Thread by @dsmart

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The demise of Worlds Adrift once again shines a spotlight on how games relying on third-party tech can be unplayable at some point down the road.

Yes, this is going to be a Star Citizen thread. Grab a chair.

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1133833986281824256

The game was one of the first to adopt @Improbableio entirely cloud based platform, SpatialOS which supports most game engines, but had direct hooks for Unity & UnrealEngine

In fact, @WorldsAdrift remains the only playable game to be "released" based for that platform. While Bossa Studios isn't a widely known studio, innovative ideas usually comes from indie studios with lofty ambitions & small bank accounts.

Their official statement, I thought was very well written and articulated; unlike the "fill in the blanks" bs you'd normally get. And they stated honestly and precisely how & why they failed.

https://twitter.com/WorldsAdrift/status/1133678772975226880?s=20

Since the dawn of time, innovative ideas have been a dime a dozen. However, very few of those ever see the light of day because as the [games] industry moved on, making games became a very expensive proposition; even as competition heated up exponentially.

The more expensive it became to make games, the higher the risks. Even the notion of higher risks yielding huge rewards tends to not pan out in the long run. Which is why we see so many sequels (the safe bet - always) over the years, and with few new innovative ideas.

It's hard to say whether or not Worlds Adrift would have succeeded had they spent more time on game-play than on tech; but from what I've heard, they simply couldn't get around the tech hurdle for various reasons.

The game was innovative enough to attract about 100K buyers, which, when you think about it, isn't too shabby for an early access game.

However, setting aside the concept of MMO games for a minute, each time you build a game that relies on third-party services (especially PAID), you run the risk of a shutdown if the sales can't pay for the game, or if the tech disappears.

It's what happens when MMO games die due to the income not being able to pay for the servers or bandwidth, let alone the team that runs it. It's why the likes of GameSpy going away, killed multiplayer in many legacy games people were still playing online.

Even though GameSpy went away suddenly, some of the devs had in fact built in peer-to-peer tech to allow gamers to still setup games the hard way, but with no matchmaking of any kind. Heck, even big name publishers have ended game support over the years for financial reasons

In recent memory, the sudden collapse (which came out of nowhere!) of Trion Worlds which got sold to gamigo for literally Pennies on the Dollar in a debtor benefit assignment deal, was yet another reminder of how much is at stake when running a GaaS-based model.

And it wasn't long after that we heard about the troubles over at Starbreeze which had also switched to a GaaS model for some of their games. And for all intent and purposes, that studio has pretty much collapsed. Again, that came literally out of nowhere.

With most games, you get to a point where you no longer have to support them as long as they worked and you were still selling them. But with GaaS games, there are on-going costs required to keep the games running, the lights on, and the support team in place.

It doesn't matter how big the studio is or how much money they have; at any given moment, someone is monitoring what a GaaS game costs to run each month, against what revenue it is making. Heck, see the on-going Athem (It's dead, Jim) for a sample of how that works.

When I took over the Alganon MMO back in 2010, the investors who owned it, and who hired my company to complete it, had spent several million Dollars on it since it's 2006 inception. By the time we completed it, and the dust settled on the various lawsuits, that figured doubled.

As an MMO it was squarely in the GaaS model which required not only on-going costs (servers, bandwidth, team etc) but also continuous player engagement, marketing, updates etc. Very few GaaS games survive "maintenance" mode because gamers are finicky and like shiny new things.

Once a game enters maintenance mode, whereby active development and marketing stops, you're basically flipping a coin that the already engaged players, even with choices, will stick around to at least help pay for the running costs.

The minute you're in the state whereby those running costs exceed the income, you're in trouble because the road to [financial] recovery isn't paved with goodwill. If you stopped paying your home's light bill, the utility company shuts off your power. It's that simple.

In the case of Alganon, once it reached the point where it wasn't making money, and there wasn't a marketing budget for it, the investors understandably decided to scuttle it. So, knowing its potential, I bought it, with a view to relaunching it.

qol.com/3000ad-acquire…

This is pretty much how these things go. However, like most GaaS games which get bought and sold, Worlds Adrift was an unfinished game which would have required not only a hefty budget to complete, but also money to keep paying for servers AND the SpatialOS tech they were using.

Even if the game was 100% complete and in maintenance mode, they would still have server related costs to contend with. SpatialOS isn't cheap. I've said (search my feed) this for quite time now, and even explained this to the devs. In the past 24hrs...

improbable.io/blog/updated-p…

So if a completed GaaS game needs to make money to pay for servers, bandwidth, cloud costs, team etc, how does anyone expect it to survive if the game isn't popular? So, even if you could afford it, why keep it running? You don't - and shouldn't.

When I bought Alganon and took it offline, I could have just migrated it, and brought it back online. I opted not to because with lack of marketing, new content, worldwide (it was only available in the US) distribution etc, I would basically be throwing good money after bad. Why?

That's why I've been sitting on it, while working with other partners and planning the property strategy and timing. That's the thing with GaaS games; you rarely get a second chance because even the most loyal gamers tend to move on. It's not like the old days with few choices.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room...Star Citizen.

When this game was pitched back in 2012, it was a standard single (Squadron 42) and multi (Star Citizen) player game. Not a GaaS based MMO.

Says so right there in the FAQ.

kickstarter.com/projects/cig/s…

As it came to pass, everything in that particular description has turned out to be fluff-ridden bs; even as Chris turned the game into an unwieldy mess sitting atop a GaaS model.

And it runs on cloud based servers.

Elite Dangerous, like Eve Online before it, built their game on an innovative peer-to-peer model with a hybrid cloud server backend. If Frontier went out of business tomorrow, even without a master server backend, they have the ability to release an update that bypasses it.

If you haven't yet, watch their AWS presentation. Even if you're a dev who has a clue wtf he's going about there, it will still sound like alchemy.

Remember Firefall? Yup. They too had a fancy AWS "Building A World In The Cloud" presentation. That GaaS game is also dead and buried.

slideshare.net/AmazonWebServi…

Star Citizen was built on Google Compute; then when they switched to Lumberyard game engine, as per the requirements, they switched to AWS for their cloud tech. Given the downright laughable networking architecture in that game, that leads to exorbitant AWS cloud server costs.

So when Star Citizen reaches the point where backers no longer fund it enough to pay for all its monthly costs, not only will the game literally STOP WORKING, but you couldn't even run it off-line.

Imagine the shock and horror, when after YEARS of my writing that they had to be running out of money, in Dec 2018 we finally fund out that they had in fact run out of money. Then came the $46M (totally for marketing though /s) bailout.

dereksmart.com/2019/05/star-c…

Even with their burn rate, the project didn't even have money for a 90 day run; as it was essentially insolvent by the Summer 2018 when they closed that funding deal.

So, whether or not Star Citizen ends up being finished (not a chance), is largely irrelevant because due to its GaaS model, whether or not it ends up being an MMO (not a chance), its continuance relies on gamers continuing to pay to keep it running.

Given that they have burned through $300M over 7 yrs and don't even have a game that's 40% completed, what are the odds that it will remain online, long after maintenance mode and downsizing roll around in 2020 (you heard it here first)?

Aside from the fact that the whole private server thing went out the window the minute they thought of it, even in a peer-to-peer online game, you still need an always-on backend server that's more than just a matchmaking service.

And seeing as Star Citizen is built on CryEngine, the server needs the entire world in order to run a simulation for clients. Without that, there's no private server, and no game client to speak of.

GaaS games are a HUGE risky bet; and any forward-thinking dev should plan for the inevitability that the day will come when gamers can no longer pay to keep it running. It's why I designed my next game, Line Of Defense, the way that I did - with full redundancy.

One thing that most gamers don't know or realize is that you're not "buying" a game. You're buying a license to play a game. So if that game stops working - for any reason - you have ZERO legal recourse because you were NEVER given a guarantee of performance, let alone ownership

So that's basically it. With GaaS being a huge gamble and risk, seeing games based on that model continue to disappear, should come as no surprise anymore. Just make sure you get your moneys worth before that day comes.

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ps: re: Worlds Adrift

cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/26…

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