None of those assets are even in the same ballpark of complexity as even a simple MMO framework. Development costs themselves are going to run in to the hundred of thousands. Then add the support costs of the “12 year olds” as justei put it. You are certainly going to need to run a subscription model. Even a killer product will be hard pressed to get worthwhile ROI/ROR. Not saying it wont ever happen but its hard to justify the risk vs creating many small assets.
EDIT Attached a little spreadsheet for running some basic numbers. I can’t see this being viable with any kind of realistic numbers. Of course this is revenue only, but even excluding infra and support costs it looks bad.
Also, why do you “need” a subscription model for a framework? The point is to have a package with efficient networking, socket handling, user management, and message sending already plotted out. It’s not like they’re running the servers.
It’s not approaching the complexity of Unity, and Unity doesn’t require a subscription.
You asked in general why someone hasn’t done this, not why these guys don’t do it. I was answering from the perspective of someone who has considered it, who has a number of profitable assets on the asset store, and has a background in development of similar systems. I thought that might be useful to you.
As to why these guys aren’t doing its likely some or more of the following:
a) want to build and maintain their game which will be a full time job for some time.
b) they don’t want to deal with all the support questions as mentioned
c) the profitability is unproven at best
But hey, they can answer themselves if they want
John A
PS Previous post updated with more accurate numbers.
PPS As to why you need a subscription model. Setting up the servers will be complex, allowing people to do it themselves will be both a massive barrier to entry and also require a lot of support. It also means you rely solely on income from the asset store.
The cloud model provides you an additional source of income, reduces barriers to entry, and means you have to spend a lot less time doing support for customers (you need to keep one complex system running, but you don’t need to help every user keep their own system running).
Or in other words, I think it would be hard to make a subscription model viable, I think it would be much much harder to make a standalone model viable.
You’re also coming from a perspective of someone that doesn’t already have the framework developed. If you went through $900,000 developing it for your game, then it’s already paid for. Adding it to the asset store isn’t a huge leap at that point. Not everything on the asset store has to be built from the ground up for the asset store.
And as I already pointed out, these people did not spend $900k on it. They spent less than $1000 on the entire game. That blows your financial requirement right out of the water.
I never said it was easy or trivial. I understand the time and difficulty of building these systems. But if they already have everything done…
Didn’t I already answer that. You asked a general question, to which I provided a general answer. You said “Considering the vast amount of other assets that cover game design, I figured it would only be a matter of time before some full scale solutions pop up”. I was providing my thoughts on why they hadn’t.
As to why these guys don’t do so (and maybe they will), I provided some thoughts but again I will leave it up to them to deliver more details if they want to.
I would add that I also disagree with this: “Adding it to the asset store isn’t a huge leap at that point. Not everything on the asset store has to be built from the ground up for the asset store.”
In my experience it is quite a bit of work to take even a simple system written in house for a game to a product on the store. Particularly if it wasn’t written with that in mind from the start. Now I don’t think it would take them anywhere near $900,000 worth of effort, but it WILL take quite a lot of effort. Documentation alone is likely many weeks of work.
no doubt. just trying to create some nice tools for your own use in Unity can be rather time consuming… imagine trying to make those tools now for others.
can’t blame them for wanting to hold to some kind of IP / advantage… can’t blame them at all.
regardless… was a nice write up, left a lot of open space for the mind to wonder though
I was curious though if you had looked into using the version of RakNet available to build your customizations? I briefly looked at it, but the price structure seemed far out there…
We actually did not consider it, as we feel that pretty much anything that cost us money is outside of our price range :).
Of course in the future, we can change this, which is why the code structure is the way it is, to be able to be switched out with ease.
The biggest reason as to why we would not release on the Asset Store is that we feel the profits would be too low vs the maintaining the framework. As well as the fact that all MMO frameworks are tailor-made specifically for each game, meaning that our framework would be horrible in a traditional MMO the way it is currently implemented.
Furthermore, it contains a lot of software which is outside of Unity (Node.JS, etc) which would mean that it can not be bundled in with unity in the Asset Store.
Also the obvious fact that we still work the same hours (16+ hour days) to maintain everything that it takes, adding features, bug fixing (our bug tracker is quite extensive, haha), working with press, working with companies we cooperate with, etc.
So running a asset on the asset store would not make economical sense (and for it to do that, we would need to sell it for at least 500-1000usd, just to make sure we weed out the people that would take up too much support time).
I actually don’t know if Photon do any type of culling in the way we do actually :/, I don’t think so :(.
It’s actually essential I have found, and I would really recommend that to be done for any networked game.
I can’t tell you an exact date, but it’s really not far from release :).
I would still not put my money on their new solution just yet, their solution won’t be relevant for a while :).
Once they get into Phase 2, I’m very interested!
Yea, I can’t say much for PUN but Photon Server SDK does not come with any built-in interest management system. It does however have a demo for it. I wouldn’t say that that is too useful though as it’s not too hard to implement.
@Kuroato What you’re looking for is interest management. There are many academic papers on the topic related to MOGs/MMOs.
Yeah I agree with ya as well. Although I personally usually flee from MMO games because I dont want to get addicted. Dark Souls and the like are too additive as it is
We did, and we didn’t feel they met our requirements :). Not that they’re not good, but we had some extremely specific use cases where we needed 100% control, and did not want to rely on a 3rd party developer.
Finally I have a name for it, hah. Time to read some papers on it! I wonder if my implementation is good or not (it works well, but in comparison).
