Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam(pcgamer.com)
pcgamer.com
Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickstarter-fiasco/
250 comments
I wonder if this post will be deleted
Its totally possible to make a large online game with proper procedural generation of geometry and sharded servers for zones.
It's a bit of work but it's doable.
Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background. A game without story is a software product.
Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2 people.
It's a bit of work but it's doable.
Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background. A game without story is a software product.
Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2 people.
Realm of the Mad God was able to build a successful game because they were extremely conservative on features -- low-res 2D graphics, no user-generated content, simple game mechanics, limited persistence. DreamWorld is... not that. They're promising features which nobody has successfully brought to market before, with a team which doesn't appear to have any meaningful experience in the industry.
This is very rare in MMOs. Most are not really sandboxes but theme parks, where most multiplayer is through interacting with the content cooperatively.
> Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience.
The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your position on that.
The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your position on that.
I was talking about multiplayer games.
"Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or background."
With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here and comment on it:
Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every year or so and they made good money.
TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely would not have hit without the content.
Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it comes).
Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay footage to be confident about this.
Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content). Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain.
EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this anymore, though, for good reason.
Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements.
Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but this game is entirely about story content and roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion.
Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more so than the original.
EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay and character customization... and players soundly rejected all of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core game.
Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not procedurally generated, though.
Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's leading story game studio (BioWare).
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or professional reviews, they all mention the story.
Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well. Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose.
World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot.
Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger games market, and some of them do make good money. However, even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content", because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps.
Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here and comment on it:
Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every year or so and they made good money.
TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely would not have hit without the content.
Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it comes).
Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay footage to be confident about this.
Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content). Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain.
EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this anymore, though, for good reason.
Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements.
Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but this game is entirely about story content and roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion.
Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more so than the original.
EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay and character customization... and players soundly rejected all of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core game.
Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not procedurally generated, though.
Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's leading story game studio (BioWare).
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or professional reviews, they all mention the story.
Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well. Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose.
World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot.
Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger games market, and some of them do make good money. However, even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content", because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps.
Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
Comparing with the best AAA sellers is a strawman, and I don't see the point comparing those with one that is being incubated.
Minecraft is a good example of a game that has almost not content but sold amazingly well.
> Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
The "market" cannot predict innovation or success. This startup will probably fail, yes, but ycombinator is a private initiative and it matters to give the benefit of the doubt. I agree about possible nepotism, but I still believe in what I said about procedural generation and hand crafted content. Hand made content is crazy expensive, and I really think that procedural generation is a good solution.
Minecraft is a good example of a game that has almost not content but sold amazingly well.
> Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed to fail.
The "market" cannot predict innovation or success. This startup will probably fail, yes, but ycombinator is a private initiative and it matters to give the benefit of the doubt. I agree about possible nepotism, but I still believe in what I said about procedural generation and hand crafted content. Hand made content is crazy expensive, and I really think that procedural generation is a good solution.
Elder Scrolls Online is primarily content led
A bit of a tangent, there was a notorious reddit thread a long time ago with a comment by someone supposedly in the MMO industry [1] that echoes your point about content:
> Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-produced MMO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to create, and it has to be turned around fast
That thread mostly focused on how unrealistic it is for one person to develop an MMO by themselves, which is not exactly the case here. But it gives a bit of a taste as to why MMORPG is one of the most challenging game genres to succeed with. "Half of all MMOs commercially developed never release; half the survivors immediately fail", and the remaining successes almost all have staggeringly huge amounts of art & lore like you mentioned.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet...
> Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-produced MMO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to create, and it has to be turned around fast
That thread mostly focused on how unrealistic it is for one person to develop an MMO by themselves, which is not exactly the case here. But it gives a bit of a taste as to why MMORPG is one of the most challenging game genres to succeed with. "Half of all MMOs commercially developed never release; half the survivors immediately fail", and the remaining successes almost all have staggeringly huge amounts of art & lore like you mentioned.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet...
Thanks for your work on Guild Wars! That game meant a lot to me growing up, it's really something special.
> Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer experience...
Did you play Fallout 76 at launch? Oof. It was terrible. They've since added NPCs, but it's really hard to fix a bad first impression.
Did you play Fallout 76 at launch? Oof. It was terrible. They've since added NPCs, but it's really hard to fix a bad first impression.
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266
If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam? What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam? What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
Theranos believed in what they were originally taking investors over.
I don't see why this is not a similar case of fraud if investors have not been informed about current expectations of their original promise.
I don't see why this is not a similar case of fraud if investors have not been informed about current expectations of their original promise.
The difference with Theranos is they were promising people tangible medical results. Clearly, if a metaverse startup convinces a bunch of VCs to back them and the venture fails, that risk was known from the beginning.
Moreover, they were making claims about the then-present, not just the clearly unforeseeable future
I don't think the point was what the tangible result would be, or risk of failure. Everyone putting money into an early venture knows that there is a good chance they just kissed it goodbye.
The problem is when said venture later lies about progress, or otherwise obfuscates, especially to get more money. That's certainly what Theranos did, and I think what GP was suggesting happened here.
The problem is when said venture later lies about progress, or otherwise obfuscates, especially to get more money. That's certainly what Theranos did, and I think what GP was suggesting happened here.
They also collected $64K from a Kickstarter while boasting about having "secured the majority of our funding from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley." So arguably they did promise some tangible results to some non-professional investors/potential players. Of course, by now everyone should know that Caveat Backer is the unofficial motto of Kickstarter.
Theranos was lying and faking demos. Also the founder had little knowledge in the field.
I do think calling this a "scam" is difficult to defend from an intent perspective, but it does not appear like it has any realistic chance of succeeding. At some point projects cross a line from being optimistic to being negligent and deceptive. YC should know better and I think using hyperbolic rhetoric is a legitimate counter to a company that seems to be sleepwalking into failure with other peoples' money.
I am all for investor protection, but "other people" here are supposed to be accredited investors. Caveat emptor etc.
And people on kickstarter. But it would probably get no play here if it were just another pie-in-the-sky kickstarter game rather than being backed by YC.
They did say they were backed by SV investors in their kickstarter, though, I'm not sure if that had anything to do with their success there.
They did say they were backed by SV investors in their kickstarter, though, I'm not sure if that had anything to do with their success there.
I can see why you would say that other investors should do their own research, but many people view a YC investment as a vote of confidence in the company in question. Your view makes me curious about how you think about the role of an incubator. Like...are there any lines YC could cross? Does their investment in a company reflect on them at all? What value do they provide other than seed money to companies?
YC provides seed money. No one should rely on YC for due diligence.
> JobCompany (YC W20) Is Hiring and you want to join!
This website trains people to rely on the YC endorsement.
I understand if you don't think people should, but I agree with the sentiment YC has some responsibility to do a better job vetting.
This website trains people to rely on the YC endorsement.
I understand if you don't think people should, but I agree with the sentiment YC has some responsibility to do a better job vetting.
I would hope that one of the services provided by YC is a reality check to convince startups like this to stop overpromising.
No one ever threw millions of dollars at founders with modest goals and realistic expectations. Every startup has to be changing the world, disrupting the status quo, innovating the next big thing.
The answer to your question in isolation is no. However people with some experience in game development would largely agree that these people can't have believed they were going to deliver it, and YC certainly should have known.
I’m sure they believe they can do it. You underestimate the confidence of privileged youth.
It is indeed possible that a total newbie in gamedev can think they can build an MMO on their own, it happens all the time.
But that adult investors fall for this, is beyond belief.
But that adult investors fall for this, is beyond belief.
>If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam?
I think I can squeeze water out of rocks. Pay me now to do it, and i'll figure it out. Everyone around tells me I can't, but I know I can.
>What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
I absolutely believe I can do it if I set my mind to it. Fund my company so we can find out.
Do you see any possible issues with this style of transaction?
I think I can squeeze water out of rocks. Pay me now to do it, and i'll figure it out. Everyone around tells me I can't, but I know I can.
>What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
I absolutely believe I can do it if I set my mind to it. Fund my company so we can find out.
Do you see any possible issues with this style of transaction?
Is Peter Molyneux a scammer? Or just a pathological liar who believes his own hype? He made some fantastic games in the past, but then...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
The Lesson of Peter Molyneux
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...
Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
The Lesson of Peter Molyneux
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...
Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
You're not meant to editorialize titles like this on HN. People who submit stories have no more claim to their viewpoint than any commenter does. The title here should be:
"This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"
"This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco"
If the reason for the rule is to avoid the submitter pushing through their viewpoint, this particular case shouldn’t be a problem. The “Y Combinator” part is a reason why it’s relevant to this site, and it’s not a viewpoint.
"Scam" is the problematic part. The article avoids the word in the title because the article itself says:
> "I think we use the word scam as a colloquial term mostly and there's some nuance to this. I don't think either game's developers have the actual intention to not deliver."
So it's not a scam, not to speak of blatant scam.
> "I think we use the word scam as a colloquial term mostly and there's some nuance to this. I don't think either game's developers have the actual intention to not deliver."
So it's not a scam, not to speak of blatant scam.
That's a quote in the article. He also said this:
> "I think for me, the base intent matters very little when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone throughout."
If it's true that the game developers promised this:
> The campaign promises, among other features, "multiplayer with the population density of real cities" and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction points.
Then it's clearly a scam. And both statements really are on the kickstarter. There is also this gem:
> We plan to expand to every internet connected device with a screen very soon!
Ridiculous.
> "I think for me, the base intent matters very little when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone throughout."
If it's true that the game developers promised this:
> The campaign promises, among other features, "multiplayer with the population density of real cities" and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction points.
Then it's clearly a scam. And both statements really are on the kickstarter. There is also this gem:
> We plan to expand to every internet connected device with a screen very soon!
Ridiculous.
There is however the possibility they are merely incompetent and genuinely don't appreciate the difficulty implicit in the scope of what they've set out to do.
Then they've lied about how much technical and game development experience they have.
They did lie, 100%. Cofounder said he, "quit Google, Facebook, and Apple" to start Dreamworld. He fails to mention that both Google and Facebook were 3 month internships, and his role at Apple was an SDET and not an actual software engineer.
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It's a scam IMO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RQ7NdpW1R0&t=0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RQ7NdpW1R0&t=0s
I agree, we should be using the word ripoff way more often, as scam is heavily diluted to things that aren't.
It's possible to submit stories and a comment simultaneously (fill in both the URL and "text* fields on the submission form).
An early-entry comment carries a lot of weight in steering conversation, and quoting the portion of the story citing YC's involvement as well as the alleged fraud would be proper.
Unless unclickbaiting titles or working with arbitrary text (e.g., a Twitter stream submission), changing titles is strongly frowned upon, especially where the source does in fact have a viable title.
I'd lose the preemptory "This" from the original source, but otherwise recommend the original title be used.
(Meantime, the discussion is now derailed by title discussion, which dang will have to clean up.)
An early-entry comment carries a lot of weight in steering conversation, and quoting the portion of the story citing YC's involvement as well as the alleged fraud would be proper.
Unless unclickbaiting titles or working with arbitrary text (e.g., a Twitter stream submission), changing titles is strongly frowned upon, especially where the source does in fact have a viable title.
I'd lose the preemptory "This" from the original source, but otherwise recommend the original title be used.
(Meantime, the discussion is now derailed by title discussion, which dang will have to clean up.)
> Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game has become a giant fiasco
Would be editorialized enough to provide context, but not as much of a click-bait title.
Would be editorialized enough to provide context, but not as much of a click-bait title.
“blatant scam” is editorializing beyond “giant fiasco” and is a viewpoint.
Scam = fiasco + company claims. I don't see it as a large leap based on the company claims. You could argue that it's not a scam as long as they're trying but if what they claimed was inherently impossible, I don't think it's a stretch.
Thankfully, we don’t have to debate whether it’s a small or large leap. The fact that it is a leap makes it editorializing.
Submitters don't get to decide why things are relevant to the site; that's a hole people have driven trucks through in this guideline. The YC angle is a perfectly good comment to write (so is the "scam" thing, if that's a case you want to make); it's not the title of the story.
"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. "
Feels weird to nitpick scam versus fiasco, but whatever.
I'd be upset either way as an investor, but just flag it if need be -- as per guidelines.
Feels weird to nitpick scam versus fiasco, but whatever.
I'd be upset either way as an investor, but just flag it if need be -- as per guidelines.
> nitpick scam versus fiasco
I don't think that's a nit. Intent matters, and it's entirely possible to have a well intentioned fiasco.
I don't think that's a nit. Intent matters, and it's entirely possible to have a well intentioned fiasco.
The problem is that lots of scammers, gurus, faith healers, etc. tend to believe their own bullshit. While I do believe that acknowledging this is worthwhile, in practice it doesn't matter to those that were scammed, hoodwinked, brainwashed, etc.
Over time I've come to believe that our desire to understand and sympathize with the perpetrators of scams and the like is not a good thing in the end.
Sure, we 'understand' why Walter White became what he was in Breaking Bad, but in the end he was a despicable person that destroyed many lives. as much as the show /does/ try to make that clear, we still sorta empathize. We like Walter and hate his wife. Same thing for Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey (The Shield).
But that 'understanding' shouldn't preclude us from coming down hard on these people, however 'well intentioned' they might be. This project is obviously a scam, or alternatively delusional. In either case YC's involvement is not a good look.
Over time I've come to believe that our desire to understand and sympathize with the perpetrators of scams and the like is not a good thing in the end.
Sure, we 'understand' why Walter White became what he was in Breaking Bad, but in the end he was a despicable person that destroyed many lives. as much as the show /does/ try to make that clear, we still sorta empathize. We like Walter and hate his wife. Same thing for Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey (The Shield).
But that 'understanding' shouldn't preclude us from coming down hard on these people, however 'well intentioned' they might be. This project is obviously a scam, or alternatively delusional. In either case YC's involvement is not a good look.
What about the video embedded in the article with the title "DreamWorld - Exposing the Scam Game" and "Ultimate Scammers" in big yellow 60pt font?
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You might be able to convince dang to change the title, but it will still be a blatant scam. Changing the title won't change that.
If you're thinking "how bad can it really be?", please treat yourself to watching a couple minutes of "gameplay".
It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.
It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.
Slack came out of a failed attempt to build an MMO.
Tech cofounder apparently has some reasonable credentials and particularly if he's known to people within Ycombinator it doesn't seem absurd at all to me that they'd invest largely on the basis of "guy we know to be reasonably competent wants to try his hand at entrepreneurship".
Like its a hundred grand. They throw that at all sorts of companies. This aint softbank throwing billions at wework. I think any sort of "omg ycombinator funded that?" response has to come from people who havent ever bothered to look at the long tail of stuff ycombinator funds instead of their top few investments. It's not an elite club. It's the most throw shit at the wall and see what sticks style VC fund out of any VC fund.
Tech cofounder apparently has some reasonable credentials and particularly if he's known to people within Ycombinator it doesn't seem absurd at all to me that they'd invest largely on the basis of "guy we know to be reasonably competent wants to try his hand at entrepreneurship".
Like its a hundred grand. They throw that at all sorts of companies. This aint softbank throwing billions at wework. I think any sort of "omg ycombinator funded that?" response has to come from people who havent ever bothered to look at the long tail of stuff ycombinator funds instead of their top few investments. It's not an elite club. It's the most throw shit at the wall and see what sticks style VC fund out of any VC fund.
I'd say the 'salience' of this topic is not even primarily the idea of YC funding what is clearly a scam, but rather the particulars of WHY this one got funding.
It's not that YC 'throws shit at the wall', but rather that it throws shit at very particular walls, and the reason it picks those walls are not obviously 'good'.
While that shouldn't surprise us, I do understand that it's disappointing to feel that YC is not quite the nerdy, rational, investing-in-good-ideas-no-matter-the-source outfit that it's thought to be.
It's not that YC 'throws shit at the wall', but rather that it throws shit at very particular walls, and the reason it picks those walls are not obviously 'good'.
While that shouldn't surprise us, I do understand that it's disappointing to feel that YC is not quite the nerdy, rational, investing-in-good-ideas-no-matter-the-source outfit that it's thought to be.
The amount of work and expertise that needs to go into this project is staggering.
It is hard for me to call anyone competent, when they are either this delusional, or purposely setting up this scam.
Edit: taking peoples money through kickstarter like this is the main scammy part here I guess.
It is hard for me to call anyone competent, when they are either this delusional, or purposely setting up this scam.
Edit: taking peoples money through kickstarter like this is the main scammy part here I guess.
VC seed stage backing is based on two things: the team (or who they know) & the addressable market. VC backing is not some meritocracy. YC is better at bridging the gap but it's certainly not perfect. uBiome is another pretty blatant YC-funded fraud
Mirrortocracy describes both that and all attempted illusions of meritocracies. In this industry, at least.
I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant, motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many) times as well and were rejected (YC is mega-competitive after all).
IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
Which is why I suspect the title will be changed, even though it is relevant to the discussion.
The submitted title blatantly breaks the site guidelines, which ask "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.". It is a no-brainer of standard HN moderation that we would change it immediately, as you can see from countless previous examples (and these are just the ones I posted about):
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
When readers email about a title complaining that it's breaking the rules (as happened with this one), you know it's bad. However, I don't think I'm going to change it, even though it shamelessly distorts the article's meaning and adds extra linkbait on top.
The reason I'm not inclined to change it is that we moderate HN less, not more, when a story is about YC or a YC-funded startup. That's explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... More on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
When readers email about a title complaining that it's breaking the rules (as happened with this one), you know it's bad. However, I don't think I'm going to change it, even though it shamelessly distorts the article's meaning and adds extra linkbait on top.
The reason I'm not inclined to change it is that we moderate HN less, not more, when a story is about YC or a YC-funded startup. That's explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... More on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978.
It is an editorialized title and should be changed.
The "blatant scam" part, maybe. The fact it's Y Combinator-backed is still relevant, though.
Just like brilliant people that gets rejected from prestigious universities and companies, there's bound to be undeserving people that gets in.
Even if there's a vetting accuracy of 99.9% (for the sake of argument), there's still a chance that some lemon will fall through the cracks. So after 1000 seeds, there should be 1 lemon.
Now does that make the program any less prestigious? No, but these things happen.
Even if there's a vetting accuracy of 99.9% (for the sake of argument), there's still a chance that some lemon will fall through the cracks. So after 1000 seeds, there should be 1 lemon.
Now does that make the program any less prestigious? No, but these things happen.
> Just like brilliant people that gets rejected from prestigious universities and companies, there's bound to be undeserving people that gets in.
This isn't that great of an analogy because there are plenty of "hard" cutoffs at both elite companies and elite schools. For example, no matter who you are, you'll never get into Yale Law with an LSAT of 125.
This isn't that great of an analogy because there are plenty of "hard" cutoffs at both elite companies and elite schools. For example, no matter who you are, you'll never get into Yale Law with an LSAT of 125.
I'd argue it's a fine analogy. You can get into Yale undergrad with an SAT of 1250, for example.
Part of the scandal mentioned in the article is the accusation that they got in through nepotism and bypassed the usual vetting process.
If you have to ask, I’ll go ahead and take a wild guess. I looked at the founder’s bios. A couple of white guys, think one worked at a few FAANGs - textbook archetype for ‘certainly people of this type know what they are doing’.
Yeah, we do live in that world. This shit might be the most valid textbook case of white male privilege ever.
Edit:
I usually have a very high bar for throwing around while male privilege thing (I’m talking Joe Rogan levels of defense against the claim), for what it’s worth.
But my spidey senses are tingling on this one from a mile away. This shit looks worse than the Asian mmo’s that are still being built on the Unreal3 engine.
Yeah, we do live in that world. This shit might be the most valid textbook case of white male privilege ever.
Edit:
I usually have a very high bar for throwing around while male privilege thing (I’m talking Joe Rogan levels of defense against the claim), for what it’s worth.
But my spidey senses are tingling on this one from a mile away. This shit looks worse than the Asian mmo’s that are still being built on the Unreal3 engine.
It's insulting for many white men who don't come from privilege - some from poor backgrounds, or rural backgrounds, or non-college educated backgrounds, or health status, etc, etc - to pull out the hackneyed "white male privilege" stereotype here.
Why not use the more accurate term for people like this, who went from a wealthy or upper-middle class home, to an Ivy, to a FAANG, to an easily funded startup? They're the elite, or the 1% of whatever similar term you want to use.
Because "white male privilege" sterotypes millions of white males incorrectly. But I know it's a very popular stereotype right now among part of the population, and so often hard to resist.
Why not use the more accurate term for people like this, who went from a wealthy or upper-middle class home, to an Ivy, to a FAANG, to an easily funded startup? They're the elite, or the 1% of whatever similar term you want to use.
Because "white male privilege" sterotypes millions of white males incorrectly. But I know it's a very popular stereotype right now among part of the population, and so often hard to resist.
I think you are 100% right. I didn’t have the words for it I guess, just the emotion, and picked something off the shelf.
I’ll just add this though, I promise you 2 girls would never have gotten this funded lol.
And I ain’t a girl either, or a white knight.
I’ll just add this though, I promise you 2 girls would never have gotten this funded lol.
And I ain’t a girl either, or a white knight.
> I’ll just add this though, I promise you 2 girls would never have gotten this funded lol.
You mean "girls", like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the infamous Theranos [1]?
Incidentally, she fits the mold I describe above: highly privileged childhood (Dad an Enron VP, highly politically connected), to Stanford, to a well-funded scam start-up with a board packed with our nation's elite (eg, former Sec of State George Shultz).
And she's just the best known - there are other examples of scammy or poorly-conceived companies founded by (actually) privileged women.
Yeah, most of these wealthy, privileged founders of scammy companies are white men, but some are women, and some are not white. Crucially, even if most of them are white men, they only represent a very small fraction of us.
And the 1% are doing a tremendous job of playing us off each other for reasons of gender, race, etc, while they consolidate their power and privilege.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
You mean "girls", like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the infamous Theranos [1]?
Incidentally, she fits the mold I describe above: highly privileged childhood (Dad an Enron VP, highly politically connected), to Stanford, to a well-funded scam start-up with a board packed with our nation's elite (eg, former Sec of State George Shultz).
And she's just the best known - there are other examples of scammy or poorly-conceived companies founded by (actually) privileged women.
Yeah, most of these wealthy, privileged founders of scammy companies are white men, but some are women, and some are not white. Crucially, even if most of them are white men, they only represent a very small fraction of us.
And the 1% are doing a tremendous job of playing us off each other for reasons of gender, race, etc, while they consolidate their power and privilege.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
Aight, you got me. No sarcasm, we need better ways of describing this shit, I’m with you 100%.
Screaming at the top of my lungs:
Hey PG, I’m not a white dude or girl that went to Stanford. In fact, I did great and bad at school. So fuck you. I’m gonna take over your whole shit, so stop discriminating.
Dumbass couldn’t even spot a half assed mmo clone.
Screaming at the top of my lungs:
Hey PG, I’m not a white dude or girl that went to Stanford. In fact, I did great and bad at school. So fuck you. I’m gonna take over your whole shit, so stop discriminating.
Dumbass couldn’t even spot a half assed mmo clone.
Plenty of articles, including this one, have interviewed insiders that have revealed that they got to skip the vetting process due to nepotism. You might want to re-asses your "high bar" and stop making "wild guesses".
I’m not married to this fight. Nepotism is a gameplay mechanic in the whole privilege thing. So is corruption, collusion, etc. The broader theme can still stand.
But, I don’t want this fight, and you are probably right I’m off base and too quick on the trigger here.
But, I don’t want this fight, and you are probably right I’m off base and too quick on the trigger here.
I (woman without CS degree) once pitched to an investor and his first question was “Okay, but who’s going to build it for you?”
Um... me? I _built_ it. It already exists and I have users and I said that several times but apparently the idea of me being able to do that on my own was simply too confusing for him to understand. His next question? “Who’d you hire to build it?”
facepalm
Um... me? I _built_ it. It already exists and I have users and I said that several times but apparently the idea of me being able to do that on my own was simply too confusing for him to understand. His next question? “Who’d you hire to build it?”
facepalm
Ouch. Did you find a good investor eventually?
Plenty of reasons to actually criticize the company, without the intellectually lazy act of crying racial and sexual preference with no basis.
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Yea, I’ve found it interesting reading about YC companies from this batch that include:
- A scam MMO
- Terminal autocomplete as a service
- A Splitwise clone
- An app that puts your next meeting in your menu bar (for $10/month!)
YC gets 5K+ applications/cycle, accepts 1-3%, so they rejected 4500+ companies for these?
- A scam MMO
- Terminal autocomplete as a service
- A Splitwise clone
- An app that puts your next meeting in your menu bar (for $10/month!)
YC gets 5K+ applications/cycle, accepts 1-3%, so they rejected 4500+ companies for these?
I have some sympathy for the difficulty evaluating tech plays when "an RSS search engine" turns into twitter.
These ideas are the starting point, but it's difficult to tell what they might turn into. Quite possibly they evaluate the ability of the founders to shape the company into something interesting during the program.
But more than that, they're probability are trying to figure out how well the founders will perform at demo day, after they've helped them polish the play.
These ideas are the starting point, but it's difficult to tell what they might turn into. Quite possibly they evaluate the ability of the founders to shape the company into something interesting during the program.
But more than that, they're probability are trying to figure out how well the founders will perform at demo day, after they've helped them polish the play.
"Invest in the team" makes some sense when you're talking about bright people with a lame idea (RSS search engine, or whatever.) But in this case the idea isn't merely lame; it's a scam, and the team being invested in are a team of con-artists. What might they pivot to, if not another scam?
[deleted]
A key skill of con-artists is being able to make yourself resemble someone competent. If you go back to 5 years ago, YC probably wasn't on the radar for con artists yet, but starting about then, it was becoming clear that VCs had more money than there were good companies to fund. We are now seeing the results.
Unfortunately the con artists make funding harder for people who are not con artists. A con artist can spend 100% of their time and effort on polish and marketing, while someone trying to actually do something often has to make those things an afterthought. I’m sure the con artists have much better decks and web sites.
"Invest in the team" gets you Juicero.
Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money.
Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art.
Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™!
Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out of the bag by hand, no fancy device needed. It is less convenient than pouring from a bottle! Does it really taste better than the delicious organic juice you can buy at any grocery store in every city for a lower price?
Lets put one hundred and twenty million dollars behind it and find out. Hahahahahahahahaha big swing and miss! Survey said? No.
You can of course have a great team with the smartest best credentialed people working on the idea motivated by tons of money. If the idea is bad they still fail, maybe they can pivot, but probably not.
Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money.
Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art.
Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™!
Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out of the bag by hand, no fancy device needed. It is less convenient than pouring from a bottle! Does it really taste better than the delicious organic juice you can buy at any grocery store in every city for a lower price?
Lets put one hundred and twenty million dollars behind it and find out. Hahahahahahahahaha big swing and miss! Survey said? No.
You can of course have a great team with the smartest best credentialed people working on the idea motivated by tons of money. If the idea is bad they still fail, maybe they can pivot, but probably not.
> "Invest in the team" gets you Juicero.
It can get you Juicero, or it could get you Android. That's the whole thing with investing, isn't it? It's rather uncertain.
It can get you Juicero, or it could get you Android. That's the whole thing with investing, isn't it? It's rather uncertain.
YCombinator doesn't put in that much money though. I'm sure they don't intentionally fund scams or juiceros, but if they do, that's not the end of the world. It's a bigger deal to miss the dumb thing that turns out to be good then to accidentally fund a few dumb things.
Totally agree not trying to be critical of YC. Situations like Juicero, Theranos, this topic, et al scams, are interesting to observe.
The Juicero was very overbuilt, I know because I watched the AvE video, but isn't that a sign of amateur engineering? I'm thinking of the old saying that anybody can make a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
Hah! It's totality overbuilt for a product that squeezes a bag of Juice! That being said the idea did work for Coffee: e.g Keurig; just not juice.
>it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
Engineers do not build bridges that barely stand. They build bridges that they reason will stand for an amount of time in the conditions they predict the bridge will be subject to versus the cost required to build said bridge. They build realizing that no bridge will stand forever but it must stand for a specified amount of time.
They build to "Correct",
Not "Perfect"
>it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
Engineers do not build bridges that barely stand. They build bridges that they reason will stand for an amount of time in the conditions they predict the bridge will be subject to versus the cost required to build said bridge. They build realizing that no bridge will stand forever but it must stand for a specified amount of time.
They build to "Correct",
Not "Perfect"
We have been following YC's devops companies. It seems like they are basically investing in pretty much similar companies, which we found a little bit weird. I would assume as fund or incubator you would diversify your investments.
In an area that might be hot, VCS are wise to diversify by investing in multiple companies in the space rather than trying to pick the winner themselves way ahead of time.
VC is about funding the massive winner and much, much less about avoiding funding the runners-up.
VC is about funding the massive winner and much, much less about avoiding funding the runners-up.
The VC game these days is no different to flipping houses. They're primarily funding boring, inconsequential and incremental startups which can be acquired in <5 years. Or chasing the <1 year money-on-money return of crypto projects.
It's Peter Thiel's "Great Stagnation" decline accelerated by the capital allocation of short-sighted VCs.
It's Peter Thiel's "Great Stagnation" decline accelerated by the capital allocation of short-sighted VCs.
Definitely damaging to the YC brand.
I'd like to see a postmortem on how these _blatant_ con artists got through.
I'd like to see a postmortem on how these _blatant_ con artists got through.
Some of us remember when YC funded InstallMonetizer and people around these parts were defending it.
I doubt it'll affect the brand.
I doubt it'll affect the brand.
YC didn’t fund installmonetizer! They funded the next venture from the people behind installmonetizer, who then proceeded to say “we’re funded by YC” on their about us page.
Italics on HN are made using asterisks. They should really make underscores do the same...not like those do anything else.
Maybe the brand is a little bit hyped to begin with? I suspect there are only two companies these VCs have ever funded that are known to turn a profit. It seems like they've trained a generation of young smart people on how to get rich by losing money.
What a strange thing to hear. Even I can tell you that many more than "two" YC companies have become profitable, and I'm pretty removed from the business side of YC.
Which ones? There are only two public companies that currently make a profit that I'm aware of: dropbox and coinbase. I don't really pay much attention, but that's all I can think of at the moment.
Well, here's one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/03/08/zapier-bo.... Sorry I don't have a list for you, but HN seems to have warped my memory in strange ways. I'm sure that YC has funded at least dozens, probably hundreds of profitable companies, including many that people wouldn't remember, because they found a lucrative niche for the founders and a small team (or maybe even just the one or two founders), and opted out of the fundraising track and are happily making a good living. That's not the preferred outcome from a venture investor's point of view, of course, but YC has always supported what founders want to do. Also, Zapier's an outlier - there are others that have followed a more conventional fundraising path.
Seems like a deeply tedious topic, but it sounds like the argument is that the small number of (claimed) profitable companies have basically ignored whatever it is you tell them to do. That's a great pitch.
In my YC batch (I was in the same one as dang and Airbnb), the issue of revenue/profit was what the partners talked about the most. Growth too, but profitable growth. Like, it was talked about all the time in the batch. That was particularly important in our 2009 batch due to the financial crisis, but it remained important later in the good times - see PG’s post “Default Alive or Default Dead?”.
Though it took us a while due to engineering challenges, our company survived and became profitable by minimizing spend and focusing on revenue/profit, just as YC advised.
This notion that YC backs/encourages companies to flush money down the drain is a mistakenly applied stereotype spawned from a combination of different eras, different companies and different investors. Notably, YC has never been involved with companies like Uber, WeWork or Theranos, or any other company that SoftBank has tried to artificially pump up by pouring billions of dollars into.
Though it took us a while due to engineering challenges, our company survived and became profitable by minimizing spend and focusing on revenue/profit, just as YC advised.
This notion that YC backs/encourages companies to flush money down the drain is a mistakenly applied stereotype spawned from a combination of different eras, different companies and different investors. Notably, YC has never been involved with companies like Uber, WeWork or Theranos, or any other company that SoftBank has tried to artificially pump up by pouring billions of dollars into.
And yet here they are investing in something that is so obviously a scam that possibly even my grandmother would notice.
It reminds me of the "but you fuck ONE goat" story: one misstep like this surely can and should have more impact than all the good steps.
It reminds me of the "but you fuck ONE goat" story: one misstep like this surely can and should have more impact than all the good steps.
> "investing in something that is so obviously a scam"
None of us has any idea what was presented in the application form and interviews, but given YC prizes its reputation above anything else, we can reasonably presume it wasn't obviously a scam.
None of us has any idea what was presented in the application form and interviews, but given YC prizes its reputation above anything else, we can reasonably presume it wasn't obviously a scam.
Most of these companies are obviously a scam in one way or another. It just depends on your definition of what a scam is. Is it a scam to insert a middle-man to profit off a transaction that already occurs, or is it a brilliant hack? Is it a scam to use huge amounts of veture funding to undercut prices in an existing market to grab market share and claim "disruption?" These are called business models, but some of us call them scams. They seem particularly scammy when they never ultimately turn a profit and begin to look suspiciously pyramid shaped.
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I don’t think Dropbox are GAAP profitable either, I was looking at their financials a couple of weeks ago.
I've been following YC companies closely for about 6-8 years of data. Before the last big transition, I noticed virtually every founder came from an Ivy League school or something comparable. Their work experience was equally impressive before YC. Other people noticed this too and brought up the lack of diversity and complained. They felt that this strayed from pg's initial goal for YC, which was helping the little guy against the VCs instead of being yet another launch pad for Ivy League alum. Is this the result of YC wanting more diversity (not just gender and race, but for background too like education and experience)?
EDIT: The technical founder came from Apple and Cruise, and he graduated from the Univ of Michigan. He has the same cred as most YC founders. They probably didn't vet them as much since he came from a successful YC company, and I'm sure they talked to his former bosses. YC's system just had a public failure after using what seems like the same process for 15 years.
EDIT: If YC was too careful, Stripe and AirBnB wouldn't have happened. Those guys didn't have any experience in their respective industries either.
EDIT: The technical founder came from Apple and Cruise, and he graduated from the Univ of Michigan. He has the same cred as most YC founders. They probably didn't vet them as much since he came from a successful YC company, and I'm sure they talked to his former bosses. YC's system just had a public failure after using what seems like the same process for 15 years.
EDIT: If YC was too careful, Stripe and AirBnB wouldn't have happened. Those guys didn't have any experience in their respective industries either.
Yes, it is funny.
Sometimes fools with big mouth get more attention than they clearly deserve.
By the way, I wouldn't like to be those three YC interviewers who valitaded this idiotic project into ycombinator !
"Le bonnet d'âne pour tous les trois ! "
By the way, I wouldn't like to be those three YC interviewers who valitaded this idiotic project into ycombinator !
"Le bonnet d'âne pour tous les trois ! "
Didn’t Oculus sound just as crazy when it was conceived? As far as I know the founder had barely any experience with hardware. Just a glorified gamer.
First Oculus was pretty much linear continuation of where VR died in the nineties with VFX1 and Virtuality. Merely a hardware upgrade of LCD and IMU technology.
His wikipedia[1] page states that he was a VR enthusiast for quite a while, building several prototypes before launching the kickstarter
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey
I lost a lot of respect for YC when I realized they invested in a startup that sold laundry detergent with a manly scent. The founders I think were from Stanford.
So yeah, I don't think they are nearly as good as they say at judging startups. I believe a lot of it is based on signaling from founders and already successful startups applying.
So yeah, I don't think they are nearly as good as they say at judging startups. I believe a lot of it is based on signaling from founders and already successful startups applying.
The statements regarding YC in the article don't make a whole lot of sense to me. Firstly:
> Y Combinator has a rigorous vetting process topped off by an exclusive demo day with "selected investors."
I don't think anyone whose been through the YC interview process would describe it as rigorous. It's streamlined, and I suspect design it minimize false negative rate while spending a minimal amount of time reviewing companies. They have a huge number of companies to evaluate. Personally can't imagine they spend more than 30mins evaluating each company (including the interview).
Then later in the article:
> The most serious accusation is that DreamWorld only got its Y Combinator backing through nepotism. According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence
I don't know what "appropriate due diligence" is here. I don't think YC generally check references, or dive into code... maybe a quick look at the demo in the 10m interview? It probably helps knowing people on the panel.
> "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
Doesn't make sense to me. Do YC ban companies from demo day if they don't have enough to show? It's not part initial DD? Have they raised from demo day investors?
> Y Combinator has a rigorous vetting process topped off by an exclusive demo day with "selected investors."
I don't think anyone whose been through the YC interview process would describe it as rigorous. It's streamlined, and I suspect design it minimize false negative rate while spending a minimal amount of time reviewing companies. They have a huge number of companies to evaluate. Personally can't imagine they spend more than 30mins evaluating each company (including the interview).
Then later in the article:
> The most serious accusation is that DreamWorld only got its Y Combinator backing through nepotism. According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence
I don't know what "appropriate due diligence" is here. I don't think YC generally check references, or dive into code... maybe a quick look at the demo in the 10m interview? It probably helps knowing people on the panel.
> "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
Doesn't make sense to me. Do YC ban companies from demo day if they don't have enough to show? It's not part initial DD? Have they raised from demo day investors?
Part of it is luck. Just like job interviews or college applications. Even though I'm sure the people vetting YC startups are smart, they have to pick a few companies from a huge number of applicants without really knowing much about any of them.
but do you have the kind of people skills that let you scam your girlfriend with a fake diamond ring, get caught, and be able to talk your way out of it to string her along for another 6 months? Do you have what it takes to recruit an army of free workforce (child labour) on empty promises alone? Those are some heavy duty CEO skills.
The dirty secret is that, despite what they may claim, venture capitalists aren’t good at picking winners, nor do they need to be.
The real skill is in (a) raising funds from LPs, and (b) creating a wide enough deal funnel to service it.
The individual investments aren’t that important, just like a single bet doesn’t matter when you’re playing poker. It’s more about spreading the money over as many hands as possible and letting your mathematical advantage do the rest.
The real skill is in (a) raising funds from LPs, and (b) creating a wide enough deal funnel to service it.
The individual investments aren’t that important, just like a single bet doesn’t matter when you’re playing poker. It’s more about spreading the money over as many hands as possible and letting your mathematical advantage do the rest.
This. It’s always funny how people jumps to the VCs defence when they make obviously bad investments. They simply aren’t good at picking winners.
i knew this project was a scam
it was obvious, default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs and people asking for 10k to make an MMO, LOL
what people can do for a quick buck, this not only expose the pseudo "scripters & asset flippers", but also everyone who promoted the project
it was obvious, default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs and people asking for 10k to make an MMO, LOL
what people can do for a quick buck, this not only expose the pseudo "scripters & asset flippers", but also everyone who promoted the project
> default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs
I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later, when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around, people would be criticizing them for focusing on looks first instead of writing game code.
All that said, the rest of the criticism appears damning.
I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later, when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around, people would be criticizing them for focusing on looks first instead of writing game code.
All that said, the rest of the criticism appears damning.
Using content from a wide variety of asset packs is a problem because it means the resulting game will be visually and thematically incoherent. You can see a lot of this already in their demo videos -- there's visible conflicts between their realistic and cartoony content, detailed vs. lo-fi, shiny vs. gritty, fantasy vs. science fiction... this all makes for a real hodgepodge of content in the game, and it's going to be difficult for them to resolve in the future in a game that's meant to rely heavily on user-generated content.
If it's going to be a hodgepodge anyway due to user-generated content, wouldn't that be another argument for not trying too hard to develop their own integrated visual theme?
(Not that I think that "user-generated" content will work well. If any of it is owned, or merely claimed to be owned, by litigious copyright holders, that's a good way to get YouTube to ban gameplay videos. There goes your free advertising. I wonder how Second Life deals with this.)
(Not that I think that "user-generated" content will work well. If any of it is owned, or merely claimed to be owned, by litigious copyright holders, that's a good way to get YouTube to ban gameplay videos. There goes your free advertising. I wonder how Second Life deals with this.)
> If it's going to be a hodgepodge anyway due to user-generated content, wouldn't that be another argument for not trying too hard to develop their own integrated visual theme?
A lot of that depends on what kind of UGC they actually allow. I'm not certain whether they intend to allow users to upload their own content, or if UGC actually just means "build structures in game out of built-in assets". I suspect it's actually the latter.
> I wonder how Second Life deals with this.
In large part, through technical barriers. Second Life historically used a lot of rather idiosyncratic formats for its 3D models (like "sculpted prims" -- in short, XYZ coordinates stored in a texture), making it effectively impossible to import models which weren't created for SL. They did eventually allow users to upload meshes, but that capability is still gated behind some special permissions to prevent abuse.
A lot of that depends on what kind of UGC they actually allow. I'm not certain whether they intend to allow users to upload their own content, or if UGC actually just means "build structures in game out of built-in assets". I suspect it's actually the latter.
> I wonder how Second Life deals with this.
In large part, through technical barriers. Second Life historically used a lot of rather idiosyncratic formats for its 3D models (like "sculpted prims" -- in short, XYZ coordinates stored in a texture), making it effectively impossible to import models which weren't created for SL. They did eventually allow users to upload meshes, but that capability is still gated behind some special permissions to prevent abuse.
> I'm not certain whether they intend to allow users to upload their own content, or if UGC actually just means "build structures in game out of built-in assets". I suspect it's actually the latter.
The Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playdreamworld/dreamwor...) says (emphasis mine, also highlighted in the article): "Creator centric crafting economy : Using simple tools and guided by quick tutorials, you can learn how to create your own 3D models for items that you and others might need or want in your builds and adventures. Imbue them with useful function like lighting, extra damage, low weight, knockback, and a plethora of exciting magical properties! Not artistically inclined? Import 3D models from anywhere online, and DreamWorld will help you turn them into exactly what you were looking for."
We'll see how much of this actually ships.
Thanks for the Second Life information.
The Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playdreamworld/dreamwor...) says (emphasis mine, also highlighted in the article): "Creator centric crafting economy : Using simple tools and guided by quick tutorials, you can learn how to create your own 3D models for items that you and others might need or want in your builds and adventures. Imbue them with useful function like lighting, extra damage, low weight, knockback, and a plethora of exciting magical properties! Not artistically inclined? Import 3D models from anywhere online, and DreamWorld will help you turn them into exactly what you were looking for."
We'll see how much of this actually ships.
Thanks for the Second Life information.
> I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me
Code reuse is fine, but when 90% of your game is from various art pack, it's kinda like a software project thats 90% copy-pasted from StackOverflow. Sure, reusing 3rd party code is fine, but at some point, they've cross the line into "Do they even know what they are doing?"
Code reuse is fine, but when 90% of your game is from various art pack, it's kinda like a software project thats 90% copy-pasted from StackOverflow. Sure, reusing 3rd party code is fine, but at some point, they've cross the line into "Do they even know what they are doing?"
> [DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through
"It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?
"It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?
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Of course it's a scam; I'm not there.
Some guys try to basically ATP bootstrap a game concept. And there are other guys including the author of the article, that want to rip it apart.
If there is a scam, where are the victims?
All I can see here is only a lot of speculative and targeted hate and smear that makes me wonder why on earth it is on Hacker News.
If there is a scam, where are the victims?
All I can see here is only a lot of speculative and targeted hate and smear that makes me wonder why on earth it is on Hacker News.
The default UE4 mannequin makes it so much funnier.
this is extremely embarrassing for YC. whether or not it's an intentional scam, anyone remotely involved w/ the tech industry should have seen how implausible the whole project was
Nepotism at Y Combinator ?
What is this about?
What is this about?
Favoritism shown or patronage granted to relatives and friends.
But I think this is just an example that shows investment is merely gambling.
But I think this is just an example that shows investment is merely gambling.
Not necessarily, the article mentions that YC allegedly never even vetted the project:
> According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence. "Originally, I thought this was a bit of a joke, but they called me and validated all their information and their sources. This person is actually higher up than just investing," he says. "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
> According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due diligence. "Originally, I thought this was a bit of a joke, but they called me and validated all their information and their sources. This person is actually higher up than just investing," he says. "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
Should not be a surprise after Theranos.
It's actually a good thing, because it destroys confidence in YC and their reputation is deservedly diminished. This results in actually successful companies not bothering to apply for YC, which hurts their performance.
This debacle will cost them a LOT more than the cash they gave to the scam.
This debacle will cost them a LOT more than the cash they gave to the scam.
Isn't this congruent with the "Invest in teams, not products" philosophy though?
The big issue relevant to YC is "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still allowed through" (if true), but the people being affected are the LPs who were likely aware such things would happen to their money.
Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
I didn't understand this comment in the article.
Demo day comes after being accepted to YC... Do YC ban companies from demo day? I thought everybody presented. I can't see any reference to them having raised any money at demo day either.
Demo day comes after being accepted to YC... Do YC ban companies from demo day? I thought everybody presented. I can't see any reference to them having raised any money at demo day either.
I read this as not having anything to show (in terms of numbers, product) at demo day and I assumed the implication was that they had also not been meeting their weekly obligations, but you’re correct that there isn’t really anything for YC to do at that point - short of running up and snatching LoIs which is obviously overstepping.
There really isn't any weekly obligations when I went through, other than a dinner weekly. You met with the partners as much as you liked. At Demo Day, there were folks in 2011 with no product, someone even pivoted the day before demo day and just had an idea on a powerpoint. Some of the folks went on to build very successful businesses. So the lack of demo day progress in of itself doesn't mean too much i think. The other points might though, to be fair.
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I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though).
Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity with the random latency of so many streams using prediction. Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on ground" sort of world).
Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to do even a small subset of what they want requires people with lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation, lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support huge numbers of"local" players either.
Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity with the random latency of so many streams using prediction. Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on ground" sort of world).
Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to do even a small subset of what they want requires people with lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation, lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support huge numbers of"local" players either.
This was part of the exciting suggestion of the original Stadia trailers: with the entire game and all the interactions happening in Google datacentres, you would only need to receive a rendered version, and suddenly all this would be possible.
Of course none of that has happened and Google folded their games studio, which is par for them, but does go some way to reinforcing this point that there's a reason this stuff isn't done.
Of course none of that has happened and Google folded their games studio, which is par for them, but does go some way to reinforcing this point that there's a reason this stuff isn't done.
Isn't that how multiplayer games work today? You receive a rendering of the server's source of truth, and send actions you'd like to perform. The current implementation just sends a lot less data to the client by sending deltas and positional data rather than full screen renderings right? It seems like that wouldn't fix any of the issues above, and might just introduce the complexity of streaming video to all the clients, and replicating world state to all the video streaming servers.
With Stadia et al. your computer sends keystrokes and mouse movements to Google's servers, and the server returns a video feed that's then displayed on your screen. Today's multiplayer games send and receive movement information and such, but the graphics rendering, which I believe is the main issue here, is still done client-side.
I don’t think graphics rendering is really the problem — worst comes to worst, you just reduce graphical fidelity — and regardless, rendering 300 AI characters roaming around is clearly doable, and it’d be the same with viewing real players. It’s a client-side problem, and doesn’t have to really scale much with player count (Stadia’s main pitch was that you didn’t need high end PCs to play AAA games — not that it would enhance games’ ability to play online)
The hard part is dealing with 300 players communicating simultaneously with random delays and state changes, in an environment that doesn’t really handle delays very well (a text chat can be 10s late and no one cares. A character moving can only be a frames late before interpolation becomes obvious, and you start teleporting people around). And tracking the state changes across users and passing them around tends to add up, causing further delays.
Of course, you could always change the game model itself too. RuneScape & Maplestory trivially enabled large groups of players simultaneously (pretty sure you could easily find places with 200+ players visible and active). Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second, so much larger room for delays. Maplestory capped actual active play to relatively few players, but enabled large quantities in towns acting as glorified visual chat rooms — which solved 90% of the feeling of being in a large community. The Maplestory strategy I think nearly every MMO implements.
The hard part is dealing with 300 players communicating simultaneously with random delays and state changes, in an environment that doesn’t really handle delays very well (a text chat can be 10s late and no one cares. A character moving can only be a frames late before interpolation becomes obvious, and you start teleporting people around). And tracking the state changes across users and passing them around tends to add up, causing further delays.
Of course, you could always change the game model itself too. RuneScape & Maplestory trivially enabled large groups of players simultaneously (pretty sure you could easily find places with 200+ players visible and active). Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second, so much larger room for delays. Maplestory capped actual active play to relatively few players, but enabled large quantities in towns acting as glorified visual chat rooms — which solved 90% of the feeling of being in a large community. The Maplestory strategy I think nearly every MMO implements.
> Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second
actually, runescape still has 0.6 sec ticks. it has become part of the meta-game to input commands at exactly 0.6 second intervals for optimal efficiency, and is basically mandatory for high-level pvp combat.
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Tick_manipulation https://runescape.wiki/w/Tick_manipulation
actually, runescape still has 0.6 sec ticks. it has become part of the meta-game to input commands at exactly 0.6 second intervals for optimal efficiency, and is basically mandatory for high-level pvp combat.
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Tick_manipulation https://runescape.wiki/w/Tick_manipulation
> (the run trick) works by first standing on a square before a trap, and then running across the single square that has a trap, in order to end up on the other side. Because running causes the player to move over two squares in a single tick, this causes the game to never consider the player to be on the trapped square.
This is like Programming 101 for player position updates, to avoid them running or jumping through walls. A classical novice mistake. I'm surprised to see it in such a mature game.
This is like Programming 101 for player position updates, to avoid them running or jumping through walls. A classical novice mistake. I'm surprised to see it in such a mature game.
That's not necessarily the hard part. I mean, it's hard, but it's not the hard part.
We know this because what this game is trying to do is done already a long time ago. It's a description of the original vision for Second Life. In fact Second Life was explicitly an attempt to create "the metaverse", with all user-generated content. Linden Labs used to write about the challenges they faced in making that vision real so we have a good idea of where the challenges really lie, or at least did 10-15 years ago.
First problem: physics. LL sharded their world, which was indeed infinite. The problem is each shard required its own dedicated high end server, which made "land" extremely expensive. Amazingly, people bought it anyway, LL developed a small but extremely rich customer base who were willing to literally rent high end (what would be today) cloud VMs just to have a very small space to call their own online. For a brief period it was also trendy for companies to open up spaces in Second Life.
The reason land was so expensive was that physics (collision detection and movement, mostly) required the server to constantly iterate every object within the zone and the calculations scaled with number of objects. Shutting down physics when nobody was there also wasn't possible because the metaverse concept implied allowing arbitrary scripting, and scripts frequently expected the world to keep running even if nobody was there. The answer in SL to "if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound" was a resounding yes.
The second big problem they faced was that user generated 3D content was extremely un-optimized. The biggest complaint users had about SL was always performance. Eventually they gave up promising to improve it and came clean with the userbase: SL was slow and always would be because users kept making slow content. In particular SL was set mostly outdoors, and even when indoors, people loved doing things like creating semi-transparent windows. The ability for any object to change at any moment (users created content in-game) also implied they couldn't use all the "baking" techniques professional games use to optimize rendering. So the rendering algorithms had to be very primitive, and there was lots of overdraw, so SL really chugged even when drawing scenes that looked very basic compared to what high end games could do. And of course hobbyist metaverse users are not pro grade 3D artists so they tended to make a lot of ugly stuff anyway.
So syncing player data was certainly a sub-challenge, but compared to the difficulties posed by cost effective sharded physics and totally un-optimizable 3D scenes, it wasn't that big a deal.
We know this because what this game is trying to do is done already a long time ago. It's a description of the original vision for Second Life. In fact Second Life was explicitly an attempt to create "the metaverse", with all user-generated content. Linden Labs used to write about the challenges they faced in making that vision real so we have a good idea of where the challenges really lie, or at least did 10-15 years ago.
First problem: physics. LL sharded their world, which was indeed infinite. The problem is each shard required its own dedicated high end server, which made "land" extremely expensive. Amazingly, people bought it anyway, LL developed a small but extremely rich customer base who were willing to literally rent high end (what would be today) cloud VMs just to have a very small space to call their own online. For a brief period it was also trendy for companies to open up spaces in Second Life.
The reason land was so expensive was that physics (collision detection and movement, mostly) required the server to constantly iterate every object within the zone and the calculations scaled with number of objects. Shutting down physics when nobody was there also wasn't possible because the metaverse concept implied allowing arbitrary scripting, and scripts frequently expected the world to keep running even if nobody was there. The answer in SL to "if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound" was a resounding yes.
The second big problem they faced was that user generated 3D content was extremely un-optimized. The biggest complaint users had about SL was always performance. Eventually they gave up promising to improve it and came clean with the userbase: SL was slow and always would be because users kept making slow content. In particular SL was set mostly outdoors, and even when indoors, people loved doing things like creating semi-transparent windows. The ability for any object to change at any moment (users created content in-game) also implied they couldn't use all the "baking" techniques professional games use to optimize rendering. So the rendering algorithms had to be very primitive, and there was lots of overdraw, so SL really chugged even when drawing scenes that looked very basic compared to what high end games could do. And of course hobbyist metaverse users are not pro grade 3D artists so they tended to make a lot of ugly stuff anyway.
So syncing player data was certainly a sub-challenge, but compared to the difficulties posed by cost effective sharded physics and totally un-optimizable 3D scenes, it wasn't that big a deal.
There are tons of examples of physics engines running on the GPU. Contact resolution (particularly between simple shapes) is an embarassingly parallel problem. I don't think it would be impossible to handle millions of collisions per frame on a modern GPU, maybe even CPU. Also, what counted as a high-end server a decade ago probably is much more affordable with today's technology. You can also probably design a scripting system/set of game rules which allow unobserved NPCs/objects to sleep when no player is around them.
User content can probably be limited as well so that people don't upload overly complex/poorly performing 3d assets.
I'm not saying that this isn't a tall order, but I think it's far more manageable by a sufficiently determined and talented team than it was decades ago.
User content can probably be limited as well so that people don't upload overly complex/poorly performing 3d assets.
I'm not saying that this isn't a tall order, but I think it's far more manageable by a sufficiently determined and talented team than it was decades ago.
Sure, technology makes some things easier with time. But the needs for content to be optimized has not really gone away, and the issue was not necessarily overly complex 3D assets but that the very structure of what people wanted to build was difficult to optimize for. Many AAA games are set in indoor areas with no windows, because this limits how much you have to draw. In second life, almost everywhere the camera could see long distances either because you are outside or because you're inside in a room with windows. And that doesn't seem to have a really easy technological solution, although maybe Unreal's new nanite can do something about it by avoiding the need for custom LOD meshes.
The delays, interpolation, etc. are a big problem in games like FPS, but I fail to see why they'd be a large problem in an MMO.
Why can't you just send the new position of other visible players, and then client-side play those characters' walking animations to the new position from their current (client-side) position? Unless the accuracy of another player's targeting is relevant why is there a problem with their position always being delayed by, say, a second?
Why can't you just send the new position of other visible players, and then client-side play those characters' walking animations to the new position from their current (client-side) position? Unless the accuracy of another player's targeting is relevant why is there a problem with their position always being delayed by, say, a second?
A good MMO typically isn't just a large number of players walking around and not interacting with one another.
Look at Eve Online; you have a spaceship, you travel around and shoot stuff (this is simplifying it, but that's a big part of it). Sometimes there are 100 or 1000 ships all involved in one battle; what do you have to deal with in that case? You need to send all ship data (model, loadout, customizations) to every client so they can load in the right assets. You need to track where each ship is (in 3d) and where it's going at any given time. You need to track what weapons are firing, and who they might hit (there are missiles, interception missiles, "bombs" with an explosion radius, lasers that hitscan, guns that have tracking projectiles, etc). You need to compute status effects that may change based on distance between given ships. You need to send all this data to each client regularly (every second at least).
This really adds up, both in compute and memory on the server and in amount of data that needs to be sent to each client. It gets difficult quickly. Let's say all the info above can be described in 1kb/ship/tick - you get up to the larger battles, which in Eve have hit 5000+ (rarely, yes) - and you're dealing with 5000kb/tick going to every one of those clients.
Look at Eve Online; you have a spaceship, you travel around and shoot stuff (this is simplifying it, but that's a big part of it). Sometimes there are 100 or 1000 ships all involved in one battle; what do you have to deal with in that case? You need to send all ship data (model, loadout, customizations) to every client so they can load in the right assets. You need to track where each ship is (in 3d) and where it's going at any given time. You need to track what weapons are firing, and who they might hit (there are missiles, interception missiles, "bombs" with an explosion radius, lasers that hitscan, guns that have tracking projectiles, etc). You need to compute status effects that may change based on distance between given ships. You need to send all this data to each client regularly (every second at least).
This really adds up, both in compute and memory on the server and in amount of data that needs to be sent to each client. It gets difficult quickly. Let's say all the info above can be described in 1kb/ship/tick - you get up to the larger battles, which in Eve have hit 5000+ (rarely, yes) - and you're dealing with 5000kb/tick going to every one of those clients.
> A good MMO typically isn't just a large number of players walking around and not interacting with one another.
It is, though! In most games you're only actually interacting with one or a few people at a time - even if many more might be visible.
Part of it, of course, is that the existing MMOs are designed for small-group gameplay. But even outside MMOs - Minecraft, CoD, etc. - you're not ever going to interact with hundreds of players. A human can't manage that!
Eve runs into problems because it has large-scale PvP. That says almost nothing about PvE scenarios.
It is, though! In most games you're only actually interacting with one or a few people at a time - even if many more might be visible.
Part of it, of course, is that the existing MMOs are designed for small-group gameplay. But even outside MMOs - Minecraft, CoD, etc. - you're not ever going to interact with hundreds of players. A human can't manage that!
Eve runs into problems because it has large-scale PvP. That says almost nothing about PvE scenarios.
Eve online has a lot of self inflicted problems, like relaying on Python for speed sensitive code, running single threaded servers, allocating one CPU per solar system (small region around a star) instead of per grid, expanding Grids to ridiculous sizes instead of partitioning them into small microgrids with delayed group updates.
You really dont need to be send accurate per server tick information about a rocket hitting a ship 5000km away from you.
You really dont need to be send accurate per server tick information about a rocket hitting a ship 5000km away from you.
As I said, the game model changes things. One of the main issues in these discussions is that no one posts what they’re actually imagining of the MMO to be doing — and we end up talking past each other.
Anyways, with an FPS or Action RPG (anything where you can act/react quickly, then you expect your peers to do the same) low state/latency is absolutely vital.
With WoW style games you could probably get away with a LOT of interpolation before it becomes a problem (it’ll quickly become obvious as people get unnaturally tweened across the screen in straight lines, but that’s ok) largely because there’s really not much for you to be doing off-cool down anyways.
The main problem is that like RuneScape/Maplestory, in WoW supporting 200 players in the same spot doesn’t really do you anything (except for those group fights, where latency becomes important again) — towns are just glorified chat rooms, because what else are you going to do? You’re not pikmin requiring x/200 to proceed
VR chat it literally accepts that chat room aspect, and so it’s more than acceptable — it’s part of the fun
That is, you can change the gameplay to better support the issues relating to large groups. The bigger problem really is do you even want 20000 people in the same session? There’s not much to do in a crowd — in a real-world crowd you basically lose all autonomy and the crowd itself becomes the unit of autonomy with “a mind of its own”. Ultimately it’s a dumb goal to have in a non-competitive setting.
What you really want is 20000 people able to affect and manipulate the same “world” — the way we do in reality. We don’t look for everyone being there in front of you — we realize things have been changed by other people when we weren’t looking. You want object persistence and manipulation with a consistent world state, shared by thousands. Which is a much different problem — you want, really, a proper simulation.
Anyways, with an FPS or Action RPG (anything where you can act/react quickly, then you expect your peers to do the same) low state/latency is absolutely vital.
With WoW style games you could probably get away with a LOT of interpolation before it becomes a problem (it’ll quickly become obvious as people get unnaturally tweened across the screen in straight lines, but that’s ok) largely because there’s really not much for you to be doing off-cool down anyways.
The main problem is that like RuneScape/Maplestory, in WoW supporting 200 players in the same spot doesn’t really do you anything (except for those group fights, where latency becomes important again) — towns are just glorified chat rooms, because what else are you going to do? You’re not pikmin requiring x/200 to proceed
VR chat it literally accepts that chat room aspect, and so it’s more than acceptable — it’s part of the fun
That is, you can change the gameplay to better support the issues relating to large groups. The bigger problem really is do you even want 20000 people in the same session? There’s not much to do in a crowd — in a real-world crowd you basically lose all autonomy and the crowd itself becomes the unit of autonomy with “a mind of its own”. Ultimately it’s a dumb goal to have in a non-competitive setting.
What you really want is 20000 people able to affect and manipulate the same “world” — the way we do in reality. We don’t look for everyone being there in front of you — we realize things have been changed by other people when we weren’t looking. You want object persistence and manipulation with a consistent world state, shared by thousands. Which is a much different problem — you want, really, a proper simulation.
we try to send something as close as just keystrokes in games too, to prevent cheating among other reasons. sometimes we have to send actual state though
Yes. Typically you are seeing an interpolations between the last agreed source of truth - 1 time interval and the last agreed source of truth. The idea is that all inputs will be received for +1 time interval before you get to the actual last agreed on source of truth (which becomes the last agreed source of truth -1 time interval ).
In modern multiplayer games "server" is just a thin layer passing packets around with zero validation, then you have a rootkit installed on clients trying to sniff for known cheat signatures, again not doing any packet validation.
No true server source of truth, no common sense packet parsing, just sand castles and cheats allowing you to fly around and spawn items.
No true server source of truth, no common sense packet parsing, just sand castles and cheats allowing you to fly around and spawn items.
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Stadia isn't magic though, it just runs on whatever random GPU they have lying around. It was never going to be better than what you can build yourself.
No, but it might have been better than what you had.
When Stadia was announced it was full AMD GPUs (probably because of their Linux drivers)
This is counter to their published information, and also would be throwing away console style homogenous hw advantage for no upside.
Exactly, on the server side player interaction is an N² problem (where N is the number of players who are currently interacting). Each of N players need updates on the (N-1) other players they can see. And without strong in-game reasons not to, players will test the limits, no matter how efficient your code (see EVE where despite them making huge improvements to their servers and code as well as already using an extremely low update rate, player battles are still basically limited by how many you can get into a system before the server topples over).
Is this really true? I would imagine you get something more like Zipf’s law in practice, N log N.
Even if there were interactions between everyone, presumably you could still exploit locality, like: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/aaai10b.pdf
Even if there were interactions between everyone, presumably you could still exploit locality, like: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/aaai10b.pdf
In practice in other existing MMOs, you have bounded areas of the game where people are in view of each oher, with player counts designed to work within the technical constrians of the tech. Then teleport/portal around to get to other areas.
But even within an area you can cut down on the n^2 in various ways, with one set of estabilished techniques cutting down server side compute and other set for network communications.
But even within an area you can cut down on the n^2 in various ways, with one set of estabilished techniques cutting down server side compute and other set for network communications.
Eve could go more granular than single threaded Server Blade per Solar System, go down to at lest server node per Grid, or even per 250km mini grid with BSP tree partition mechanism. They could also work on real dynamic scaling.
Instead last time I looked into it they migrated Solar systems around once a day during mandatory downtime relocating the ones where huge battles were pre-planned to happen in near future to the dedicated high MHz blade nodes, and everything was single threaded. Result was two small battles in different parts of one solar system loaded the node as much as one bigger battle.
Oh, and they ran a lot of Stackless Python code for that extra slowness.
Instead last time I looked into it they migrated Solar systems around once a day during mandatory downtime relocating the ones where huge battles were pre-planned to happen in near future to the dedicated high MHz blade nodes, and everything was single threaded. Result was two small battles in different parts of one solar system loaded the node as much as one bigger battle.
Oh, and they ran a lot of Stackless Python code for that extra slowness.
There's a 5,000 human player experimental event happening tomorrow [1]. As a participant in a previous invite-only event, I can assure you that it works very well.
Disclaimer: I work under the same company as the developers of this tech (although I am not involved in this product). My opinions are entirely my own.
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/scavengers-large-scale-m...
Disclaimer: I work under the same company as the developers of this tech (although I am not involved in this product). My opinions are entirely my own.
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/scavengers-large-scale-m...
> 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior
I participated in a tech demo test about 2 years back, with roughly 3000 players interacting in non-trivial ways (server authoritative). UDP exists. GPGPU exists (NVIDIA helped improve PhysX for this specific scenario). A massive amount of users is not impossible.
This MMO does otherwise otherwise impossible.
I participated in a tech demo test about 2 years back, with roughly 3000 players interacting in non-trivial ways (server authoritative). UDP exists. GPGPU exists (NVIDIA helped improve PhysX for this specific scenario). A massive amount of users is not impossible.
This MMO does otherwise otherwise impossible.
Could you explain how world of Warcraft works then? You can certainly have more than 200 in one place at once... Are they doing some tricks to make this appear as if it's working but in reality it is not?
Would love to hear your opinion.
Would love to hear your opinion.
> 200 in one place
200 players in one map instance.
But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details, if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all after a certain visibility range threshold.
200 players in one map instance.
But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details, if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all after a certain visibility range threshold.
The spiffing Brit managed to get 500 people into a single Factorio game, not all visible at the same time but all interacting with the environment. It was an interesting video, the performance was fairly good.
Buildings are more CPU intensive than players unless those players are all busy fighting. If they just mine or place buildings they simply don't matter.
I saw that video, the game definitely struggled.
It's certainly doable though.
It's certainly doable though.
This doesn't really matter though, after a certain point there isn't much difference to players between 50 people and 200 people within visible distance. You can just stop showing others past some cap, or throttle position updates to like 1 every 20 seconds or so and fill in the gaps with AI.
Actually it makes a huge difference. You haven't played WoW have you?
To the people downvoting me, I only said that because his response was directly about somebody mentioning World of Warcraft. In WoW, if they only limited you to seeing 50 people the game would feel completely different when you go into cities and do open world PVP and such. It would literally break the game.
In fact when they released WoW Classic they had a new technology they called layering where even if you were in the same realm as somebody you could be on a different layer and therefore not see them. People absolutely hated it and went crazy.
So that is why I asked him if he had played it since he said "at a certain point there isn't much difference to players between 50 people and 200 people within visible distance" which is just wrong.
In fact when they released WoW Classic they had a new technology they called layering where even if you were in the same realm as somebody you could be on a different layer and therefore not see them. People absolutely hated it and went crazy.
So that is why I asked him if he had played it since he said "at a certain point there isn't much difference to players between 50 people and 200 people within visible distance" which is just wrong.
On HN to uphold civil discussion it’s best to avoid dismissive references and assumptions directed at “you”. Best to address the idea alone with your example/argument, rather than the imagined speaker. Otherwise it can be interpreted as needlessly antagonistic and will be downvoted.
That's fair
It's an open world game, but let's assume you mean local map.
In that case, let's assume that each player waves (/wave). I've done this before with >50 players and took a screenshot and we were all in sync. It's also possible to have 50 players in the same area fighting in real time, e.g., in a battleground. This was back in 2010 when I played ... So I am not sure if it's any fabrication at all, otherwise everyone would die, etc? Given players have health, take damage, get healed, etc.
In that case, let's assume that each player waves (/wave). I've done this before with >50 players and took a screenshot and we were all in sync. It's also possible to have 50 players in the same area fighting in real time, e.g., in a battleground. This was back in 2010 when I played ... So I am not sure if it's any fabrication at all, otherwise everyone would die, etc? Given players have health, take damage, get healed, etc.
This is one of the reasons it's been so believable. Lots of people think they've already seen it, apparently. The gap between what MMO players already think they're seeing and what these founders are promising seems trivial, but actually implies a lot about network latency and bandwidth, software complexity, etc.
Ultima Online could do 100+ visible people back in 1997.
But I don't believe WoW could do it now, the last time I played WoW, early last year, in a large raid, there would be spells cast from invisible people because the characters wouldn't even load.
But I don't believe WoW could do it now, the last time I played WoW, early last year, in a large raid, there would be spells cast from invisible people because the characters wouldn't even load.
The lag around the Britain bank when busy (even sometimes Moonglow bank) made it nearly unplayable though, and the game was only 2D.
I remember on a player run server (Novus Opiate) we had a random battle one day of red vs blue and we had about 80-100 people in Britain run through a portal into Buccaneer's Den, slaughtering all the reds, and all the reds banded together to kill the blues. It was well over 100 people with minimal lag, with most people on 56k modems.
But Britain bank with lots of people was always laggy. Especially if there wasn’t a server reboot in over a week.
But Britain bank with lots of people was always laggy. Especially if there wasn’t a server reboot in over a week.
Maybe all players where in sync because of tick granularity.
Not an MMO dev but my random guess is that there's not a lot that needs to be directly p2p. I've only played FF14 but most of the interactions you have don't require you to have precise locations of your party. Server has a tick rate and for mechanics you need to be aware of server latency. Most everything can be calculated server side and/or predicted. Many abilities often have a cast time which can be used to hide latency between clients.
Unless you are playing on console, almost nothing is p2p in gaming (Due to cheaters). The server has to simulate the entire "world", and as I understand it, the problem becomes when you have one server instance simulating a world for 100s of players.
The said, FTA I think people are focusing on the wrong side of aisle. From what I understand, I don't think anything they said is impossible; it just seems like the team is very inexperienced and MMOs are incredibly complex and given how few MMO developers there are (MMOs are popular, but they aren't diverse) they might have bit off more than can chew. I'm really not seeing how what they are trying to do is anymore complicated than Fortnite or Minecraft from a backend standpoint (I'm very green to game programming)
The said, FTA I think people are focusing on the wrong side of aisle. From what I understand, I don't think anything they said is impossible; it just seems like the team is very inexperienced and MMOs are incredibly complex and given how few MMO developers there are (MMOs are popular, but they aren't diverse) they might have bit off more than can chew. I'm really not seeing how what they are trying to do is anymore complicated than Fortnite or Minecraft from a backend standpoint (I'm very green to game programming)
player to player, not peer to peer
The WoW world is not very mutable unless something big has changed since I last played it. The amount of state to be managed is small. It’s basically location, inventory, some ephemeral projectiles, etc. Only a small number of players can see each other at the same time too, so it’s not like thousands of people in a virtual colloseum.
If you've ever played sitting next to someone else, you'll notice that not every animation is shared, just position and future position. If you hold the mouse button and spin in a circle, it won't show on the other person's screen. And the spells aren't governed by the animations position, but rather calculated and animated as a "hit" or "miss" completely independently on the other person's computer.
WoW's servers fall down pretty hard if you have 200 players in one spot doing more than just running around. The Ashran battleground was lowered below 40v40 for a while because even just that many players fighting each other was enough to get multi-second lag on abilities.
Back when I was playing capital city raids would lag out pretty badly - you don’t get it when everyone is massively single-playering but when action is occurring you notice it.
In Eve online the largest battle had ~6500 players concurrently. Eve has a system called time dilation to help handle large fights. During a normal battle, every player's actions are processed by the server, and the state is sent to all players at least once every second. When there are too many players and actions for this to happen, the servers overall tick rate slows down. So for this fight time dilation was down to 10s per tick, everything takes 10s as long, a normal weapon that fires every 15 seconds only fires once every 150s. Even with this 10x slowdown of actions, and a game like eve where relatively few actions are taken by each player there is a huge amount of lag, the server and clients don't always agree on the game state, weapons not activating, commands not being recognized.
The underling issue here is the information needed scales exponentially with the number of players interacting. Supporting 200 players means 400x as much information as 10 players instead of 20x as much. So specifically for WOW, there are problems with more than 80 or so players at once in PVP. If you do things like large scale open world PVP getting desyncs, disconnects, heavy lag is common. Also for major cities and other high density areas most servers have 4 or more "phases" where you can be in the same place in the game and not see other people not part of your phase. So you could have 50 people in a guild all together, 200 people in local, but most of the other 150 in another phase.
The underling issue here is the information needed scales exponentially with the number of players interacting. Supporting 200 players means 400x as much information as 10 players instead of 20x as much. So specifically for WOW, there are problems with more than 80 or so players at once in PVP. If you do things like large scale open world PVP getting desyncs, disconnects, heavy lag is common. Also for major cities and other high density areas most servers have 4 or more "phases" where you can be in the same place in the game and not see other people not part of your phase. So you could have 50 people in a guild all together, 200 people in local, but most of the other 150 in another phase.
Nit: that is quadratic scaling, not exponential
In WoW players don't collide with each other. Every player is really just a point and a facing. There's no collision detection with spell shots. Of you're within range and LOS, you can cast the spell. And once the spell is cast it doesn't collide with objects.
Basically, WoW gets around it by vastly simplifying player interaction.
Basically, WoW gets around it by vastly simplifying player interaction.
I remember regularly participating in real-time battles with over 200 people on Dark age of Camelot, 20 years ago. Did they do something special?
Some examples:
https://youtu.be/lkl_fAjmLmA?t=38
https://youtu.be/7_BNNteCtCU?t=48
Some examples:
https://youtu.be/lkl_fAjmLmA?t=38
https://youtu.be/7_BNNteCtCU?t=48
What do you mean when you say "the internet is not fast enough to manage more than [100 people] with anything resembling real behavior"? Is that based on some objective metric, or just based on your experience?
This makes sense. Forza Horizon 4 with all the money and servers Microsoft can throw at it only supports 79 live humans in the same session. It seems like a small number but with all the real-time variables from cars and liveries to backgrounds and driving behavior, it's an enormous amount of state to manage.
See star citizen for a recent example
Everything will work when /if server meshing works
Everything will work when or rather if server meshing works
A contemporary broadband connection can manage way more than 100 simultaneous characters.
You only need to send an updated position and direction on every frame, which can fit in 10 bytes (16-bit screen space fixed point coordinates, 3 position coordinates + 1 orientation + one 16-bit animation/action ID).
With a 100mbps connection you can send 160 KB per frame at 60fps and thus support 16K characters.
You only need to send an updated position and direction on every frame, which can fit in 10 bytes (16-bit screen space fixed point coordinates, 3 position coordinates + 1 orientation + one 16-bit animation/action ID).
With a 100mbps connection you can send 160 KB per frame at 60fps and thus support 16K characters.
100mbps is much much faster than a the majority of consumer broadband connections, I don’t think that’s a particularly realistic figure. Don’t these games have to support a lowest common denominator type speed rather than a fantastic one? I’m not in game dev so not sure if there’s ways to get around things like that
100mbps is at or below entry level for fiber in major cities, and outside major cities it's what Starlink claims to provide, and also in the VDSL and 4G range.
A "fantastic" customer connection speed currently would be 2.5gbps or 10gbps.
A "fantastic" customer connection speed currently would be 2.5gbps or 10gbps.
Do you know anybody who doesn't use WiFi to connect to the Internet?
I don't. (But maybe I just don't know any professional gamers.)
And 100mbps is not realistic for modern WiFi setups.
I don't. (But maybe I just don't know any professional gamers.)
And 100mbps is not realistic for modern WiFi setups.
You can do a lot more compression and encoding. The data is very regular and you can use pretty low precisions, even lower if server tracks the accumulated error at the client. Most players aren't moving on every tick. Network tick rate is typically much slower than fps with interpolation used in presentation. Players typically move in very constrained ways (walking speed is constant). Etc.
Which MMO did you work at?
[deleted]
Wow, the speaker story is hilarious. He was running blasting music so people were following him in the street because they liked his music, so he created a kickstarted for this ugly ass speaker that you can strap to yourself. Wow.
Our of curiosity - to the game devs out there:
The article suggests this game isn’t possible, as described, even with an infinite budget. Is this true?
If the game were 2 dimensional (either top down or side scroller) would it be possible?
The article suggests this game isn’t possible, as described, even with an infinite budget. Is this true?
If the game were 2 dimensional (either top down or side scroller) would it be possible?
Former game dev, ten years in the industry. I don't think money is going to be their bottleneck. It's going to be game dev expertise.
This game idea is incredibly banal. It's like the pitch you'd get if you asked a kid to design a game. Pitches like these are punchlines in game dev circles.
Throw in the article's claims that people are working 80 hour weeks and the owners are offering 20% rev shares with streamers, I just don't see anyone who knows what they're doing taking these guys seriously.
With a more professional pitch, one which describes accurately the constraints, it's possible. For example, you can have a hundred million DAU if your game is primarily asynchronous multiplayer. This was being done a decade ago on Facebook. You can have user generated content cover your content gap if you rev share with content creators as Roblox does.
They are basically pitching a game platform but never tell you why their game platform will even boot.
This game idea is incredibly banal. It's like the pitch you'd get if you asked a kid to design a game. Pitches like these are punchlines in game dev circles.
Throw in the article's claims that people are working 80 hour weeks and the owners are offering 20% rev shares with streamers, I just don't see anyone who knows what they're doing taking these guys seriously.
With a more professional pitch, one which describes accurately the constraints, it's possible. For example, you can have a hundred million DAU if your game is primarily asynchronous multiplayer. This was being done a decade ago on Facebook. You can have user generated content cover your content gap if you rev share with content creators as Roblox does.
They are basically pitching a game platform but never tell you why their game platform will even boot.
It's not true at all. It's impossible only if money and experience is limited. In this case, the scam has no money or experience.
$100k won't buy you a stripped down alpha vertical slice, even if you cut 90% of promised features.
$100k won't buy you a stripped down alpha vertical slice, even if you cut 90% of promised features.
I'm guessing no one technical vetted them? Seems more like YC growing pains than anything else. YC, the organization, should have prevented this with a set process and requirements like "have someone technical with gaming experience vet potential gaming investments".
Dang — we need a title change on this one. The article itself discusses the scam accusation but never makes that assertion itself, but the title here is heavily editorialized.
(I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)
(I have no known affiliation with the game or anyone involved with it)
Are not alphas expected to be broken?
They are, finding item size cap bugs and alerting the devs seems all in the spirit. To me there's just an elephant in the room - the idea is dead in the water. The latency dictated by the internet does not support their ideas. It will end up under-delivering. I wouldn't call it an outright scam, though, as games are a very subjective product
So it's a "scam" because they are promising something they can't deliver straight away? Isn't that basically a description of every startup company ever?
There are a couple reasons it's a scam. First, they've apparently overstated their relevant credentials. Claiming nine years of experience in something they don't have any professional experience in is a scam. I wouldn't open a restaurant and claim decades of cooking experience when my experience is just cooking for myself at home.
Second, and more importantly, it's a scam because they are charging money for something that they have no viable path to delivering the thing people paid for.
Second, and more importantly, it's a scam because they are charging money for something that they have no viable path to delivering the thing people paid for.
Nope. There is Tesla and there's Therasense.
Is Therasense == Theranos?
A google search returns a lot of stuff on patent litigation but no "human readable" articles
A google search returns a lot of stuff on patent litigation but no "human readable" articles
check out the coldfusion video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CccfnRpPtM ). truly another Enron
Thanks- I knew about Theranos, just had no memory of the term "Therasense". And googling the term didn't make the connection clear at fisrt sight, so I asked
There was a recent submission saying the same things:
DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments)
I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926.
The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago.
Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments)
I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926.
The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago.
Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
A rule of thumb in the games industry is that it takes $100+ Million to get a competitive MMO launched. Followed by ongoing $ for maintenance, new extensions/assets etc. The claims made by the inexperienced founders are beyond laughable. People who haven’t worked on large scale game projects have no idea how hard it is compared with your average web/biz application.
[deleted]
s/backed MMO metaverse game //g
Fixed the title for you.
Fixed the title for you.
> You don't have to be a game developer to know that this isn't a game you can make today, even with a massive budget.
And yet I played this game in the 90s. It was called Ultima Online.
And yet I played this game in the 90s. It was called Ultima Online.
Ultima Online could support millions of connected players over a peer-to-peer network? Allowing any player full access to adapt the world and create any content, of any genre, style or experience. All set across an infinite sized world?
I think it's a bit of an offense to pair DreamWorld to Ultima and the legacy of people like Raph Koster, Starr Long et al. That game had a wealth of gameplay loops, progression, deep economy, and interesting world.
DreamWorld has no design, it's just all things. A plate full of every food you like does not make a good meal.
I think it's a bit of an offense to pair DreamWorld to Ultima and the legacy of people like Raph Koster, Starr Long et al. That game had a wealth of gameplay loops, progression, deep economy, and interesting world.
DreamWorld has no design, it's just all things. A plate full of every food you like does not make a good meal.
If every overly optimistic founder with unrealistic goals was written off as a "blatant scam" then YC would invest in...exactly no one. The one serious charge in the article (that they got in to YC through nepotism) is more of a "I heard from someone who heard from someone", and has zero detail.
Haha
> a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame creatures
Ultima online was released in like 1997 and did all that.
> a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame creatures
Ultima online was released in like 1997 and did all that.
I miss Ultima Online. That game really was ahead of its time.
I'm pretty sure the actual intention here is to not deliver the promised product and make money. I'm just surprised YC backed this "game"
Maybe this is only funny in my head, but I suggest to the VC's to go to some GameDev forums and start funding the total newbies that ask "I'm gonna make the best MMO out there, where do I start?"
"Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"
"Crazy idea, but it will be worth billions when they can pull it off!!!"
YC never claimed to have a perfect selection process. I wouldn’t hold them accountable for the teams they pick based on a business plan and a 10 min discussion. Its just a good guess.
If they doubled down on the team after demo day, then I am with you.
Compare this with hiring. I have heard successful people say they do get 1 in 5 hires wrong, even after a process which is 10x more thorough.
If they doubled down on the team after demo day, then I am with you.
Compare this with hiring. I have heard successful people say they do get 1 in 5 hires wrong, even after a process which is 10x more thorough.
[deleted]
I knew Garrison in undergrad and let’s just say while I wasn’t expecting to see his name in this article, I’m not at all surprised.
I'm crushed to hear that YC is not a meritocracy. I can't even remember how many times I applied. That just makes me sick.
Star Citizen is a much better example that is actively trying to pursue this goal of being an entire "universe simulator". Here's a recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYs_zn2pTZo