Comment by ncallaway

5 years ago

> 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.

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paraknight  5 years ago

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)

  • imtringued  5 years ago

    I once thought about how to make Minecraft multithreaded. There is no way its going to happen without a from scratch redesign and a massive increase in code complexity.

lordnacho  5 years 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.

  • ncallaway  5 years ago

    > But it's also a startup. Don't those usually gather up investment and hire more people?

    In the kickstarter they describe their team as: "2 full time devs, 1 part time dev". That's where I got 2-3 person team.

    They also say: "If we raise enough, we'll be able to hire an additional full-time engineer to bring you Alpha features even faster!"

    So, by their own terms raising an additional team member would seem to be some kind of a stretch goal, and such hiring isn't in their plan for delivering the features they've promised in the timeline they promised.

    Yes, if their promise was: "We need to raise a large amount of funding, so that we can hire a medium sized team to build out all of these features" I would be a lot less skeptical. But, from reading their Kickstarter page, that doesn't seem to be what's being promised or proposed.