Comment by electromagnetic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electromagnetic | Hacker News Reader

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electromagnetic

Agreed, I'd love to know if an indie game can accomplish a profitable MMO following.

I mean assuming you can keep roughly 1,000 people subscribed at $5 a month, then each year a game would pay out $60,000 dollars. If you get a loyal fan following then this would be a great revenue source. Once people are emotionally tied into a game then it can often keep them in the game for many, many years.

If you could keep a lot of the heavy work on client-side (not unreasonable for modern computers if you're producing a non-CPU intensive game by nature) so that your bandwidth and server needs stay low, then once you break-even you'd hopefully be able to keep a large chunk of that $60k.

Correctly done, I imagine an MMO could quite possibly be the best way an "indie" developer could make big money without a publisher taking a huge cut. I mean sure if you can get a publisher to sell the game for $20 or so and let them take most of it to help grow your users, but keep the monthly fees in your pocket.

$5 a month is extremely overpriced for small, low-budget indie game. $10/6mo or less is more like it.

The quality of Eve Online with it's dozens and dozens of devs/designers/artists/writers and multi-million budget only costs ~ $11/mo.

Micro indie's such as OA can't afford an MMO. MMO takes an order of magnitude or more resources to develop/maintain than single player one-shot. Old Ultima Online is the "level" I'd expect for an "indie" MMO and that took a lot more than an indie level effort to produce/run.

http://www.prairiegames.com/

ed: the biggest issue with an "Indie MMO" is that maintenance costs can make it a non-indie kind of venture very quickly.

It's definitely possible. The company that made runescape started out as a small company. Now the company isn't so small, and the founders are worth tens of millions.

If you are including text based games, there is a lot of competition, but you can be successful. I played Kingdom of Loathing for a few months, and it was a profitable mmorpg. That was even entirely free. Donations were accepted, and got you special items, but those items were traded on the in game market for in game currency.

I want to see a major MMO start offering modding tools that let indie developers make mods that people can play for some small sum of money -- say, somewhere between free and a dollar. I think it could really take off if the modding tools were flexible enough and the mods cool enough. Small profit margins, large audiences, and tiny marginal costs are where it's at.

Installing new games and learning how to play them is work. Making a game you already like be bigger and better could be a profitable business.

> I want to see a major MMO start offering modding tools that let indie developers make mods that people can play for some small sum of money -- say, somewhere between free and a dollar.

Done. It's called 2nd life.

2nd life isn't a game, it's an online world, vastly different thing. There's nothing to play, there are no goals, nothing, it's just a world; you go there to socialize with others in the world.

There is lots to play. People make games. People play games, http://slgames.wordpress.com/ There are active RPG groups. Star Trek, Harry Potter I've heard about. Basically virtual world LARPing with kick-ass interactive props that don't need to obey laws of physics.

There is nothing stopping anyone from creating games in 2nd Life. It's exactly what you asked for mod tools. It's all mod tools. It's all up to you.

Games esp mmo's are mostly socializing.

It's just a world. Geez, only a world. Like saying its just reality there's only sticks and rocks here, no games. Pick up the damn rock and hit it with a damn stick.

Have a modicum of imagination.

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