HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

The fact this made it past ANY cursory inspection at YC is kind of... hilarious?

There's a good video[1] breaking down just how ridiculous this entire venture is. They have absolutely ZERO background in game development, yet are claiming to be making the biggest MMO ever attempted (with a team of 2), using a revolutionary peer-to-peer meshed (infinite!) game world, with every single game genre merged together.

It's probably the single most blatant gaming-related fundraiser scam I've personally come across... but they got YC backing.

All their videos are just assets from the store, thrown together using open world youtube tutorials, and long-winded posts filled with every buzz-word and game-dev fantasy you can think of. The video is really worth a watch if you want to see just how ridiculous this is, especially the latter half breaking down their technical claims.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGQZfAbsQ6I

⬐ exogeny

YC invested in a company called Balto that was easily the most absurdly weak idea/company I've seen pass through. It was basically a crappy free-to-play fantasy sports platform that was lightyears behind the incredibly well-established, deeper-pocketed, and totally change-resistant market. The only possible advantage it had for it was that one of the founders was Joe Montana's son, as sad as that sounds.

I'm not sure who they have advising them, but in the areas of games and sports, they're so bad at identifying opportunities that it's borderline comical. Where I will however grant some defense is that ideas like AirBnb probably also looked ridiculous at the time; it's only in hindsight where you have the clarity.

⬐ Rastonbury

They invested in the team, who were supposedly one of the best teams they'd ever seen and they knew the immediately after meeting them

⬐ ceilingcorner

AirBnb is someone seeing CouchSurfing and thinking, “How do I monetize this genuinely good, profitless phenomenon?”

The idea of it being “ridiculous” is post-success rationalization, designed to hide the fact that the idea was not original. Even the early AirBnb marketing was very “human connection” in tone.

⬐ Logon90

Joe Montana is pretty involved in investing in YC companies. So some math of the kind you are describing could have gone on: What is more expensive on the long run? To let Balto through, or stop Joe investing in the other companies.

⬐ koonsolo

> AirBnb probably also looked ridiculous at the time; it's only in hindsight where you have the clarity.

There is a difference between assumptions of the market, and assumptions of the amount of work a team can accomplish.

The latter is easier to estimate since you have a lot of data points of what teams can do in an amount of time.

⬐ fsloth

AFAIK YC invests in teams, not products, and are ok, if not expect the team to pivot once or twice. I mean, AirBnB looked equally silly in the beginning. I presume the team (not their product vision) was the reason for investment.

Small teams can bootstrap the creation of billion dollar IP (notch created Minecraft singlehandedly).

Not taking a stance on this particular case. But you can leverage the outsourcing economy quite far if all you want are generic high quality assets. Code - well, that is the thing here, isn't it.

Game industry experience? Baldurs Gate or the original Witcher teams had zero of it also in the beginning.

Hustling? Founders are expected to hustle.

I don't see anything super weird about this. All startups are a dice roll in the beginning.

⬐ KingOfCoders

Why do you think AirBnB looked silly?

"After moving to San Francisco in October 2007, roommates and former schoolmates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the idea of putting an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast." -Wikipedia

⬐ _delirium

That didn't end up being the actual business model though. The vast majority of AirBnB's current revenue is from renting out private apartments or rooms, more in competitition with VRBO or hotels. You can definitely still rent out an air mattress in the living room, but that's not what AirBnB is making its money from.

⬐ fsloth

There are good stories of their beginning out there.

The wikipedia summary really does not do justice to how hard their start was.

I enjoy especially the ones as told by their founder in the excellent startup school lectures. They were scrappy, lacked clear direction and hustled and struggled.

⬐ hn_throwaway_99

Agreed. This mythology keeps getting repeated, where the only thing that happened was a couple of rich VCs (pg and others) didn't like the idea originally. But as many others have pointed out, Couchsurfing was already big, and VRBO/HomeAway had already received huge funding rounds. Was it really that hard of a leap to see how people (especially millennials) would flock to cheaper urban rentals if a company made the safety and payment aspect of it much better than what existed before?

⬐ dang

"Didn't like the idea originally" is no different from "looked silly". And it wasn't just "a couple of rich VCs" who thought that. (Btw, the word 'rich' seems gratuitous there.) YC wasn't going to fund them but did anyway because they liked the founders. It's not mythology.

"Was it really that hard a leap?" - yes it was. That it seems otherwise now is pure hindsight fallacy.

⬐ throwaway_kufu

> "Was it really that hard a leap?" - yes it was. That it seems otherwise now is pure hindsight fallacy.

Not diminishing building an $xx billion dollar unicorn, but I think the poster has a point about couch surfing.

Couch surfing really was one of those beloved and deeply embraced communities that also had that early underground internet feel to it. I don’t think it’s fair to say taking couchsurfer.com and the concept more generally and commercializing backed by vc money is hindsight fallacy, even if pg didn’t like the idea when YC funded Airbnb.

Now if the concept and strong organic community it inspired didn’t previously exist then I’m totally on board with your sentiment. But maybe I’m wrong too and Airbnb bears no relation or resemblance to couch surfing before it.

Edit: read the email thread you linked too, in it also confirms within the VC debate the old guys didn’t get it while the young guys did. This may be why the poster felt it was relevant to use the adjective “rich”, older or more established VCs were less likely to be or know couchsurfers. The other thing the vc noted were the Airbnb customers were already listing on multiple marketplaces.

⬐ dang

The connection to Couchsurfing was obvious at the time. But taking that seriously as a venture investment was not. That is the hindsight fallacy part. Calling that "mythology" is inaccurate, as that email thread plainly shows.

⬐ KingOfCoders

"Not funding" and "looked silly" is a difference, but perhaps it's my limited understanding of the English language.

My wife bootstrapped a startup, got "no funding", scaled it and sold it successfully to a competitor. I guess the idea "was silly" because no one wanted to fund it?

What about all these successful "one person bootstrapped SaaS" companies from time to time in HN threads that didn't get funding?

"But PG said so."

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

⬐ hn_throwaway_99

It keeps getting repeated that the original AirBnB idea was "crazy and outlandish" at the time, but it was only with hindsight that we see how it could be successful.

My argument is that that is false, because at the time there were already numerous examples of successful lodging sharing platforms, just none of which had the special combination of features (e.g. social reviews, ease of payment) that AirBnB had.

As another analogy, when Facebook launched there were already many previous social networks (MySpace, Friendster), but FB was the first with a unique combination of features (uncluttered design, real name policy, eventually the feed, etc.) that made them the primary social media winner. But nobody repeats the false myth "Oh wow, social media was such a crazy and outlandish idea before Facebook came along".

⬐ dang

Sorry, but this strikes me as classic hindsight fallacy. Here's Fred Wilson in 2011: https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/, and the original email thread between him and PG from 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html. PG went all the way to using an exclamation mark (has there ever been another?) and even that wasn't enough.

Anyone who thinks VCs would have been happy to fund a Couchsurfing knock-off in 2008 is looking at this history through many filters, for example the fact that startup fundraising became much easier in the subsequent decade.

⬐ hn_throwaway_99

The reason I strongly disagree is that I was intimately involved in the VR (vacation rental) space at that time. I have seen those articles before, and yes, both Fred Wilson and pg missed seeing the potential benefit, but in my opinion despite their phenomenal success otherwise, this "miss" here was just the miss in their minds, not the space more broadly.

My understanding is that one of the first big investors in AirBnB did so because he was familiar with the VR space. Being very familiar with the holes in user experience and technology at the time with VR websites, it was not a leap in my mind at all to see how a winner was destined for the space.

⬐ dang

Ah, this context makes things clearer—and is quite interesting! I think we may have been talking at cross purposes. I was talking about the mind-misses.

⬐ fsloth

Seeing a market and implementing a unicorn class product are quite different things even if you have the accurate perception of market needs. There is a reason unicorns are called unicorns and not justsurveythemarketfortrends-corns.

I admit AirBnB was perhaps not the most relevant example given it's a different industry.

I have no reason to champion the team but having a fairly good knowledge of games and software development I don't see the need to criticize the YC investment based on the context of their pitch.

⬐ dagw

I mean, AirBnB looked equally silly in the beginning.

One big difference is that AirBnB wasn't trying to obviously scam people on Kickstarter as part of their core business plan.

I mean maybe the dude is a genius programmer who has come up with a truly novel way of building a single world Peer to Peer MMO, but if so why not lead with that? Instead all their sales videos are obvious minimal effort Unreal Engine asset flips that show no creativity or technical innovation.

⬐ sen

Hustling is showing pre-rendered videos to simulate gameplay, or promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.

This is flat out lying and saying you're going to build something that massive mega-studios struggle to even build, then throwing in a few dozen promises for stuff that's not even possible with current technology.

⬐ fsloth

What's specifically not possible with current technology?

For example the "infinitely large simulation world" is an off-the-shelf system (or was the last time I looked https://hadean.com/) .

Sure, it might not work in production but that certainly is not a lie.

⬐ Animats

Hadean is a general-purpose distributed object system. People have tried to use those for games. EvE Aether Wars used that. They got 10K players in the same space. But it's all spaceships in a big space, not interacting much. Xsolla’s Game Carnival was only 500 users.

Spatial OS is more geographical. They have regions, and dynamic boundaries between them. If more players are in a region, the regions get smaller. Inter-region interactions are possible but slower.

Second Life has fixed-sized regions. Each region talks to its neighbors on four sides. The user's viewer talks to all the regions within visual range of the viewpoint. Assets are stored on AWS front-ended by Akamai. The servers are mostly single-thread per region, because the design is old. Crossing regions works most of the time, and since moving to AWS with faster networking, the delay is usually under 0.5 second. The whole system is sluggish but works reasonably well. (I'm writing a new client for it in safe Rust, using Vulkan and multiple threads. It's going well. The existing C++ client gets CPU bound on the main thread and can't keep the GPU busy.)

⬐ aidanhs

Disclaimer: I work at Hadean, thought I'd clarify a couple of things

Yes, the Hadean Platform is a general distributed compute platform. But 'EVE: Aether Wars' used Aether Engine, our spatial simulation engine built on top of the platform (and works similarly to how you describe Spatial OS). Some updated numbers: more recently we've hit 2 million entities with a few hundred CCU.

In terms of cross-cell ('cell' being our region) interactions, entities moving between cells has been a single tick (at 15-30Hz depending on sim) in all simulations we've built so far - 'EVE: Aether Wars' did torpedo and player transitions, as well as torpedo target tracking across cells and torpedo-ship collisions. We also have a demo of cross-cell PhysX - this has some pretty strict requirements on inter-cell interaction latency.

Out of curiosity, what would you see as a litmus test for 'simulation with lots of cross-region interactivity'?

⬐ Animats

"CCU"? ConCurrent Users?

"Let us all join hands around the world".

No, that's too hard. Crowd scenes, basically. How big a crowd of players, reasonably close to each other although not in physical contact. Clubs, ground battles, etc.

⬐ aidanhs

Yep, CCU = concurrent users.

We look at CCU alongside number of entities in the sim, since they're both axes of interest for customers - 2m+ entity scale is tricky, netcode at 10k+ player scale is tricky, we target both.

That said, I've found it interesting that people _generally_ want one or the other. Game companies like the idea of loads of entities/logic ('high fidelity'), but that ramps up cost per user - ultimately they just want more people in-game for cheaper. Whereas companies willing to put the money behind resources for high fidelity simulations, generally 'only' want a few hundred concurrent users.

Thanks for the thoughts on the scenario!

⬐ Animats

Yes. The scaling problem with Second Life is that it scales in size, but not in density. The number of regions you can have is limited only by the available funding for servers. But the number of players per region is limited by how much work the single thread that does most of the sim work can do. Right now, this is 20 to 60 per region. The architecture could probably get to 100-500 per region if multi-threaded, a bug in the dispatcher for the Mono engine used for scripting was fixed, and the viewer was modernized to avoid choking when displaying that many avatars. Beyond that, a different architecture would be needed.

Improvement means more CPU cores per region, though, which increases cost. Especially since Linden Lab moved the sim servers to AWS, where you pay by CPU. Server cost is a big problem with this approach. Server cost scales with land area, not usage. Second Life land costs about US$175 per month for a 256 x 256 meter square.

I thought Improbable was going to crack this, but after the first three Spatial OS games shut down due to high hosting costs at Google, it looks like that's not it. Sominium Space is on Spatial OS, but their world isn't very big. If it was big, the NFT land scheme, which depends on scarcity, wouldn't work.

I want to see a Metaverse that looks like an AAA title. This is probably possible now but may not yet be cost-effective to operate. Linden Lab lacks the will, the staff, the management, the money, and enough understanding of their legacy code base. The really good people who built the thing all left years ago.

Linden Lab has a job opening for a VP of Engineering. The old one retired. If someone competent wants to go over there and kick them into forward motion, please go for it. Really. There's probably someone reading this who's qualified for the job.

Starting a new world of user-created content is hard because it takes years to acquire the creator base and for the culture to settle. So far, Roblox, Minecraft, and Second Life have achieved that. In each case it took over a decade. That's the hard problem. Upgrading the technology is easier than the decade of building a world.

(I'm looking at this from the outside, not as a Linden Lab employee. The Second Life client is open source, and after a few months of writing a replacement client in Rust, I have a reasonably good idea of what's required. There's a third party replacement for the server code, written in C#, so that's relatively well understood by others. The C++ code Linden Lab uses for their servers is still proprietary, but the protocols are not. Nor are the bug reports.)

⬐ chevill

>promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.

This is also flat out lying, its just that most people will realize its not true. Simulated gameplay that's labelled as "simulated" is fine but if you end up not delivering anything close to that then you'll rightfully lose all credibility.

⬐ fsloth

Scalable simulation worlds are more or less just a networked cluster of nodes with an octree topology. I suppose there are limitations to local node density but other than that providing a seamless experience is more about how to architect the core system than rocket science.

Yes, it's hard. I have no idea if people even want that. Or can you make the node-to-node transit non jarring for players. But I don't really see it as lying. Ambitious certainly.

Can they pull it off? No idea.

⬐ chevill

I don't think many people expect a literally unlimited world. I'm almost 40 so I don't have enough time to finish most of the non-infinite games I start. I just take issue with his statement that promising literally unlimited content and then delivering a lot of content isn't a lie. I'm not a great programmer (or a pro) and I suck at math so I don't actually know what's possible in terms of infinite worlds.

There have been attempts at delivering more content than a person could play in a lifetime. However, the broader the scope of a game is, the less compelling the content becomes. For example, No Man's Sky is probably the best attempt thus far at a literally infinite world (I don't know if it actually is or not). Its a really great game and I sank about a hundred hours of time into it, but after a while even though you're going to different places it begins to feel too familiar.

The 2nd Elder Scrolls Game, Daggerfall wasn't infinite but it did have 16,000 cities and quests generated in all of them. Supposedly someone figured out it would take about a week to walk from one end of the world to the other but you could actually do it (unless it experienced one of its many crashes while you were attempting it) Its one of my favorite games of all time. While by today's standards the quests were frequently shallow, there was enough hand crafted content to make the overall experience feel pretty authentic.

⬐ fsloth

I think "Infinite" has to be understood not in the mathematical sense (as obviously nothing is infinite) but in the sense of letting the player experience as many new environments as they like. No mans sky is a good example of this, I think.

I also don't find too large game worlds intrinsically interesting, but there are many popular things I find boring so I'm not using my own sentiment as a gamer as a benchmark here.

⬐ gcheong

Further to the point about pivoting, it’s interesting to note that both Flickr and Slack came out of attempts to make MMOs.

⬐ chevill

That is really interesting and something I hadn't heard before. Got any recommendations for detailed write-ups on their histories?

⬐ kevingadd

In fairness to Slack, the MMO they put together worked and was truly innovative. It just didn't find a big enough audience. Huge gap between that and something like DreamWorld.

The wikipedia page has lots of detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)

⬐ paxys

While I have never played it, the brief description in the opening paragraph:

> Glitch was officially launched on September 27, 2011, but reverted to beta status on November 30, 2011, citing accessibility and depth issues. Glitch was officially shut down on December 9, 2012.

Doesn't exactly paint an image of quality.

⬐ abraae

Yep, the article slates this as "Like a Juicero".

However Juicero was most definitely a thing and attracted a heap of interest and $120M investment.

So comparing this to Juicero is .... undercutting the entire premise of the rant.

⬐ rabbidruster

I think you misread that. It says you could spend your money on something better. like a juicero. Hard to know exactly how the author views juicero in terms of being a good product but I think the point is it's a much better kickstarter than this game. Seems you agree on that.

⬐ chevill

>Game industry experience? Baldurs Gate or the original Witcher teams had zero of it also in the beginning.

I agree with the spirit of your post but these are bad examples. Baldur's Gate wasn't Bioware's first game and the first game in The Witcher series wasn't exactly received as a masterpiece.

Single Player RPGs and Minecraft style games can easily be simple enough to develop with a small team. So when people are criticizing the size of the team and lack of experience of that tiny team, it has to be taken in context with the type of game they are trying to develop.

What's more important than game industry experience is game dev experience or even software experience in general. Even if that experience is as a hobbyist, it can make a big difference in my confidence level for a project. So my questions would be, what did these guys do before now, what kinds of projects have they worked on, etc.

⬐ fsloth

Yes, you are quite right. My point was past performance is not always a good indicator of future human potential.

⬐ koonsolo

True. Claiming you are going to make a huge MMO when you are an inexperienced game developer is pretty common. Therefore we also know at which stage of Dunning Kruger they are.

⬐ fsloth

I have no idea at which point of Dunning Kruger they are. For example have they digested all of the technical material available on MMO:s available publicly? If they have and have fair software engineering savvy that puts them already way ahead.

Past failures by third party actors should not be taken as discouragement for startups.

To take a blunt example, before Elon Musk started SpaceX there were failed rocket companies started by millionaires all of whom dreamed of commoditizing space...

Sure, their success is improbable. But in this context longshots and improbable bets are the whole point.

⬐ Arwill

Putting together an MMO requires knowledge how to make your software systems scale. Putting together a demo in Unreal is the exact opposite of that. That is why you see so many bad MMO-s, they can make a demo, but they could not make that scale in 100 years.

If going by the above logic that just showing expertise is enough to get funding, then why was an Unreal demo valued as expertise at all?

If they showed expertise by demoing a network server/cluster, or world streaming, or asset import workflow, then i would say that there is some relevant expertise.

But they didn't even import a custom character into Unreal for their demo, how are they going to make a character creator and a clothing system?

⬐ koonsolo

The rocket market is not anywhere near as developed as the games industry. Everything related to the development part of games is very much cleared out.

There are plenty of small studios that have huge successes, and they are all smart enough to not develop a huge MMO. Simply because they know they don't have the resources to pull this off.

Starting a rock band is a long shot. Beating the best NBA team in basketball is a delusion.

⬐ fsloth

My point was that if the state space of the market has lots of undiscovered areas all bets are off who is going to succeed an who is not. I would not call gaming tech "complete" by a long shot.

I would argue the NBA example is not a good one. In that the parameter space is quite fixed, whereas in technology and games, I would claim the state space of what success looks like is much broader.

Yes, if you have super accurate metrics of what success looks like and the domain is highly competitive and lucrative then the scrappy upstart has poor chances.

I dont' think you can have a Billy Beane/Moneyball/Sabermetrics moment in NBA like you had in baseball.

But I think gaming and technology still has lots of unfound angles to be discovered.

I would guess the question YC pondered was not "can these guys create an MMO" but "could they have a small chance to bring some value adding innovation to some place in some market".

⬐ koonsolo

> Yes, if you have super accurate metrics of what success looks like and the domain is highly competitive and lucrative then the scrappy upstart has poor chances.

According to their Kickstarter, this is exactly the place they placed themselves. Head on competition with huge competitors. That was the point that I was making. You can of course create a 2nd "Minecraft" and be successful, but that is clearly not what is happening here.

Their claim is basically "we can be 1000x more productive than any of the established game developers". I can give you my estimate of those odds ;).

⬐ fsloth

I agree with you 100%, ab-initio any teams chances to create new successful MMO IP are astronomically small. Even more so if the team is tiny. But a small team can generate valuable IP - whatever that turns out to be. The key thing at this point is that they are clearly engaging with the market (enough to warrant an angry rant).

⬐ koonsolo

> For example have they digested all of the technical material available on MMO:s available publicly? If they have and have fair software engineering savvy that puts them already way ahead.

I can see you have no experience in game development. Let me explain: with 2 people and a budget of 200K you can make a tiny indie game. With a team of 15 experienced game developers you can make a single player RPG. MMO's are built by huge companies, with lots of experience under their belt.

Newbies that want to build an MMO is a running joke in game dev communities. It basically says you are so stupid that you don't even realize how stupid you are.

⬐ rlonn

I agree with previous commenter: it's impossible to make an MMO on a shoestring budget. Until someone does it. Saying something is impossible because you've seen many failures indicates a lack of imagination, not wisdom.

⬐ meheleventyone

It’s entirely possible, there are a bunch of small team MMO games. There’s even a few one man efforts. For example familiars.io. But the important thing is their scopes are hugely reduced from the promises made by this project.

⬐ koonsolo

Exactly. As a small team, the main thing is to decide the things that you will drop.

I remember Powerhoof Games (a 2 person team) had to downgrade their pixelated graphics on Crawl, so they could have really awesome animations. Think about that: deciding to have some awesome animations in there, and therefore also deciding your pixelated graphics will be very flat and basic.

⬐ fsloth

I would say that as a small team the main thing is to decide when and how to scale (if you know what you are doing). If you need to stay bootstrapped then that is fine but it does not need to be the template for all small teams.

I hope this does not turn out into a duel of irrelevant anecdata :)

To counter your specific point Studio MDHR started with a team of two and eventually produced a game with outstanding graphics and animations. Scale and outsource. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead)

⬐ koonsolo

Sure, but they dropped anything related to gameplay innovation. The gameplay is a tried-and-true platformer, which is not that hard to implement (might be hard to get right though).

So in the end they did make compromises too.

I would love to see them make an MMO ;p

⬐ koonsolo

Ok, here are some examples:

- Levitation through meditation. - An 8 year old kid watching karate kid and then beating an MMA fighter. - Finding underground water with a stick

The MMO falls into this realm. Unless of course they invented an AI that can develop an MMO. But there is no indication of this last part.

⬐ chevill

>with 2 people and a budget of 200K you can make a tiny indie game.

As an example I remember reading an article explaining how something like angry birds probably cost approximately this much money to develop, but everyone was treating it like it was a tiny indie project that was made in a garage over a few weekends.

⬐ chevill

>Claiming you are going to make a huge MMO when you are an inexperienced game developer is pretty common.

Yea its so common its basically a meme that the first question a beginner asks when they join /r/gamedev or another gamedev community is "How do I make an MMO?"

⬐ chevill

>Yes, you are quite right. My point was past performance is not always a good indicator of future human potential.

I agree. People can shift into an entirely different field and get fairly good at it quicker than many would imagine. Once you've proven successful in one intellectual pursuit the biggest factor in becoming proficient in another is passion, because passion leads to putting in the work. In this particular case I just think they may not realize the scope of the work their game idea is going to involve due to their lack of experience. I wish them well and if its looking good by the time it hits beta I'll probably be trying it out.

⬐ lattalayta

In their Q&A [0] they sound very passionate about raising money now and figuring everything out later. I wish them the best, but definitely feels like a project that will fizzle out, or dramatically change in scope. I've never seen a more vague and generic description for anything - they want to combine:

an infinite world, millions of players, upload anything into it, every game genre, thousands of "biomes", craft anything, factions, pets, enemies, loot, Photoshop/Zbrush/SketchUp clone, PvP and PvE, mac & windows with mobile coming soon

Their vision for the game reminds me of how Epic Games reportedly raised around a billion dollars to fund their idea of the Metaverse [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6-qghm4Xo [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/what-is-epic-games-metaverse-an...

⬐ fastball

They talked a lot about Minecraft but I'm not sure either of them played it.

> You look at Minecraft and yes there are multiplayer Minecraft servers, but the majority of gameplay people experience as single-player

This doesn't ring true to me at all. The vast majority of people playing MC regularly are playing on MP servers, and on those servers a lot of the gameplay is directly with other players – tournaments of all sorts (PvP, building, games like "Spleef"), fully-formed market economies with payments/shops/etc, small-scale building with friends, exploring the world together / team PvE, and of course huge collaborative building efforts that can have 100s of people working towards a unified goal.

⬐ qsi

It's probably the single most blatant gaming-related fundraiser scam I've personally come across... but they got YC backing.

It'll take quite a bit to beat Star Citizen.

I don't understand the YC backing either though.

⬐ unionpivo

Star Citizen is allready a game.

It's not particularly good one[*], and it's missing a lot of promised features, but you can actually, fly the ships, have combat, trade some, walk in ships etc.

I am not defending them, because It probably will end up in tears, but they already delivered some.

Although clearly in pre alpha state, is more stable than some recent releases by major studios.

⬐ chevill

I can't remember the name of it but there was another one a year or maybe a few years ago where they were it was going to be an MMO that's an alternate earth where you can be anything. AAA photorealistic graphics, lots of IRL jobs exist in detail. It could be an action game but for example cars would have all of their IRL systems modeled realistically and would require maintenance.

They launched with a trailer that looked so cool everyone knew it was a scam and everyone called it out immediately so it got pulled.

⬐ danso

Star Citizen is a decade-spanning imploding trainwreck, but there’s no doubt that it’s helmed by ambitious and notable gamedev veterans.

Dreamworld doesn’t even have notably padded resumes, and it’s flimsy even by the low standards of shoddy Kickstarter MMO campaigns. To be honest, when I saw it claiming to be a member of YC, I assumed it was touting a participant award (i.e. it applied to YC, but wasn’t necessarily accepted), or was engaged in some other outright deception. Anything seemed more probable than them actually getting YC investment

⬐ Grustaf

Yeah I had to go back and forth between the HN headline and the page 4 times. I couldn't believe I read it correctly, did it really, REALLY say "YC".

⬐ fataliss

They might just have gotten a "wow these guys have no shame and can sell anything while stabbing your mother in front of you without you batting an eye" feeling that many people in the SV circles like to glorify.

⬐ golergka

> using a revolutionary peer-to-peer meshed (infinite!) game world

As someone who actually have built a peer-to-peer meshed game world, good freaking luck to them.

⬐ Animats

Which one?

⬐ golergka

The Wild Eight, you can get it on Steam. It's only a 8-person multiplayer game though. I was brought in after the original team decided to sell the project to the publisher, and turns out that their idea of peer-to-peer multiplayer (which is the central feature of the game) was to just send all the events generated by each player to all others, without local game logic built on single-player Unity primitives and local time — without any lock-step or anything like it. Unsurprisingly, it got into a complete desync state after a couple of hours, with different players seeing a completely different picture of the world on their screens. And the game, without any mechanism in place to detect it, happily carried on.

There were a few theoretical solutions for it. One would be to have authoritative client-server architecture. But all the game logic was very tightly coupled with Unity primitives in the most naive way, so to simulate a part of the game world, you had to have this part of the game world loaded on your computer, with textures, sounds and everything. After spending a little time on that idea, I concluded that we would need to rewrite all game logic to decouple it, and it was simply unfeasible. There were a lot of custom quests.

Another was to use dedicated servers. But we only sold the game, didn't take any subscription or micro-transactions, so even if servers were cheap (they were not), it wasn't a viable strategy long-term.

And finally - the true peer-to-peer. Since the game world was already split into shards for loading and unloading, I decided that every shard was to have a different "master" player who would play a role of authoritative server — this way he had to load roughly the area that he saw on the screen anyway. We implemented the API which repeated the Unity Multiplayer API, but instead of sending calls and returning RPCs to and from one central server, we routed it to the local "master" player. Of course, this architecture was very susceptible to cheating, but since our game was a coop for friends, and not something even remotely competitive, we decided it was okay.

And even with this much smaller scope, the amount of pain, stress and screwed deadlines we endured was just too much. These kinds of systems are very hard to get right, and even harder to debug — you end up running between different PCs comparing hashes, writing gigabytes of logs and doubting if you even chose the right career after you rewrote your packet-packing code the 6th time. Still, a lot of fun and new lessons learned.

⬐ an_opabinia

It would be nice if they didn't take on scams so hard, because there are people out there who are a lot more talented than these guys and also really love and care about games.

⬐ meheleventyone

We’re well into the start of the Metaverse fad for VC funding. I expect the bet is that they’ll pickup large investment quite quickly off the back of that and hire in expertise.

Not sure why they’re running a Kickstarter though!

⬐ jl6

That video makes a case for the developers being naive or on-track to make a bad game, but it’s a stretch to call it an outright scam.

⬐ walterlb

The Kickstarter video gave me the same vibes.

⬐ username90

Yeah, it is possible that the engineer thinks he can do anything and the other guy trusts the engineer.

⬐ pasquinelli

sounds like someone making their first post on gamedev.net, trying to figure out how to use gcc.

⬐ ipsum2

I wonder if the expansion of YCombinator-funded companies have diluted the brand substantially. From YC's perspective, it's basically free to invest a small amount of money to hope for another Dropbox/Coinbase, but ignores the second order effects.

⬐ an_opabinia

Y Combinator had invested in a company last year that didn't even make it to demo day. Its technology was only 20% fake. But it still ended up raising tons of money.

⬐ edem

This is even worse than Star Citizen.

⬐ JeremyBanks

They're really leaning on it, too. Practically the first thing in their kickstarter pitch. Although they can't write the name correctly...

We're a YCombinator Company.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/22656

YCombinator is where Twitch, AirBnB, Doordash, and far more all got their starts! https://www.ycombinator.com/

We know MMOs cannot be built with just $10K. We've secured the majority of our funding from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley.

⬐ koonsolo

With $10K you can probably make a nice single player RPG Maker game :D.

⬐ skocznymroczny

Star Citizen wants to know your location

⬐ swyx

.

⬐ ipsum2

> Boom aerospace founders had zero aviation engineering background

"Joe (co-founder and CTO) came to Boom with significant experience in the aerospace industry. He played engineering and leadership roles on aircraft and certification programs at Hawker Beechcraft, Adam Aircraft Industries, Eclipse Aviation, and ICON Aircraft, and he has been an early employee at three aerospace startups."

⬐ mtalantikite

> elon had zero background in rocket science before spacex.

He was also a billionaire after PayPal? Sort of different circumstances.

⬐ gostsamo

He has degree in science and was admitted in the Stanford's PHd physics program before dropping out to do business. And he has billions dollars behind his investments, not Kickstarter.

⬐ sen

Elon used his billions of dollars to hire hundreds of the top industry professionals to get the job done.

These guys are live-streaming themselves inserting asset store objects into downloaded game templates then saying that's them developing the biggest MMO ever made. Just a bit of a difference there.

⬐ rohansingh

As someone who unsuccessfully applied for YC W21, and who also launched a product on Kickstarter in the last month, I'm going between "kind of funny" and "I'm so confused".

We didn't make it into YC, though I did get the "you were in the top 10%, please consider reapplying" email. I thought I had some idea of why we didn't make it, and what I'd change if and when we were to reapply. Hell, given that our business has grown a ton, I figured we'd have a strong application.

But seeing this makes me think that I might have some really fundamental misunderstanding of the application process.

⬐ nikanj

YC is a form of VC, and first and foremost validates "Will this make good returns?", not "Is this legit".

⬐ Rastonbury

Are you serious? Legitimacy (not being a scam) and ability to execute contribute heavily to successful outcomes. Any VC who invests in every shady startup claiming to become the next Google/FB is gonna go broke

⬐ nikanj

Seems like Theranos, UBeam etc have no trouble raising money, despite every domain expert saying their goals are impossible according to our current understanding of physics

⬐ dagw

And I suspect many of those early investors in Theranos made a very nice return on that investment, so obviously ignoring the domain experts wasn't such a bad move for them.

⬐ tomhoward

Nobody is likely to have made money from Theranos - it went bankrupt. Maybe there were some isolated cases of private stock sales by early investors, but this doesn’t normally happen with big investors, as it’s a sign of no-confidence in the company, so major investors can’t do it without harming the reputation and value of the company, including the value of the stock they’re trying to sell.

⬐ tomhoward

Y Combinator didn't invest in either of these companies. With Theranos, most of the investors weren't VCs. The ones who were were had family/personal connections to Elizabeth Holmes. They've been made to look stupid, and everyone knows if they kept doing deals like that they'd go bust. UBeam had several top VC investors, but they must have been convinced that the original technology demo was legitimate, and that it could be productized and scaled. The skeptics against UBeam only came out later, after they'd already raised their big money. Again, they know if they keep doing deals like that, they'll go bust.

⬐ imhoguy

Congratulations on your success!

YC are just people, not some infallible oracle.

⬐ jeffreygoesto

You might give it a positive spin and be proud you grow and make it without the need to pay investors later?

⬐ sen

The video is actually worth watching, this is probably one of the most blatant video game fundraising scams that have ever been attempted, and yet they somehow magically get YC backing.

The people involved have ZERO background experience in making games at all. The demo videos are just free game assets used in every single game dev tutorial.

I'm not sure what this says about the YC approval process... the entire thing is just absolutely hilarious.

⬐ Kiro

Thanks for posting it in the front-page thread! I think it really does a good job of breaking down how blatant this is.

⬐ username90

Note that this got funded by ycombinator.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dreamworld