Comment by koonsolo
5 years ago
The rocket market is not anywhere near as developed as the games industry. Everything related to the development part of games is very much cleared out.
There are plenty of small studios that have huge successes, and they are all smart enough to not develop a huge MMO. Simply because they know they don't have the resources to pull this off.
Starting a rock band is a long shot. Beating the best NBA team in basketball is a delusion.
My point was that if the state space of the market has lots of undiscovered areas all bets are off who is going to succeed an who is not. I would not call gaming tech "complete" by a long shot.
I would argue the NBA example is not a good one. In that the parameter space is quite fixed, whereas in technology and games, I would claim the state space of what success looks like is much broader.
Yes, if you have super accurate metrics of what success looks like and the domain is highly competitive and lucrative then the scrappy upstart has poor chances.
I dont' think you can have a Billy Beane/Moneyball/Sabermetrics moment in NBA like you had in baseball.
But I think gaming and technology still has lots of unfound angles to be discovered.
I would guess the question YC pondered was not "can these guys create an MMO" but "could they have a small chance to bring some value adding innovation to some place in some market".
> Yes, if you have super accurate metrics of what success looks like and the domain is highly competitive and lucrative then the scrappy upstart has poor chances.
According to their Kickstarter, this is exactly the place they placed themselves. Head on competition with huge competitors. That was the point that I was making. You can of course create a 2nd "Minecraft" and be successful, but that is clearly not what is happening here.
Their claim is basically "we can be 1000x more productive than any of the established game developers". I can give you my estimate of those odds ;).
I agree with you 100%, ab-initio any teams chances to create new successful MMO IP are astronomically small. Even more so if the team is tiny. But a small team can generate valuable IP - whatever that turns out to be. The key thing at this point is that they are clearly engaging with the market (enough to warrant an angry rant).