Comment by LarsDu88

I remember a friend showing me some stuff about this when they were still trying to pursue the MMORPG route and I am surprised this company is still alive given the amount of unnecessary overengineering that went into that effort.

The model of putting ECS like logic as code and putting all that code as stored procs solves a handful of db transaction issues that none of the major mmorpgs really had issues with 20 years ago when mmorpgs were all the rage and when computers were 100x-1000x slower than today. A lot of engineering is going to solving and cutting out these database round trips that were not even an issue 20 years ago and even less of an issue today.

On the other hand the actual hard parts about building a multiplayer game, such as roll back, physics, collisions, all of that sort of stuff, well this actually doesn't really help with any of that. If anything it makes all of those things even more difficult. I imagine that the developers of this game probably had to come up with some pretty interesting hacks that probably didn't benefit from their DB to get anything resembling physics to work.

Layered on top of that are the known anti-patterns around using stored procs within databases, which spacetimedb does't address at all. You can't really run your tests just on your client because the application logic is split between client and db-server leading to spaghetti code and poor iteration cycles for game design. The database itself also doesn't horizontally scale beyond a single node.

Just take a peek at the steam reviews for BitCraft. The recent ones are actually pretty scathing and it seems like, despite all this engineering, the developers haven't really listened to their playerbase. With all of this effort centered around building a custom database, users still can't, say, build homes for themselves in this game, something that you can certainly do in probably most all other MMORPGs.

I think this will go down as a cautionary example of not listening to your users and spending engineering effort on the wrong types of problems. I think one of the most important skills for an engineer is actually not just having good technical ideas but knowing the right types of problems to solve and, most importantly, listening to your audience, your users, and your stakeholders. I wish the developers the best of luck and hope they can pivot successfully.