Game Dev Recap: Should You Make an MMO?

Should you make an MMO as an indie game developer? The answer is probably no. Not as your first game. But there's an interesting argument to be made otherwise. I talked to Benyamin Tukara, part of the management team at Zipoft. They make MMOs. For example, they made Tibia and they're currently working on a new one called Persist Online. Tibia started operating in 1997. So, their game has been running for more than 30 years. It was essentially an indie team when they started. There were just four of them. Now, there are over 100 people and counting. What's interesting about Tibia is that it has been continuously operated since 1997. So that makes it one of the longest continuously operated MMOs out there. It's still actively receiving updates. They're still working on the game. There's still new content updates. People are still playing it. It's crazy. What's even more crazy is that Ben even shared some revenue numbers with me, which I find awesome. Um he was like, "They're making 25 million revenue, 10 million profit, which is even more crazy for a game as old as this." This is something we didn't even bring up in the podcast episode, but they but they actually have a revenue share system. So, part of the

revenue is also going to all of the employees. Very, very cool to see. Now, I was very much wondering why the hell is the game still making so much? And the answer is the players that used to play when they are young are old now, so they spend more money now. This is pretty much the answer Ben gave me. But needless to say, this might not last forever. At the very least, it's very risky. So eventually they were like we should have another game. That's why they started making Persist online. And there's a bit of a longer story behind it. They actually had had quite a bit of trouble innovating. Um but they eventually figured something out. And there are actually some good reasons why they are only focusing on MMOs. For for one, making MMOs now is easier than it ever has been. Like if four students basically managed to do it 30 years ago, then you can imagine it's a lot a lot more achievable now than it ever has been. So it's not like uh you want to make an MMO as an indie developer, you're crazy. It's possible. You can do it. And obviously if you manage to do it, it's very consistent

and predictable cash flow, which is fantastic because most indie development studios um you make one game and then you have to look for funding. You make that game and then you once again have to look for funding. And this is a way to break the cycle a bit because if you make just one good game and you keep updating it for a very very very long time, then you have very consistent and predictable cash flow. In this extreme case, as mentioned, they've been updating Tibia for 30 years and they don't have to fire people because every time they hire somebody, they already know they'll be able to support them for years to come, which is very cool. Persistent worlds scale down. This is surprisingly important for online multiplayer games. You you might be like, "Huh, why would I want my game to be able to scale down?" The reason for that is that online multiplayer games can easily get into a death spiral where as soon as there are not enough players anymore, um it's not fun to play anymore because in session based games, you need

people to play with. For example, if you play a PvP game and there's nobody to play with, then you can't play. and matchmaking gets worse and worse the fewer people there are. But for persistent worlds like in MMOs, so it's not like that. You can still play if if you're alone. There are just less people in the world, which is kind of fine. You can still play. So they they scale better. You can scale them up. You can scale them down. Your game's not instantly going to die just because there are not enough people playing. In a way, that makes it one of the easier online genres. But of course, there are other things that make it more difficult. For example, there's a heavy heavy upfront investment for for building all of the tech and also prototyping these kind of games is much more difficult. You have the operational burden. Got to keep things running all the time and you have giant competition. From what Ben told me, you don't have maybe not a lot of competition, but the competition you have is very big. So, they have very big budgets. You're fighting guys with very very big budgets. And evenoft is not that massive massive of a company. You you might think that 100 people is a lot, but most

of these are working on Tibia, not on Persist. So, Persist online is maybe maybe a 10 people team at this point and they're going up going up against massive massive teams that are working on massive massive MMOs. There's also security and exploit risk and this is very interesting to talk about with Ben as well. It's like everything you give to the players is essentially in enemy hands. And you have to be very very careful because if people can exploit it, they will exploit it. Especially if you can buy things for money and so on. So very very common thing that seems to happen in online MMOs is duplicating items. So apparently people keep finding ways to duplicate items, like putting them on the ground in weird ways, then picking them back up again with just the right timing. and every single possible way that it could uh possibly happen will will be found and will be exploited. And those mistakes are very very expensive. It's quite a different mindset to make an MMO. I feel like I

think if you want to make an MMO, you need this funnel way of thinking and most indie developers, they actually don't like this funnel way of thinking. But I think there's a certain type of person that would enjoy that. So the way basically the way you develop these games is you you develop with this funnel in mind. So you at the very beginning you already know like you're probably going to get new players through advertisement and then you try to optimize how many of these people move on to the next step. So how many people move on to downloading the game and then you try to optimize how many of those people move on to playing all the way through the tutorial and then you try to optimize how many of these people make it to the 10-hour mark of your game. And then the funnel continues and continues and you during development you constantly have to test this funnel. So what they're doing is even now the game's not even out yet but they're already running advertisements for their game to test how well this part of the funnel is working to test how many people are downloading the game. So funnily enough the people who get the

advertisement are able to download the game even you can't even download it on Steam yet. So they're getting some players in. They're testing how long they stick around for and so on and so forth. It's quite an interesting way to develop games, but it's it's certainly not for everybody. And there are also, I think, some rather unethical ways to do this as well. It's like you you at some point if you overdo this, you get away from from being artistic and you're essentially just doing numbers driven design and it starts feeling very soulless and corporate. I don't think that's the case in for the games that um Chipsoft is making, but there's certainly the the risk of that happening. You can make an MMO, but only if you scope correctly. For example, Persist online, you can see they chose intentionally chose a very low poly art style that's like not too heavy on performance because you also can't really control what players do, right? There might be hundred hundreds of players on screen and you got to be able to support that. And also, if you're a

small team, you got to pick an art style that you can support. Essentially, if you're an even smaller team, like if you're like two people with Poland, I would make a game like this, then we would have to pick an even cheaper art style. So, you really really have to cut some corners in order to be able to do this. One advice Ben kept repeating all the time is uh set yourself a deadline to make X amount of revenue. This is a good advice in general, not just for making MMOs, but I feel like especially for MMOs, this is a good mindset because it's like um you have a motivation to work towards and it's it's a delusion checker, right? Almost like the thing that I talked about with um Yuan Brunai, the bubble battle death. So, this is a good way to keep your illusions your illusions and delusions in check, especially if you want to make something as ambitious as an MMO. the set something like this up for yourself. You can watch another podcast summary just like this one here if you like the short form content or you can check out the

full interview that I talked about in this uh summary. It's very much worth a watch. It's good story time, goes into much more detail. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the next one.