MMO’s are pretty feared in indie gamedev community, and new users who have a MMO dream are often laughed at. There’s also an aura of secrecy about them, maintained by the people who have once dived into MMOs a little, but have failed, and are unwilling to share their knowledge and experience with others, preferring to discourage them instead. Well, I want to know why is that? Did you tried making a MMO and faild, what where the reasons. Was it time, money…, how far did you get. What are the biggest obstacles to overcome?
Are you implying there is an MMO conspiracy going on, that tries to deter aspiring game devs from breaking into that lucrative market, when in fact it actually is rather easy to make your own MMO?
9 Likes
He is actually right. MMOs are where the money is, so no one wants to share their knowledge about it in order to keep as much of the profit for themselves.
If suddenly new game devs would have access to mmo tools that would split the players over millions of games and it will spell the end for the profitable era of mmos!
Sarcasm implied.
1 Like
They don’t say anything because its embarassing to admit that their brilliant idea was actually as dumb as a pile of rocks and that they should have listened to everyone that warned them.
It’s common sense, the scope is huge, the resources are miniscule. It will not work.
Actually, as Martin already said, it’s not that hard to make an mmo. Anyone with sufficient programming skills could make an mmo.
The problem comes when people who don’t have much of a programming background try to make an mmo and have no idea what they are suppose to do, expect their “idea” of a fantastic mmo.
1 Like
For the record: that wasn’t the intention behind my ironic question. I consider everything involving online multiplayer to be hard as balls and unsuitable for beginners.
1 Like
Egads! He’s onto us! Quick, torch the documents and relocate our headquarters! But, be sure to break at least three newbies spirits while you’re at it, of course.
3 Likes
It’s rather easy to make your own space shuttle. It doesn’t mean it will work or even leave the ground.
7 Likes
This is untrue. There is no aura of secrecy and no “fear” of MMO’s. Plenty of us are working on them.
However, the Unity forums are the place to get help or support for aspects of your game, which are most often similar to the aspects of any game of that type, including single player, rts, rpg, fps, etc.
If you do a search, you will find some very good discussions about MMO’s. Networking for MMO’s has been non-existant for Unity until recently and even then, most networking solutions are not going to be perfect but will need to be greatly modified. For that reason, I don’t think Unity has been the best choice for people who choose to do an MMO unless you know what you are doing. Therefore, not as much discussion about making one.
I also doubt there are many that failed and are keeping it secret, because…well, they never had the desire to make one. 
It is a lot of work, you need some degree of experience, and a decent team. MMO makers are a minority in most indie circles for that reason. A lot of work compared to a single player game or a mobile game and a lot of risk and money.
I worked on a team that was making an MMO and failed, not with Unity though and this was years ago, before the era of inexpensive game engines. Their reason for failure was lack of funds and feature creep.
Yeah, people here make fun of MMO makers but if you are serious, just ignore them. I think it is just a bandwagon they jump into fit in with the cool kids. Some though, are genuinely concerned that a newcomer to Unity should start small first in order to succeed. You have to push past the “cool kids” and the “concern” and find people who are serious.
Try forums on other engines, such Hero Engine or whatever. Lots of MMO makers there and they are indie gamers as well.
4 Likes
As someone who is both a cool kid*, and has written three games of my own, and is concerned with other people realizing their games, I think @Teila brings up an awesome point here.
Use the right tool for the right job. Right now, Unity is bad at MMOs; Unity excels at mobile games, or games with simpler graphics styles. I know some more ambitious developers like @ have done extensive work on getting Unity to support more modern photorealistic visuals, and in certain cases simply opt to use Unreal Engine because it makes those sorts of visuals easier to attain.
Also, as Teila says - if you’re a newcomer, trying to write a MMO is about as realistic as it is for a botanist to build a working tree out of mountain dew, happy thoughts, and random scraps of biomatter. Back in college I was involved in a MMO effort - Visions, a Christian MMORPG set shortly before the Diaspora - using Torque as part of my internship requirements. The developer of this MMO had a vision that she was trying to realize. The problem is that, like some other genres, MMOs serve many masters - it’s easy to fail a game when your game serves one. This MMORPG is apparently still in ongoing development, some six years later.**
I may joke about conspiracies to scare off noobs from MMOs, or whatever, but seriously, I’d wager from my brief experience that 99% of the indie community isn’t equipped to deal with the challenges of a MMO game, and that’s with experience. MMOs are many things, but ‘easy to do’ is not one of those things.
*: For microscopic values of cool
**: This isn’t to bash Visions - the director of the project is a very skilled woman with a great vision, and I still wish the project luck! This is to illustrate that there is nothing easy about making a MMORPG, in any way, shape, or form. If you’re trying to realize a MMORPG, and you can’t take casual criticism, you don’t have the staying power to finish it. Casual criticism on an MMO is the least of your worries.
1 Like
Another problem is that a lot of times, these projects just aren’t serious, and the threads started aren’t asking any real questions.
If someone asks for help with a specific networking problem, or a specific code problem, then they’re just as likely to find help as anyone else. The silly mmo threads are generally more “what do you think of my idea?” threads or “join my team!” threads, not asking detailed or specific problems.
As to why most MMO efforts failed, my guess is that there is no specific reason. Most probably fail because eventually people realize how far away their dream game is from whatever state their project currently is, and just sort of stop working on it.
It’s not that any given item on the list is “too hard of a challenge” - the problem is that the list has a million bullet points, and there are a thousand that if gotten wrong will make the other 999,000 way harder.
3 Likes
That’s a very optimistic number. I’m not sure there are even 99 people on these forums who are prepared for it 
3 Likes
I disagree with this. Unity is not bad at MMO’s. It is not set up for MMO’s but it is entirely possible to make a very good MMO with Unity if you are realistic in your vision and you take advantage of some of the tools out there, such as Photon or Forge Networking…and in the future UNet, and as long as you have the skills or can find someone who does to work with the networking part of making the game. It is not “bad”, just has not focused on MMOs. I think that will change with UNet and we will gradually see more, maybe not massive ones, but smaller more indie-size multiplayer games, which over 32-64 players is called an MMO.
It is absolutely possible to get great realistic results with Unity. Look at the thread on the Gaia, the AAA solution for terrains. Beautiful realistic results as well as gorgeous environmental packs and character packs. Besides, not all MMO’s are realistic. WoW is far from realism. Not everyone wants a Witcher 3 graphics quality MMO. I am not even sure what photo-realism has to do with MMO’s anymore than any other 3d single player game.
Also…every type of game fails. I read posts here about mobile games failing all the time as well as rts, rpg, and everything else. My guess is if you tally it up, failures on these forums is probably highest for mobile games, because more people are making them and the competition is stiff. However, much easier to recover from a mobile game that might take months than from an MMO that will take years.
As a newcomer, I suggest folks join an MMO team for a while before going it alone. Learn from their mistakes and from their successes. In a large project, there are many of both before the game is finished.
2 Likes
I’m not exactly sure they’re a money maker, but anyway I think the whole point is an MMO is something you make when you’re very comfortable making games and you’ve amassed some knowledge of networking / game design.
It’s not a very good idea to start out making something like that, sure as always the core components / replication / accounts etc. isn’t THAT difficult to do.
But MMO’s require a LOT of content and tech, a lot of consideration into art budgets, months if not years of research into systems to keep people playing and the ridiculous masses of content so people don’t run out of stuff get bored / move on. Because most MMO’s fail because they can’t retain a user base or even get one in the first place, there’s a lot of cheat middleware integrations you have to look into… It cost’s a lot for server hardware… It’s a money pit.!
Also ultimately, the question is why an MMO? You could earn a lot more money out of much easier avenue’s… You’d have to be really and I mean REALLY sold on the idea of it to even bother. Because in the grand scheme of things it ain’t the smartest choice to venture into.
It’s not like were hiding secrets into development, there’s plenty of stuff out there for experienced dev’s and they’ll ask about components (not MMO’s) when they need to.
4 Likes
The real nightmare is that - imagine you do it. You spend like 10 years of your life building a solid MMO. You succeed in making the whole thing. It’s even kind of fun to play!!
How is random ‘dude with a dream’ going to even attract the player base to make his game worth playing?! MMOs live and die on their player base. You need to be able to draw in thousands of gamers in order to make the whole thing worth playing in the first place.
What’s the point of making an MMO if you don’t have the advertising budget to get more than 1 player in the game in the first place?
The whole thing is really just kind of absurd.
4 Likes
I may have worded my idea incorrectly. In the spirit of the original post, I was referring to ease of access to set up.
Unity does not quickly and easily provide tools to set up something close to a MMORPG - Hero Engine is the tool that does that. Granted, this is all relative; as someone who has not used Hero Engine ever, I’m not sure of what it would take to get a ‘basic’ MMO up and running (by basic, I mean having 1…1000 grey featureless cubes concurrently interacting, maybe with chat.) I know for an early Unity project I made, Onslaught of the Laser Cat (it was a FPS), the networking took me about two months to figure out and get working well, and that was with the M2H Networking Tutorial explaining things.
It may be that UNet, Photon, or others make networking easier to set up in Unity, and of course with anything the result of your effort is directly proportional to the effort you put into it; after all, @Teila , you’re working on an MMORPG and it’s coming along. You’re proof that Unity can do MMOs.
My point is that Unity is not natively good at MMOs. That’s all I was trying to say. For a newcomer who really, really wants to MMO, Unity is not the best tool.
Back on topic, as a newcomer, you need to ask yourself - because MMOs are hard, do you absolutely need to MMO? There are easier things you can make to equip yourself if the answer turns out to be “yes,” that will build your street cred and get people to take you seriously.
2 Likes
A friend of ours made an MMO in Unity - www.TheSpaceGame.com - TONS of amazing technical work which shows you can build a pretty crazy MMO in Unity. In that game you can literally fly a realistic distance at a somewhat realistic speed from one planet to another, LAND on that planet, walk around a city with 300,000 buildings, walk out of the city, walk around the world, come back to the spot you started, and get in your ship. … of course doing so would probably take you several months - years depending on the planet size 
Still, point is, people don’t talk much about it because most of them fail before they really start. Those that do finish are too busy trying to keep it functional (maintaining MMOs is hard work). Those that really succeed don’t tend to lurk around forums much!
4 Likes
It’s worth noting that he also says that he invested $70,000 out of pocket, then raised another $35,000 on kickstarter. This is not really representative of the average unity forum MMO thread.
That said, it’s a seriously impressive piece of work on 105k budget. Kind of inspiring and humbling at the same time.
EDIT: It’s crazy reading reviews where the player has 1000 hours logged and he gives a thumbs down. It just blows my mind.
2 Likes
He didn’t get his money’s worth Frosted. Only 1,000 hours for 15 dollars? Can’t we do better? (The lesson being to avoid the race for the bottom because there’s no winning it.)
In the end I think everyone has different ideas of what an “indie” budget is. 105k is really pretty small for some, and 35k was basically free money. Also, and don’t quote me on this because I’d actually have to go ask him, but I suspect that 70k was actually his living expense during development and chunk to artwork. So I think the actual expenditure here was actually pretty low. Still well into the 10s of k though. You can spend money or time, in the end that is all life is!
(Now I am sad!)
Experience. The most ridiculed posts are people with zero experience who invariably want to make an MMO (I was one of them). People with a modest amount of experience are aware of the challenges and don’t attempt an MMO (I eventually became one of these people too). And then there are the people who have a solid amount of experience who might attempt an MMO (now I’m one of these people!).
NOTE: Indies will receive ridicule no matter where they’re at on that spectrum, which is why they don’t often talk about it… which is kinda counterproductive.
I suppose you could say my MMO initially failed due to a lack of experience and a serious underestimation of what was involved. But I don’t think of it as a failure. It was just put on the backburner for a few years while I got some experience under my belt.
Now we’re back! We’re a few projects wiser. We’re backed by the guy who actually bought HeroEngine. And we have an art director that led projects like Fallout, Final Fantasy and Parasite Eve!
See? It’s all about experience. As long as you can see the road ahead, then you’re on the right path.
EDIT: Just wanted to say that I’m glad to see you here, IronBelly! (Those guys did some artwork for the cover of my novel. They do awesome work.)
5 Likes