6 ms·

Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

49 points by henning 17y ago

TweedHeads 17y ago
I am working on the first stages of a multiplayer online game. Any tips on game hosting services with IRCD? Between 500 and 1000 players is ok for a start. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Any reason why a VPS wouldn't cut it? assume I know nothing about games, online or otherwise (at least not since Street Fighter II)
- cubicle67 17y ago
  cool! Any more info on the game you can provide?
  - TweedHeads 17y ago
    Not at this moment, but as soon as I get the hosting I'll put it online for testing.
  - Harkins 17y ago
    I'm also building one, been blogging as I go: http://push.cx/tag/athenge http://push.cx/tag/athenge And, yeah, I have a similarly low opinion of the game industry as this article. Looking at it from the outside I see no reason to be part of it, I'm happier to be a software company that does games rather than a games company. http://push.cx/2009/the-game-industry http://push.cx/2009/the-game-industry
ricree 17y ago
"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet" That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine. Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that there'd be a decent sized market for a product which would shave years off of the development time. I wonder if part of the problem comes from most MMO companies clinging to life for as long as they can, and then not having the money to rework their technology into something suitable for a third party. Certainly, there have been quality(from a technical standpoint, anyways) games that got released, got a few rounds of post launch patching, and then died from lack of users. I'd bet that with a bit of polish, that sort of proven technology would be a moneymaker.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Panda 3D was used to make one Disney MMO at least. And that one's free!
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  Oh, there are a few such companies. Can't think of the names right now, but I did some research into this over the winter. A big problem is that the asset creation is very expensive, and balancing the economic factors is much easier said than done. If you are interested in this, Richard Bartle, inventor of MUD, is the leading thinker in the field. The best technical system that I know of is the stackless python one developed for Eve Online, which I believe is profitable but has only about $300k players. Mind you, with that number it's insanely complex already. I had to stop playing, because to do so well requires the same level of commitment as a full time job.
  - ricree 17y ago
    I can imagine that asset creation might easily be as large an expense as building the technology. However, one of the big killers of MMOs is problems with the launch. With some of these large high profile failures, they've already gone through this and worked out at least some of the bugs, so one would assume that this would make them more attractive to buyers.
- reedlaw 17y ago
  Why not use an open source one? I saw a Google tech talk by Keith Fulton, one of the main architects of PlaneShift. He said that although the engine is GPLed, the characters, rules, scenery, etc. are all separate from the main project and can be scripted. So if someone wanted to, they could improve the GPL engine while creating proprietary art and storyline that could then be marketed.
  - pmjordan 17y ago
    Unfortunately, you can't use GPL or even LGPL licensed code on consoles, and try getting (L)GPL code past your publisher's/investors' lawyers. I had to go through an arduous approval process to be allowed to use zLib in a game.
stcredzero 17y ago
Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO dev teams?
- greendestiny 17y ago
  Its the scope of MMO's thats the problem. Building a massive game world, with massive networking requirements is very hard.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    http://www.stackless.com/ http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other). Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp gates and hyperspace jumps - you can just fly off into space with normal engines but given the astronomical distances being simulated this isn't practical for actual travel, only for tactical combat advantage (scouting or sniping at enemy ships). As with a most other online games, players tend to congregate around a central point because of navigational and trade benefits. In Eve's case this is a system called Jita which regularly had 500 ships in one local volume, leading to horrendous lag. Load balancing can become a particular problem and so does client bandwidth since you're suddenly trying to feed everyone 1000 vectors per second.
    - Retric 17y ago
      Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't let 5,000 players into the same zone at the same time. You could do the same thing with a classic MMO by having limited resources in a zone that respawn in real time. It actually a reasonable idea, kill all the gnoll's in that dungeon and they don't respawn. However, it's more fun to for most people to be able to repeat the same dungeon over and over with little effort. You could do the same thing with quick movement between zones but then you get the empty feeling when there are not enough players to fill the world. It just works better in space, however, awsome random content generation could do the same thing on land. PS: As to the market's being linked, City of Heroes does the same thing; all shards share the same market.
blader 17y ago
Most <any industry> companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people." I'm guessing it's especially true in software - everybody is involved in software nowadays but you can count the number of companies doing software really well on two hands and two feet.
- raganwald 17y ago
  Sturgeon's Revelation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
johnyzee 17y ago
Game industry job interview: http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050406l.jpg http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050406l.jpg
hoelle 17y ago
I'm an MMO hacker that's shipped one unsuccessful game and one moderately successful game, and I have to comment on some points made in this article. -MMOs fail due to bad management, design Partially true. All the elements need to be there, and bad technology seems to be the biggest crippling force in games. We need more good hackers in the field. -Good MMO studios aren't hiring. Not true, even today. -MMO studios all have terrible quality of life, pay, benefits. Not true. Startup studios might, but if you're going into that situation you're either getting profit sharing, or a beginner getting a foot in the door. -MMO engines don't exist, tech isn't reused. This is becoming less true, but the third party tech out there is still untested. It's unlikely a great MMO company will sell its tech like Epic does with Unreal, since we need long term customers, and can't afford to undercut ourselves. -Don't work in games unless you are a gaming fanatic. Loving gameplay helps if you want to be a gameplay coder, but MMOs are vast. Networking, graphics, AI, scalability, the problems to be solved are endless. If you're bored at your job, I recommend giving the games industry a look.
sethg 17y ago
I wonder if the "secure distributed persistent communication" protocol developed by the E folks could be used to implement a virtual world running on a network of clients. I.e., one central server would send a client some model of a room, and the trust layer would prevent that client from moving walls around. (I'm being handwavey here because I'm not familiar with either E or MMOs, but maybe someone else can be inspired by this.) http://www.erights.org/ http://www.erights.org/

49 points by henning 17y ago

I am working on the first stages of a multiplayer online game. Any tips on game hosting services with IRCD? Between 500 and 1000 players is ok for a start. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

mahmud 17y ago
Any reason why a VPS wouldn't cut it? assume I know nothing about games, online or otherwise (at least not since Street Fighter II)
cubicle67 17y ago
cool! Any more info on the game you can provide?
- TweedHeads 17y ago
  Not at this moment, but as soon as I get the hosting I'll put it online for testing.
- Harkins 17y ago
  I'm also building one, been blogging as I go: http://push.cx/tag/athenge http://push.cx/tag/athenge And, yeah, I have a similarly low opinion of the game industry as this article. Looking at it from the outside I see no reason to be part of it, I'm happier to be a software company that does games rather than a games company. http://push.cx/2009/the-game-industry http://push.cx/2009/the-game-industry

ricree 17y ago

"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet" That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine. Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that there'd be a decent sized market for a product which would shave years off of the development time. I wonder if part of the problem comes from most MMO companies clinging to life for as long as they can, and then not having the money to rework their technology into something suitable for a third party. Certainly, there have been quality(from a technical standpoint, anyways) games that got released, got a few rounds of post launch patching, and then died from lack of users. I'd bet that with a bit of polish, that sort of proven technology would be a moneymaker.

stcredzero 17y ago
Panda 3D was used to make one Disney MMO at least. And that one's free!
anigbrowl 17y ago
Oh, there are a few such companies. Can't think of the names right now, but I did some research into this over the winter. A big problem is that the asset creation is very expensive, and balancing the economic factors is much easier said than done. If you are interested in this, Richard Bartle, inventor of MUD, is the leading thinker in the field. The best technical system that I know of is the stackless python one developed for Eve Online, which I believe is profitable but has only about $300k players. Mind you, with that number it's insanely complex already. I had to stop playing, because to do so well requires the same level of commitment as a full time job.
- ricree 17y ago
  I can imagine that asset creation might easily be as large an expense as building the technology. However, one of the big killers of MMOs is problems with the launch. With some of these large high profile failures, they've already gone through this and worked out at least some of the bugs, so one would assume that this would make them more attractive to buyers.
reedlaw 17y ago
Why not use an open source one? I saw a Google tech talk by Keith Fulton, one of the main architects of PlaneShift. He said that although the engine is GPLed, the characters, rules, scenery, etc. are all separate from the main project and can be scripted. So if someone wanted to, they could improve the GPL engine while creating proprietary art and storyline that could then be marketed.
- pmjordan 17y ago
  Unfortunately, you can't use GPL or even LGPL licensed code on consoles, and try getting (L)GPL code past your publisher's/investors' lawyers. I had to go through an arduous approval process to be allowed to use zLib in a game.

stcredzero 17y ago

Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO dev teams?

greendestiny 17y ago
Its the scope of MMO's thats the problem. Building a massive game world, with massive networking requirements is very hard.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  http://www.stackless.com/ http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other). Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp gates and hyperspace jumps - you can just fly off into space with normal engines but given the astronomical distances being simulated this isn't practical for actual travel, only for tactical combat advantage (scouting or sniping at enemy ships). As with a most other online games, players tend to congregate around a central point because of navigational and trade benefits. In Eve's case this is a system called Jita which regularly had 500 ships in one local volume, leading to horrendous lag. Load balancing can become a particular problem and so does client bandwidth since you're suddenly trying to feed everyone 1000 vectors per second.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't let 5,000 players into the same zone at the same time. You could do the same thing with a classic MMO by having limited resources in a zone that respawn in real time. It actually a reasonable idea, kill all the gnoll's in that dungeon and they don't respawn. However, it's more fun to for most people to be able to repeat the same dungeon over and over with little effort. You could do the same thing with quick movement between zones but then you get the empty feeling when there are not enough players to fill the world. It just works better in space, however, awsome random content generation could do the same thing on land. PS: As to the market's being linked, City of Heroes does the same thing; all shards share the same market.

blader 17y ago

Most <any industry> companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people." I'm guessing it's especially true in software - everybody is involved in software nowadays but you can count the number of companies doing software really well on two hands and two feet.

raganwald 17y ago
Sturgeon's Revelation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

johnyzee 17y ago

Game industry job interview: http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050406l.jpg http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050406l.jpg

hoelle 17y ago

I'm an MMO hacker that's shipped one unsuccessful game and one moderately successful game, and I have to comment on some points made in this article. -MMOs fail due to bad management, design Partially true. All the elements need to be there, and bad technology seems to be the biggest crippling force in games. We need more good hackers in the field. -Good MMO studios aren't hiring. Not true, even today. -MMO studios all have terrible quality of life, pay, benefits. Not true. Startup studios might, but if you're going into that situation you're either getting profit sharing, or a beginner getting a foot in the door. -MMO engines don't exist, tech isn't reused. This is becoming less true, but the third party tech out there is still untested. It's unlikely a great MMO company will sell its tech like Epic does with Unreal, since we need long term customers, and can't afford to undercut ourselves. -Don't work in games unless you are a gaming fanatic. Loving gameplay helps if you want to be a gameplay coder, but MMOs are vast. Networking, graphics, AI, scalability, the problems to be solved are endless. If you're bored at your job, I recommend giving the games industry a look.

sethg 17y ago

I wonder if the "secure distributed persistent communication" protocol developed by the E folks could be used to implement a virtual world running on a network of clients. I.e., one central server would send a client some model of a room, and the trust layer would prevent that client from moving walls around. (I'm being handwavey here because I'm not familiar with either E or MMOs, but maybe someone else can be inspired by this.) http://www.erights.org/ http://www.erights.org/