16 ms·

Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

390 points by astlouis44 5y ago

Tialco 5y ago
Trash article like the majority of stuff that comes out of PC gamer.
lloydatkinson 5y ago
I wonder if this post will be deleted
jokoon 5y ago
Its totally possible to make a large online game with proper procedural generation of geometry and sharded servers for zones. It's a bit of work but it's doable. Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background. A game without story is a software product. Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2 people.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  "Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background." With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here and comment on it: Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every year or so and they made good money. TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely would not have hit without the content. Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it comes). Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay footage to be confident about this. Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content). Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain. EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this anymore, though, for good reason. Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements. Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but this game is entirely about story content and roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion. Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more so than the original. EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay and character customization... and players soundly rejected all of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core game. Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not procedurally generated, though. Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's leading story game studio (BioWare). Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or professional reviews, they all mention the story. Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well. Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose. World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot. Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger games market, and some of them do make good money. However, even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content", because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps. Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    A bit of a tangent, there was a notorious reddit thread a long time ago with a comment by someone supposedly in the MMO industry [1] that echoes your point about content: > Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-produced MMO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to create, and it has to be turned around fast That thread mostly focused on how unrealistic it is for one person to develop an MMO by themselves, which is not exactly the case here. But it gives a bit of a taste as to why MMORPG is one of the most challenging game genres to succeed with. "Half of all MMOs commercially developed never release; half the survivors immediately fail", and the remaining successes almost all have staggeringly huge amounts of art & lore like you mentioned. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet_im_a_26_year_old_lady_whos_been/c3lup2l/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet...
  - polytely 5y ago
    Thanks for your work on Guild Wars! That game meant a lot to me growing up, it's really something special.
  - iand 5y ago
    Elder Scrolls Online is primarily content led
  - jokoon 5y ago
    Comparing with the best AAA sellers is a strawman, and I don't see the point comparing those with one that is being incubated. Minecraft is a good example of a game that has almost not content but sold amazingly well. > Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail. The "market" cannot predict innovation or success. This startup will probably fail, yes, but ycombinator is a private initiative and it matters to give the benefit of the doubt. I agree about possible nepotism, but I still believe in what I said about procedural generation and hand crafted content. Hand made content is crazy expensive, and I really think that procedural generation is a good solution.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your position on that.
  - jokoon 5y ago
    I was talking about multiplayer games.
- dbg31415 5y ago
  > Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience... Did you play Fallout 76 at launch? Oof. It was terrible. They've since added NPCs, but it's really hard to fix a bad first impression.
- rcxdude 5y ago
  This is very rare in MMOs. Most are not really sandboxes but theme parks, where most multiplayer is through interacting with the content cooperatively.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Realm of the Mad God was able to build a successful game because they were extremely conservative on features -- low-res 2D graphics, no user-generated content, simple game mechanics, limited persistence. DreamWorld is... not that. They're promising features which nobody has successfully brought to market before, with a team which doesn't appear to have any meaningful experience in the industry.
cbsks 5y ago
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam? What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
- DetroitThrow 5y ago
  Theranos believed in what they were originally taking investors over. I don't see why this is not a similar case of fraud if investors have not been informed about current expectations of their original promise.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    The difference with Theranos is they were promising people tangible medical results. Clearly, if a metaverse startup convinces a bunch of VCs to back them and the venture fails, that risk was known from the beginning.
    - ska 5y ago
      I don't think the point was what the tangible result would be, or risk of failure. Everyone putting money into an early venture knows that there is a good chance they just kissed it goodbye. The problem is when said venture later lies about progress, or otherwise obfuscates, especially to get more money. That's certainly what Theranos did, and I think what GP was suggesting happened here.
    - qzw 5y ago
      They also collected $64K from a Kickstarter while boasting about having "secured the majority of our funding from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley." So arguably they did promise some tangible results to some non-professional investors/potential players. Of course, by now everyone should know that Caveat Backer is the unofficial motto of Kickstarter.
    - orzig 5y ago
      Moreover, they were making claims about the then-present, not just the clearly unforeseeable future
tptacek 5y ago
You're not meant to editorialize titles like this on HN. People who submit stories have no more claim to their viewpoint than any commenter does. The title here should be: "This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"
- deleted 5y ago
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- tobr 5y ago
  If the reason for the rule is to avoid the submitter pushing through their viewpoint, this particular case shouldn’t be a problem. The “Y Combinator” part is a reason why it’s relevant to this site, and it’s not a viewpoint.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    "Scam" is the problematic part. The article avoids the word in the title because the article itself says: > "I think we use the word scam as a colloquial term mostly and there's some nuance to this. I don't think either game's developers have the actual intention to not deliver." So it's not a scam, not to speak of blatant scam.
    - onli 5y ago
      That's a quote in the article. He also said this: > "I think for me, the base intent matters very little when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone throughout." If it's true that the game developers promised this: > The campaign promises, among other features, "multiplayer with the population density of real cities" and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction points. Then it's clearly a scam. And both statements really are on the kickstarter. There is also this gem: > We plan to expand to every internet connected device with a screen very soon! Ridiculous.
      - deleted 5y ago
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KuiN 5y ago
If you're thinking "how bad can it really be?", please treat yourself to watching a couple minutes of "gameplay". It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.
- dumbfoundded 5y ago
  VC seed stage backing is based on two things: the team (or who they know) & the addressable market. VC backing is not some meritocracy. YC is better at bridging the gap but it's certainly not perfect. uBiome is another pretty blatant YC-funded fraud
  - vmception 5y ago
    Mirrortocracy describes both that and all attempted illusions of meritocracies. In this industry, at least.
- austhrow743 5y ago
  Slack came out of a failed attempt to build an MMO. Tech cofounder apparently has some reasonable credentials and particularly if he's known to people within Ycombinator it doesn't seem absurd at all to me that they'd invest largely on the basis of "guy we know to be reasonably competent wants to try his hand at entrepreneurship". Like its a hundred grand. They throw that at all sorts of companies. This aint softbank throwing billions at wework. I think any sort of "omg ycombinator funded that?" response has to come from people who havent ever bothered to look at the long tail of stuff ycombinator funds instead of their top few investments. It's not an elite club. It's the most throw shit at the wall and see what sticks style VC fund out of any VC fund.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    The amount of work and expertise that needs to go into this project is staggering. It is hard for me to call anyone competent, when they are either this delusional, or purposely setting up this scam. Edit: taking peoples money through kickstarter like this is the main scammy part here I guess.
dvt 5y ago
I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant, motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many) times as well and were rejected (YC is mega-competitive after all). IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
- kemonocode 5y ago
  Which is why I suspect the title will be changed, even though it is relevant to the discussion.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    It is an editorialized title and should be changed.
    - kemonocode 5y ago
      The "blatant scam" part, maybe. The fact it's Y Combinator-backed is still relevant, though.
    - variable11 5y ago
      What's worse, you don't agree with the title, or somebody at YC blatantly engaged in nepotism to let some two-bit scam artist fraud use their name to bilk ordinary people out of money? Priorities, in order.
  - dang 5y ago
    The submitted title blatantly breaks the site guidelines, which ask "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.". It is a no-brainer of standard HN moderation that we would change it immediately, as you can see from countless previous examples (and these are just the ones I posted about): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20misleading%20or%20linkbait&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20editorializ&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20level%20playing%20field&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... When readers email about a title complaining that it's breaking the rules (as happened with this one), you know it's bad. However, I don't think I'm going to change it, even though it shamelessly distorts the article's meaning and adds extra linkbait on top. The reason I'm not inclined to change it is that we moderate HN less, not more, when a story is about YC or a YC-funded startup. That's explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... More on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978.
Shadonototro 5y ago
i knew this project was a scam it was obvious, default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs and people asking for 10k to make an MMO, LOL what people can do for a quick buck, this not only expose the pseudo "scripters & asset flippers", but also everyone who promoted the project
- tom_mellior 5y ago
  > default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later, when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around, people would be criticizing them for focusing on looks first instead of writing game code. All that said, the rest of the criticism appears damning.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Using content from a wide variety of asset packs is a problem because it means the resulting game will be visually and thematically incoherent. You can see a lot of this already in their demo videos -- there's visible conflicts between their realistic and cartoony content, detailed vs. lo-fi, shiny vs. gritty, fantasy vs. science fiction... this all makes for a real hodgepodge of content in the game, and it's going to be difficult for them to resolve in the future in a game that's meant to rely heavily on user-generated content.
    - tom_mellior 5y ago
      If it's going to be a hodgepodge anyway due to user-generated content, wouldn't that be another argument for not trying too hard to develop their own integrated visual theme? (Not that I think that "user-generated" content will work well. If any of it is owned, or merely claimed to be owned, by litigious copyright holders, that's a good way to get YouTube to ban gameplay videos. There goes your free advertising. I wonder how Second Life deals with this.)
anonymousab 5y ago
> [DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through "It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?
- deleted 5y ago
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hprotagonist 5y ago
Of course it's a scam; I'm not there.
tomaszs 5y ago
Some guys try to basically ATP bootstrap a game concept. And there are other guys including the author of the article, that want to rip it apart. If there is a scam, where are the victims? All I can see here is only a lot of speculative and targeted hate and smear that makes me wonder why on earth it is on Hacker News.
OutThisLife 5y ago
The default UE4 mannequin makes it so much funnier.
ultrastable 5y ago
this is extremely embarrassing for YC. whether or not it's an intentional scam, anyone remotely involved w/ the tech industry should have seen how implausible the whole project was
xmly 5y ago
Nepotism at Y Combinator ? What is this about?
- ffhhj 5y ago
  Favoritism shown or patronage granted to relatives and friends. But I think this is just an example that shows investment is merely gambling.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    Not necessarily, the article mentions that YC allegedly never even vetted the project: > According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence. "Originally, I thought this was a bit of a joke, but they called me and validated all their information and their sources. This person is actually higher up than just investing," he says. "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
    - xmly 5y ago
      Should not be a surprise after Theranos.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      Isn't this congruent with the "Invest in teams, not products" philosophy though?
    - 0xy 5y ago
      It's actually a good thing, because it destroys confidence in YC and their reputation is deservedly diminished. This results in actually successful companies not bothering to apply for YC, which hurts their performance. This debacle will cost them a LOT more than the cash they gave to the scam.
sombremesa 5y ago
The big issue relevant to YC is "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through" (if true), but the people being affected are the LPs who were likely aware such things would happen to their money. Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
- new299 5y ago
  I didn't understand this comment in the article. Demo day comes after being accepted to YC... Do YC ban companies from demo day? I thought everybody presented. I can't see any reference to them having raised any money at demo day either.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    I read this as not having anything to show (in terms of numbers, product) at demo day and I assumed the implication was that they had also not been meeting their weekly obligations, but you’re correct that there isn’t really anything for YC to do at that point - short of running up and snatching LoIs which is obviously overstepping.
    - ypzhang2 5y ago
      There really isn't any weekly obligations when I went through, other than a dinner weekly. You met with the partners as much as you liked. At Demo Day, there were folks in 2011 with no product, someone even pivoted the day before demo day and just had an idea on a powerpoint. Some of the folks went on to build very successful businesses. So the lack of demo day progress in of itself doesn't mean too much i think. The other points might though, to be fair.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
coldcode 5y ago
I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity with the random latency of so many streams using prediction. Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on ground" sort of world). Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to do even a small subset of what they want requires people with lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation, lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support huge numbers of"local" players either.
- 650REDHAIR 5y ago
  See star citizen for a recent example
  - reiichiroh 5y ago
    Everything will work when /if server meshing works
  - reiichiroh 5y ago
    Everything will work when or rather if server meshing works
- rcxdude 5y ago
  Exactly, on the server side player interaction is an N² problem (where N is the number of players who are currently interacting). Each of N players need updates on the (N-1) other players they can see. And without strong in-game reasons not to, players will test the limits, no matter how efficient your code (see EVE where despite them making huge improvements to their servers and code as well as already using an extremely low update rate, player battles are still basically limited by how many you can get into a system before the server topples over).
wyxuan 5y ago
To give them credit, dream world has provided a lot of entertainment, unfortunately not the video game kind
- baby 5y ago
  Also, if VCs want to throw money at him, well why not. Who cares.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
baby 5y ago
Wow, the speaker story is hilarious. He was running blasting music so people were following him in the street because they liked his music, so he created a kickstarted for this ugly ass speaker that you can strap to yourself. Wow.
endisneigh 5y ago
Our of curiosity - to the game devs out there: The article suggests this game isn’t possible, as described, even with an infinite budget. Is this true? If the game were 2 dimensional (either top down or side scroller) would it be possible?
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  Former game dev, ten years in the industry. I don't think money is going to be their bottleneck. It's going to be game dev expertise. This game idea is incredibly banal. It's like the pitch you'd get if you asked a kid to design a game. Pitches like these are punchlines in game dev circles. Throw in the article's claims that people are working 80 hour weeks and the owners are offering 20% rev shares with streamers, I just don't see anyone who knows what they're doing taking these guys seriously. With a more professional pitch, one which describes accurately the constraints, it's possible. For example, you can have a hundred million DAU if your game is primarily asynchronous multiplayer. This was being done a decade ago on Facebook. You can have user generated content cover your content gap if you rev share with content creators as Roblox does. They are basically pitching a game platform but never tell you why their game platform will even boot.
- 0xy 5y ago
  It's not true at all. It's impossible only if money and experience is limited. In this case, the scam has no money or experience. $100k won't buy you a stripped down alpha vertical slice, even if you cut 90% of promised features.
chaostheory 5y ago
I'm guessing no one technical vetted them? Seems more like YC growing pains than anything else. YC, the organization, should have prevented this with a set process and requirements like "have someone technical with gaming experience vet potential gaming investments".
eganist 5y ago
Dang — we need a title change on this one. The article itself discusses the scam accusation but never makes that assertion itself, but the title here is heavily editorialized. (I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)
29athrowaway 5y ago
Are not alphas expected to be broken?
- ludamad 5y ago
  They are, finding item size cap bugs and alerting the devs seems all in the spirit. To me there's just an elephant in the room - the idea is dead in the water. The latency dictated by the internet does not support their ideas. It will end up under-delivering. I wouldn't call it an outright scam, though, as games are a very subjective product
jVinc 5y ago
So it's a "scam" because they are promising something they can't deliver straight away? Isn't that basically a description of every startup company ever?
- kkotak 5y ago
  Nope. There is Tesla and there's Therasense.
  - gota 5y ago
    Is Therasense == Theranos? A google search returns a lot of stuff on patent litigation but no "human readable" articles
    - MauriceChavez 5y ago
      check out the coldfusion video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CccfnRpPtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CccfnRpPtM ). truly another Enron
      - gota 5y ago
        Thanks- I knew about Theranos, just had no memory of the term "Therasense". And googling the term didn't make the connection clear at fisrt sight, so I asked
- fredophile 5y ago
  There are a couple reasons it's a scam. First, they've apparently overstated their relevant credentials. Claiming nine years of experience in something they don't have any professional experience in is a scam. I wouldn't open a restaurant and claim decades of cooking experience when my experience is just cooking for myself at home. Second, and more importantly, it's a scam because they are charging money for something that they have no viable path to delivering the thing people paid for.
dang 5y ago
There was a recent submission saying the same things: DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments) I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926. The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22good%20conscience%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago. Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=follow-up%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
mbrodersen 5y ago
A rule of thumb in the games industry is that it takes $100+ Million to get a competitive MMO launched. Followed by ongoing $ for maintenance, new extensions/assets etc. The claims made by the inexperienced founders are beyond laughable. People who haven’t worked on large scale game projects have no idea how hard it is compared with your average web/biz application.
- deleted 5y ago
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duckfang 5y ago
s/backed MMO metaverse game //g Fixed the title for you.
jdmoreira 5y ago
> You don't have to be a game developer to know that this isn't a game you can make today, even with a massive budget. And yet I played this game in the 90s. It was called Ultima Online.
- roskelld 5y ago
  Ultima Online could support millions of connected players over a peer-to-peer network? Allowing any player full access to adapt the world and create any content, of any genre, style or experience. All set across an infinite sized world? I think it's a bit of an offense to pair DreamWorld to Ultima and the legacy of people like Raph Koster, Starr Long et al. That game had a wealth of gameplay loops, progression, deep economy, and interesting world. DreamWorld has no design, it's just all things. A plate full of every food you like does not make a good meal.
paxys 5y ago
If every overly optimistic founder with unrealistic goals was written off as a "blatant scam" then YC would invest in...exactly no one. The one serious charge in the article (that they got in to YC through nepotism) is more of a "I heard from someone who heard from someone", and has zero detail.
philliphaydon 5y ago
Haha > a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame creatures Ultima online was released in like 1997 and did all that.
- supernintendo 5y ago
  I miss Ultima Online. That game really was ahead of its time.
hakube 5y ago
I'm pretty sure the actual intention here is to not deliver the promised product and make money. I'm just surprised YC backed this "game"
koonsolo 5y ago
Maybe this is only funny in my head, but I suggest to the VC's to go to some GameDev forums and start funding the total newbies that ask "I'm gonna make the best MMO out there, where do I start?" "Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"
tyrex2017 5y ago
YC never claimed to have a perfect selection process. I wouldn’t hold them accountable for the teams they pick based on a business plan and a 10 min discussion. Its just a good guess. If they doubled down on the team after demo day, then I am with you. Compare this with hiring. I have heard successful people say they do get 1 in 5 hires wrong, even after a process which is 10x more thorough.
- deleted 5y ago
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dadrian 5y ago
I knew Garrison in undergrad and let’s just say while I wasn’t expecting to see his name in this article, I’m not at all surprised.
djyaz1200 5y ago
I'm crushed to hear that YC is not a meritocracy. I can't even remember how many times I applied. That just makes me sick.
manigandham 5y ago
Star Citizen is a much better example that is actively trying to pursue this goal of being an entire "universe simulator". Here's a recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYs_zn2pTZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYs_zn2pTZo

390 points by astlouis44 5y ago

Tialco 5y ago

Trash article like the majority of stuff that comes out of PC gamer.

lloydatkinson 5y ago

I wonder if this post will be deleted

jokoon 5y ago

Its totally possible to make a large online game with proper procedural generation of geometry and sharded servers for zones. It's a bit of work but it's doable. Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background. A game without story is a software product. Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2 people.

kevingadd 5y ago
"Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background." With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here and comment on it: Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every year or so and they made good money. TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely would not have hit without the content. Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it comes). Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay footage to be confident about this. Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content). Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain. EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this anymore, though, for good reason. Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements. Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but this game is entirely about story content and roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion. Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more so than the original. EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay and character customization... and players soundly rejected all of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core game. Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not procedurally generated, though. Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's leading story game studio (BioWare). Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or professional reviews, they all mention the story. Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well. Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose. World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot. Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger games market, and some of them do make good money. However, even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content", because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps. Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  A bit of a tangent, there was a notorious reddit thread a long time ago with a comment by someone supposedly in the MMO industry [1] that echoes your point about content: > Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-produced MMO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to create, and it has to be turned around fast That thread mostly focused on how unrealistic it is for one person to develop an MMO by themselves, which is not exactly the case here. But it gives a bit of a taste as to why MMORPG is one of the most challenging game genres to succeed with. "Half of all MMOs commercially developed never release; half the survivors immediately fail", and the remaining successes almost all have staggeringly huge amounts of art & lore like you mentioned. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet_im_a_26_year_old_lady_whos_been/c3lup2l/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet...
- polytely 5y ago
  Thanks for your work on Guild Wars! That game meant a lot to me growing up, it's really something special.
- iand 5y ago
  Elder Scrolls Online is primarily content led
- jokoon 5y ago
  Comparing with the best AAA sellers is a strawman, and I don't see the point comparing those with one that is being incubated. Minecraft is a good example of a game that has almost not content but sold amazingly well. > Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail. The "market" cannot predict innovation or success. This startup will probably fail, yes, but ycombinator is a private initiative and it matters to give the benefit of the doubt. I agree about possible nepotism, but I still believe in what I said about procedural generation and hand crafted content. Hand made content is crazy expensive, and I really think that procedural generation is a good solution.
walrus01 5y ago
> Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your position on that.
- jokoon 5y ago
  I was talking about multiplayer games.
dbg31415 5y ago
> Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience... Did you play Fallout 76 at launch? Oof. It was terrible. They've since added NPCs, but it's really hard to fix a bad first impression.
rcxdude 5y ago
This is very rare in MMOs. Most are not really sandboxes but theme parks, where most multiplayer is through interacting with the content cooperatively.
duskwuff 5y ago
Realm of the Mad God was able to build a successful game because they were extremely conservative on features -- low-res 2D graphics, no user-generated content, simple game mechanics, limited persistence. DreamWorld is... not that. They're promising features which nobody has successfully brought to market before, with a team which doesn't appear to have any meaningful experience in the industry.

cbsks 5y ago

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam? What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?

DetroitThrow 5y ago
Theranos believed in what they were originally taking investors over. I don't see why this is not a similar case of fraud if investors have not been informed about current expectations of their original promise.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  The difference with Theranos is they were promising people tangible medical results. Clearly, if a metaverse startup convinces a bunch of VCs to back them and the venture fails, that risk was known from the beginning.
  - ska 5y ago
    I don't think the point was what the tangible result would be, or risk of failure. Everyone putting money into an early venture knows that there is a good chance they just kissed it goodbye. The problem is when said venture later lies about progress, or otherwise obfuscates, especially to get more money. That's certainly what Theranos did, and I think what GP was suggesting happened here.
  - qzw 5y ago
    They also collected $64K from a Kickstarter while boasting about having "secured the majority of our funding from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley." So arguably they did promise some tangible results to some non-professional investors/potential players. Of course, by now everyone should know that Caveat Backer is the unofficial motto of Kickstarter.
  - orzig 5y ago
    Moreover, they were making claims about the then-present, not just the clearly unforeseeable future

tptacek 5y ago

You're not meant to editorialize titles like this on HN. People who submit stories have no more claim to their viewpoint than any commenter does. The title here should be: "This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"

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tobr 5y ago
If the reason for the rule is to avoid the submitter pushing through their viewpoint, this particular case shouldn’t be a problem. The “Y Combinator” part is a reason why it’s relevant to this site, and it’s not a viewpoint.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  "Scam" is the problematic part. The article avoids the word in the title because the article itself says: > "I think we use the word scam as a colloquial term mostly and there's some nuance to this. I don't think either game's developers have the actual intention to not deliver." So it's not a scam, not to speak of blatant scam.
  - onli 5y ago
    That's a quote in the article. He also said this: > "I think for me, the base intent matters very little when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone throughout." If it's true that the game developers promised this: > The campaign promises, among other features, "multiplayer with the population density of real cities" and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction points. Then it's clearly a scam. And both statements really are on the kickstarter. There is also this gem: > We plan to expand to every internet connected device with a screen very soon! Ridiculous.
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KuiN 5y ago

If you're thinking "how bad can it really be?", please treat yourself to watching a couple minutes of "gameplay". It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.

dumbfoundded 5y ago
VC seed stage backing is based on two things: the team (or who they know) & the addressable market. VC backing is not some meritocracy. YC is better at bridging the gap but it's certainly not perfect. uBiome is another pretty blatant YC-funded fraud
- vmception 5y ago
  Mirrortocracy describes both that and all attempted illusions of meritocracies. In this industry, at least.
austhrow743 5y ago
Slack came out of a failed attempt to build an MMO. Tech cofounder apparently has some reasonable credentials and particularly if he's known to people within Ycombinator it doesn't seem absurd at all to me that they'd invest largely on the basis of "guy we know to be reasonably competent wants to try his hand at entrepreneurship". Like its a hundred grand. They throw that at all sorts of companies. This aint softbank throwing billions at wework. I think any sort of "omg ycombinator funded that?" response has to come from people who havent ever bothered to look at the long tail of stuff ycombinator funds instead of their top few investments. It's not an elite club. It's the most throw shit at the wall and see what sticks style VC fund out of any VC fund.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  The amount of work and expertise that needs to go into this project is staggering. It is hard for me to call anyone competent, when they are either this delusional, or purposely setting up this scam. Edit: taking peoples money through kickstarter like this is the main scammy part here I guess.

dvt 5y ago

I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant, motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many) times as well and were rejected (YC is mega-competitive after all). IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.

kemonocode 5y ago
Which is why I suspect the title will be changed, even though it is relevant to the discussion.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  It is an editorialized title and should be changed.
  - kemonocode 5y ago
    The "blatant scam" part, maybe. The fact it's Y Combinator-backed is still relevant, though.
  - variable11 5y ago
    What's worse, you don't agree with the title, or somebody at YC blatantly engaged in nepotism to let some two-bit scam artist fraud use their name to bilk ordinary people out of money? Priorities, in order.
- dang 5y ago
  The submitted title blatantly breaks the site guidelines, which ask "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.". It is a no-brainer of standard HN moderation that we would change it immediately, as you can see from countless previous examples (and these are just the ones I posted about): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20misleading%20or%20linkbait&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20editorializ&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20level%20playing%20field&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... When readers email about a title complaining that it's breaking the rules (as happened with this one), you know it's bad. However, I don't think I'm going to change it, even though it shamelessly distorts the article's meaning and adds extra linkbait on top. The reason I'm not inclined to change it is that we moderate HN less, not more, when a story is about YC or a YC-funded startup. That's explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... More on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978.

Shadonototro 5y ago

i knew this project was a scam it was obvious, default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs and people asking for 10k to make an MMO, LOL what people can do for a quick buck, this not only expose the pseudo "scripters & asset flippers", but also everyone who promoted the project

tom_mellior 5y ago
> default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later, when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around, people would be criticizing them for focusing on looks first instead of writing game code. All that said, the rest of the criticism appears damning.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Using content from a wide variety of asset packs is a problem because it means the resulting game will be visually and thematically incoherent. You can see a lot of this already in their demo videos -- there's visible conflicts between their realistic and cartoony content, detailed vs. lo-fi, shiny vs. gritty, fantasy vs. science fiction... this all makes for a real hodgepodge of content in the game, and it's going to be difficult for them to resolve in the future in a game that's meant to rely heavily on user-generated content.
  - tom_mellior 5y ago
    If it's going to be a hodgepodge anyway due to user-generated content, wouldn't that be another argument for not trying too hard to develop their own integrated visual theme? (Not that I think that "user-generated" content will work well. If any of it is owned, or merely claimed to be owned, by litigious copyright holders, that's a good way to get YouTube to ban gameplay videos. There goes your free advertising. I wonder how Second Life deals with this.)

anonymousab 5y ago

> [DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through "It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?

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hprotagonist 5y ago

Of course it's a scam; I'm not there.

tomaszs 5y ago

Some guys try to basically ATP bootstrap a game concept. And there are other guys including the author of the article, that want to rip it apart. If there is a scam, where are the victims? All I can see here is only a lot of speculative and targeted hate and smear that makes me wonder why on earth it is on Hacker News.

OutThisLife 5y ago

The default UE4 mannequin makes it so much funnier.

ultrastable 5y ago

this is extremely embarrassing for YC. whether or not it's an intentional scam, anyone remotely involved w/ the tech industry should have seen how implausible the whole project was

xmly 5y ago

Nepotism at Y Combinator ? What is this about?

ffhhj 5y ago
Favoritism shown or patronage granted to relatives and friends. But I think this is just an example that shows investment is merely gambling.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  Not necessarily, the article mentions that YC allegedly never even vetted the project: > According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence. "Originally, I thought this was a bit of a joke, but they called me and validated all their information and their sources. This person is actually higher up than just investing," he says. "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
  - xmly 5y ago
    Should not be a surprise after Theranos.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Isn't this congruent with the "Invest in teams, not products" philosophy though?
  - 0xy 5y ago
    It's actually a good thing, because it destroys confidence in YC and their reputation is deservedly diminished. This results in actually successful companies not bothering to apply for YC, which hurts their performance. This debacle will cost them a LOT more than the cash they gave to the scam.

sombremesa 5y ago

The big issue relevant to YC is "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through" (if true), but the people being affected are the LPs who were likely aware such things would happen to their money. Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.

new299 5y ago
I didn't understand this comment in the article. Demo day comes after being accepted to YC... Do YC ban companies from demo day? I thought everybody presented. I can't see any reference to them having raised any money at demo day either.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  I read this as not having anything to show (in terms of numbers, product) at demo day and I assumed the implication was that they had also not been meeting their weekly obligations, but you’re correct that there isn’t really anything for YC to do at that point - short of running up and snatching LoIs which is obviously overstepping.
  - ypzhang2 5y ago
    There really isn't any weekly obligations when I went through, other than a dinner weekly. You met with the partners as much as you liked. At Demo Day, there were folks in 2011 with no product, someone even pivoted the day before demo day and just had an idea on a powerpoint. Some of the folks went on to build very successful businesses. So the lack of demo day progress in of itself doesn't mean too much i think. The other points might though, to be fair.
    - deleted 5y ago
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coldcode 5y ago

I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity with the random latency of so many streams using prediction. Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on ground" sort of world). Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to do even a small subset of what they want requires people with lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation, lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support huge numbers of"local" players either.

650REDHAIR 5y ago
See star citizen for a recent example
- reiichiroh 5y ago
  Everything will work when /if server meshing works
- reiichiroh 5y ago
  Everything will work when or rather if server meshing works
rcxdude 5y ago
Exactly, on the server side player interaction is an N² problem (where N is the number of players who are currently interacting). Each of N players need updates on the (N-1) other players they can see. And without strong in-game reasons not to, players will test the limits, no matter how efficient your code (see EVE where despite them making huge improvements to their servers and code as well as already using an extremely low update rate, player battles are still basically limited by how many you can get into a system before the server topples over).

wyxuan 5y ago

To give them credit, dream world has provided a lot of entertainment, unfortunately not the video game kind

baby 5y ago
Also, if VCs want to throw money at him, well why not. Who cares.

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baby 5y ago

Wow, the speaker story is hilarious. He was running blasting music so people were following him in the street because they liked his music, so he created a kickstarted for this ugly ass speaker that you can strap to yourself. Wow.

endisneigh 5y ago

Our of curiosity - to the game devs out there: The article suggests this game isn’t possible, as described, even with an infinite budget. Is this true? If the game were 2 dimensional (either top down or side scroller) would it be possible?

somehnacct3757 5y ago
Former game dev, ten years in the industry. I don't think money is going to be their bottleneck. It's going to be game dev expertise. This game idea is incredibly banal. It's like the pitch you'd get if you asked a kid to design a game. Pitches like these are punchlines in game dev circles. Throw in the article's claims that people are working 80 hour weeks and the owners are offering 20% rev shares with streamers, I just don't see anyone who knows what they're doing taking these guys seriously. With a more professional pitch, one which describes accurately the constraints, it's possible. For example, you can have a hundred million DAU if your game is primarily asynchronous multiplayer. This was being done a decade ago on Facebook. You can have user generated content cover your content gap if you rev share with content creators as Roblox does. They are basically pitching a game platform but never tell you why their game platform will even boot.
0xy 5y ago
It's not true at all. It's impossible only if money and experience is limited. In this case, the scam has no money or experience. $100k won't buy you a stripped down alpha vertical slice, even if you cut 90% of promised features.

chaostheory 5y ago

I'm guessing no one technical vetted them? Seems more like YC growing pains than anything else. YC, the organization, should have prevented this with a set process and requirements like "have someone technical with gaming experience vet potential gaming investments".

eganist 5y ago

Dang — we need a title change on this one. The article itself discusses the scam accusation but never makes that assertion itself, but the title here is heavily editorialized. (I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)

29athrowaway 5y ago

Are not alphas expected to be broken?

ludamad 5y ago
They are, finding item size cap bugs and alerting the devs seems all in the spirit. To me there's just an elephant in the room - the idea is dead in the water. The latency dictated by the internet does not support their ideas. It will end up under-delivering. I wouldn't call it an outright scam, though, as games are a very subjective product

jVinc 5y ago

So it's a "scam" because they are promising something they can't deliver straight away? Isn't that basically a description of every startup company ever?

kkotak 5y ago
Nope. There is Tesla and there's Therasense.
- gota 5y ago
  Is Therasense == Theranos? A google search returns a lot of stuff on patent litigation but no "human readable" articles
  - MauriceChavez 5y ago
    check out the coldfusion video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CccfnRpPtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CccfnRpPtM ). truly another Enron
    - gota 5y ago
      Thanks- I knew about Theranos, just had no memory of the term "Therasense". And googling the term didn't make the connection clear at fisrt sight, so I asked
fredophile 5y ago
There are a couple reasons it's a scam. First, they've apparently overstated their relevant credentials. Claiming nine years of experience in something they don't have any professional experience in is a scam. I wouldn't open a restaurant and claim decades of cooking experience when my experience is just cooking for myself at home. Second, and more importantly, it's a scam because they are charging money for something that they have no viable path to delivering the thing people paid for.

dang 5y ago

There was a recent submission saying the same things: DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments) I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926. The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22good%20conscience%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago. Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=follow-up%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

mbrodersen 5y ago

A rule of thumb in the games industry is that it takes $100+ Million to get a competitive MMO launched. Followed by ongoing $ for maintenance, new extensions/assets etc. The claims made by the inexperienced founders are beyond laughable. People who haven’t worked on large scale game projects have no idea how hard it is compared with your average web/biz application.

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duckfang 5y ago

s/backed MMO metaverse game //g Fixed the title for you.

jdmoreira 5y ago

> You don't have to be a game developer to know that this isn't a game you can make today, even with a massive budget. And yet I played this game in the 90s. It was called Ultima Online.

roskelld 5y ago
Ultima Online could support millions of connected players over a peer-to-peer network? Allowing any player full access to adapt the world and create any content, of any genre, style or experience. All set across an infinite sized world? I think it's a bit of an offense to pair DreamWorld to Ultima and the legacy of people like Raph Koster, Starr Long et al. That game had a wealth of gameplay loops, progression, deep economy, and interesting world. DreamWorld has no design, it's just all things. A plate full of every food you like does not make a good meal.

paxys 5y ago

If every overly optimistic founder with unrealistic goals was written off as a "blatant scam" then YC would invest in...exactly no one. The one serious charge in the article (that they got in to YC through nepotism) is more of a "I heard from someone who heard from someone", and has zero detail.

philliphaydon 5y ago

Haha > a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame creatures Ultima online was released in like 1997 and did all that.

supernintendo 5y ago
I miss Ultima Online. That game really was ahead of its time.

hakube 5y ago

I'm pretty sure the actual intention here is to not deliver the promised product and make money. I'm just surprised YC backed this "game"

koonsolo 5y ago

Maybe this is only funny in my head, but I suggest to the VC's to go to some GameDev forums and start funding the total newbies that ask "I'm gonna make the best MMO out there, where do I start?" "Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"

tyrex2017 5y ago

YC never claimed to have a perfect selection process. I wouldn’t hold them accountable for the teams they pick based on a business plan and a 10 min discussion. Its just a good guess. If they doubled down on the team after demo day, then I am with you. Compare this with hiring. I have heard successful people say they do get 1 in 5 hires wrong, even after a process which is 10x more thorough.

deleted 5y ago
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dadrian 5y ago

I knew Garrison in undergrad and let’s just say while I wasn’t expecting to see his name in this article, I’m not at all surprised.

djyaz1200 5y ago

I'm crushed to hear that YC is not a meritocracy. I can't even remember how many times I applied. That just makes me sick.

manigandham 5y ago

Star Citizen is a much better example that is actively trying to pursue this goal of being an entire "universe simulator". Here's a recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYs_zn2pTZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYs_zn2pTZo