Comment by fsloth
5 years ago
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.
>Yes, you are quite right. My point was past performance is not always a good indicator of future human potential.
I agree. People can shift into an entirely different field and get fairly good at it quicker than many would imagine. Once you've proven successful in one intellectual pursuit the biggest factor in becoming proficient in another is passion, because passion leads to putting in the work. In this particular case I just think they may not realize the scope of the work their game idea is going to involve due to their lack of experience. I wish them well and if its looking good by the time it hits beta I'll probably be trying it out.
True. Claiming you are going to make a huge MMO when you are an inexperienced game developer is pretty common. Therefore we also know at which stage of Dunning Kruger they are.
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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?
Seeing a market and implementing a unicorn class product are quite different things even if you have the accurate perception of market needs. There is a reason unicorns are called unicorns and not justsurveythemarketfortrends-corns.
I admit AirBnB was perhaps not the most relevant example given it's a different industry.
I have no reason to champion the team but having a fairly good knowledge of games and software development I don't see the need to criticize the YC investment based on the context of their pitch.
"Didn't like the idea originally" is no different from "looked silly". And it wasn't just "a couple of rich VCs" who thought that. (Btw, the word 'rich' seems gratuitous there.) YC wasn't going to fund them but did anyway because they liked the founders. It's not mythology.
"Was it really that hard a leap?" - yes it was. That it seems otherwise now is pure hindsight fallacy.
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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.
Scalable simulation worlds are more or less just a networked cluster of nodes with an octree topology. I suppose there are limitations to local node density but other than that providing a seamless experience is more about how to architect the core system than rocket science.
Yes, it's hard. I have no idea if people even want that. Or can you make the node-to-node transit non jarring for players. But I don't really see it as lying. Ambitious certainly.
Can they pull it off? No idea.
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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.
Hadean is a general-purpose distributed object system. People have tried to use those for games. EvE Aether Wars used that. They got 10K players in the same space. But it's all spaceships in a big space, not interacting much. Xsolla’s Game Carnival was only 500 users.
Spatial OS is more geographical. They have regions, and dynamic boundaries between them. If more players are in a region, the regions get smaller. Inter-region interactions are possible but slower.
Second Life has fixed-sized regions. Each region talks to its neighbors on four sides. The user's viewer talks to all the regions within visual range of the viewpoint. Assets are stored on AWS front-ended by Akamai. The servers are mostly single-thread per region, because the design is old. Crossing regions works most of the time, and since moving to AWS with faster networking, the delay is usually under 0.5 second. The whole system is sluggish but works reasonably well. (I'm writing a new client for it in safe Rust, using Vulkan and multiple threads. It's going well. The existing C++ client gets CPU bound on the main thread and can't keep the GPU busy.)
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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)
While I have never played it, the brief description in the opening paragraph:
> Glitch was officially launched on September 27, 2011, but reverted to beta status on November 30, 2011, citing accessibility and depth issues. Glitch was officially shut down on December 9, 2012.
Doesn't exactly paint an image of quality.
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.