayer game though. I was brought in after the original team decided to sell the project to the publisher, and turns out that their idea of peer-to-peer multiplayer (which is the central feature of the game) was to just send all the events generated by each player to all others, without local game logic built on single-player Unity primitives and local time — without any lock-step or anything like it. Unsurprisingly, it got into a complete desync state after a couple of hours, with different players seeing a completely different picture of the world on their screens. And the game, without any mechanism in place to detect it, happily carried on.
There were a few theoretical solutions for it. One would be to have authoritative client-server architecture. But all the game logic was very tightly coupled with Unity primitives in the most naive way, so to simulate a part of the game world, you had to have this part of the game world loaded on your computer, with textures, sounds and everything. After spending a little time on that idea, I concluded that we would need to rewrite all game logic to decouple it, and it was simply unfeasible. There were a lot of custom quests.
Another was to use dedicated servers. But we only sold the game, didn't take any subscription or micro-transactions, so even if servers were cheap (they were not), it wasn't a viable strategy long-term.
And finally - the true peer-to-peer. Since the game world was already split into shards for loading and unloading, I decided that every shard was to have a different "master" player who would play a role of authoritative server — this way he had to load roughly the area that he saw on the screen anyway. We implemented the API which repeated the Unity Multiplayer API, but instead of sending calls and returning RPCs to and from one central server, we routed it to the local "master" player. Of course, this architecture was very susceptible to cheating, but since our game was a coop for friends, and not something even remotely competitive, we decided it was okay.
And even with this much smaller scope, the amount of pain, stress and screwed deadlines we endured was just too much. These kinds of systems are very hard to get right, and even harder to debug — you end up running between different PCs comparing hashes, writing gigabytes of logs and doubting if you even chose the right career after you rewrote your packet-packing code the 6th time. Still, a lot of fun and new lessons learned.
It would be nice if they didn't take on scams so hard, because there are people out there who are a lot more talented than these guys and also really love and care about games.
We’re well into the start of the Metaverse fad for VC funding. I expect the bet is that they’ll pickup large investment quite quickly off the back of that and hire in expertise.
Not sure why they’re running a Kickstarter though!
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.