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In Defense of Hero's Journey
ThothAmon
Member Posts: 8
I vaguely recall my time spent in GS III back in the day. But anyhow, let me explain to the non GS people (folks used to UO and WoW) what Simutronics and their product HJ is trying to accomplish. First a little background,
-Simutronics developed one of the first successful text based MUDs EVER,Gemstone, back in the days of dial up and AOL, there would be 5000+ players online on one server and this was at a time when it was pay per MINUTE of play. They developed a couple of other games recently, DragonRealms (another MUD), Modus Operandi and some graphical robot game.
- They are a VERY small company.
>If I were an investor and was looking at this company, it would look like some garage start up then anything else. Most of the development, in fact, nearly all of the development and upkeep of their games are done for FREE by dedicated GM's who enjoys playing their games. Personally, I have no idea why these guys work for free, but they do and quite frankly they seem to enjoy their time as GMs.
>They have a dedicated group of actual employees (onsite GMs) who are part of the Simutronics payroll. Noone has the actual figures of the amount of employees they have, but I would say no more then 20-30 employees (this includes the receptionist and the 2 people who always pick up the customer service line...I tried to ask out the girl but she promptly hung up.)
>Their resource pool is incredibly small, I would say their (SImutronics) annual revenue is NOT over 10 million dollars a year. I can't begin to determine their net income, but one indicator of this is company growth. The company has been in existence for over 20 years now, and it hasn't grown all too much. What this means is that their product line has expanded by 1 MUD (DragonRealms) since their creation of their bread and butter game GemStone. They are still using a volunteer force to maintain and develop their products. They haven't attempted to go public throughout the company's existence (although theres a ton of reasons for not doing this).
So, with that being said Simutronics's strategy is simple and quite frankly very smart.
-Essentially, Simutronics decided to invest probably most of their companies' funds into a Engine, the HeroEngine. They reasoned, that if all else fails they can at the very least recoup the costs of development by selling it as a proprietary engine to other companies. At the same time they can build the game Hero's Journey. The target of the company was to make the Engine first, HJ the game was secondary.
-Why is HJ the game secondary? The answer is two fold. First, it just makes sense for Simutronics in a business sense to make a solid tangible product which could be sold before gambling on an industry that is ruthless and cut throat (online gaming). Second,and most importantly, Hero's Journey is completely a VOLUNTEER product. *THERE CAN'T BE A DEADLINE BECAUSE ITS BASED ON THE WORK OF VOLUNTEERS* with paying day jobs,familial obligations, and a host of other things to do. In that way, this game's development is not traditional in the sense of SoE/Blizzard/Funcom which are all BTW huge companies with a ton of resources. Even on the creativity side, Simutronics has asked for customer input for material.
Now, is this system of development the right way? Personally, I think it is because it hasn't been done before and Simutronics has done well making MUDs through this way. The only way we can know is when the game comes out. Will there be a deadline? No way. One thing about Simutronics and deadlines is whenever they set one, be suspicious because of the nature of their development process (see above). Anyhow, chipper up and just be patient.
Comments
I don't think anyone disputes that, using its unorthodox business model, Simu has enjoyed success making quality MUDDs. But to claim this translates into making mmorpgs is like saying a company that previously constructed a high rise in NYC will have no trouble constructing an international space station.
Take, for example, Vanguard. It had the backing first of Microsoft, then of SOE, both financial heavyweights. Its full time professional staff has enormous experience making mmorpgs. And yet, after 6 years they are out of money and are rushing the game out the door rife with bugs, missing content, etc., etc. Simu is waaaaaay far behind that. They wish they were in that position and had it so good.
I'm sorry but the "you just have to understand how Ma and Pa Kettle do things" card has been overplayed. That dog won't hunt anymore.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Its is! Cant argue about that. But it do put them in a tricky situation. Especially when its about a big project like a graphical mmo.Imagine the slow process, as they cant make everything them self fast enough so they depend on volunteers. And a few years go by, suddenly the 3D engine is "out of date" and all textures are lowres, they need to upgrade everything. All characters gets a few extra polygons, every fork and every tree gets a little upgrade. Then all textures needs to be done as well.
And, as time goes and volunteers drops of and new comes (need training) and suddenly another year has passed, and DirectX 10 is released. Ok, the producers decides that the game cant compete visually with other games if it dont support DX10. So, another engine upgrade is needed, perhaps the textures needs to be fitted to DX10 aswell. Another year is needed...
well, you get the point, and this was only about visuals I can think of more problems but picked this as an example.
Anyway, my biggest fear is that they gets stuck in a "catch 22", and it might be hard to get out of that circle. I really hope Im wrong, but since the game has been under development for some time now (officially announced 1999) I am a bit worried. Hopefully they will release something that will blow us to kingdom come (hence the long development), I really hope they do, but sometimes it feels like we wont see a release date ever. (god forbid)
Thank you for a good post btw!
__________________________
Reality is for people who lack imagination
I can't add much more then what has already been presented, except for this: I'm looking at the credits from my little WoW:TBC booklet and there are literally hundreds of names there, and at least many of them are full time real employees. With that kind of manpower, it still took Blizzard 2 years to produce TBC, and TBC is basically just a worldbuilding addon.
Simu has always been slow to produce anything, and now that they are working on effectively two products...the engine and the game, it's starting to look like it's going to be a long time before the game is ready, volunteers or not.
That, combined with these fluff updates, which, even for full, have been few and far between, clearly shows the level of resource commitment they have for this game.
Don't get me wrong here. I think the final product will be a good one, but it seems we are at least a year away before it's released, and it's starting to look like it's going to be much longer than that.
Perhaps a better comparison would be to compare it to Eve.
If Simu had Vanguards squillion dollar budget this game would already be out there.
And as Simu have previously said - when you buy the heroengine you get the full kit and kaboodle - not just the engine, but the billing and customer support systems as well - stuff they already know and do very well. Yet Sigil had to outsource this to Sony.
I think Sigils problem was two things - the unreal engine and making the world too big - all that content costs money.
Take any timeframe Simu gives you, double it, and go down one notch on scope and that's fairly accurate.
They said in 2006 the game would be ready & out of beta in about a year... So In 2008 it will be almost ready to get INTO beta. They just need to stop telling people things.
I work in IT, and if we told all of our users all the ideas we had or even all the ideas we started to put into production and then stopped half way through, they'd think we were behind and never got anything done. We don't tell anybody anything until the product is done (be it a new mail server, faster network etc) and ready to be implemented.
Simu shouldn't be telling anybody anything until it's done. And maybe that's what they're attempting to figure out with this long peroid of silence. But they should have done it from the start, not suddenly stopped posting new data for us to lap up. Or at least have Melissa come in and tell us they are working on so many things right now and can't pull anybody off to tell us more data. If we want the game this year, then we have to let them work.
They shouldn't have told anybody about the game from the start - or maybe it was their hope to hype the game into oblivion so a company (bioware) would take interest and buy their engine. Now that they have a buyer for their engine they don't need to hype the game anymore.
Umm the work on Hero's Journey and their other graphical game in areas like art creation, programming, etc etc is not volunteer work. If you go to their website you see they're hiring. You get paid to work there, you get paid for your work. Yes they still have the old school volunteer workers like game testers and in game GM's but they make more than enough money from their high populated games to actually pay people. Because they've not gone super public or let anyone buy them out and yes keep things small and simple and they have a long time supportive customer base they're able to do what they want to do without larger companies blowing it out of the water.
Don't kid yourself no programmer can afford to put in full time hours to a game and work for free. More workers on a game more messes to fix.
btw I have complete faith in Simultronics to put out a good game probably even better than several of the current ones. They may still be learning to handle the mass market verbage spill but every company goes through that.
Please Refer to Doom Cat with all conspiracies & evil corporation complaints. He'll give you the simple explination of..WE"RE ALL DOOMED!
Not that I disagree with the core sentiments of the OP’s post, but I’m compelled to clear up some of the minor mistakes made.
Based on what I know of the MUD/MUSH/etc. industry (if you can call it that), Simutronics has definitely been the world leader for close to 20 years now (will be two decades on Oct. 23, 2007). So we definitely agree there. Even if other MUDs have at times challenged individual Simutronics games in numbers of players online at various points, I don’t know that any other company has ever truly been in the same ballpark in scope, depth, and profit gained from their games (check out topmudsites.com for an idea of some of what else is out there and how much traffic they get). Simutronics is definitely the 800 pound gorilla of MUDs.
Simutronics has actually developed multiple different products over the years. While Gemstone (versions I, II, III, and now IV, and separate Platinum subscription game instance) and DragonRealms (versions I and II, and separate Platinum and ‘The Fallen’ game instances) are certainly the flagship products (each ‘prime instance’ of the games still averaging 700+ players online during primetime US hours), there have also been several smaller projects such as Alliance of Heroes (originally Hercules & Xena, and focused on the setting that appeared in those popular TV shows), and Modus Operandi (set in the modern era on a tropical island, diversely themed to include cloak and dagger sleuthing type content). There were also the two graphical offerings of Cyberstrike.
Rates for access to Simutronics games, paid through GEnie and later AOL and other services like Prodigy, were never by the minute. Those services charged hourly rates, though they certainly added up and could, like in the case of GEnie, by quite steep during prime time hours. When Simutronics left their agreements with those companies to go it alone on the web with Play.net in 1997, they offered monthly plans similar (but originally cheaper!) to what we see today with all graphical games.
Also, there have never been more than 3000 users logged into any single Simutronics product at once. Perhaps not even more than 2500. The most likely peak of Simutronics popularity came in the months after AOL broke the internet mold and went to flat-priced subscription fees in December of 1996. Simutronics customer hours, with its flagship games now accessed ‘for free’ from AOL and similar, leaped from 750,000 to 2 million per month (1.4 million of those hours and 2000 simultaneous users logged in Gemstone III).
It is possible that Simutronics was pushing 3500+ customers logged in during prime time with all its products combined (GS, DR, etc.). I would venture to guess that all of Simutronics’ games combined still enjoy close to 2000 simultaneous users during the prime time hours (conservative estimates based on what I see logging into the main two games and from login numbers available on websites: 700+ in both GSIV and DR2 prime, another 80+ in GSIV and DR Platinum with 80+ in DR The Fallen, and 30+ in AoH and MO, give or take around 300+ spread amongst the games).
While Simutronics is definitely a small company and always has been, it was once listed #295 on a respected top 500 list of fastest growing private companies in the country. That was 1999 though and at the height of its popularity, right as the first big graphical games were finally coming onto the scene to really blow the entire industry out of the water. If the text-based industry was a small gaming niche even back then, it was never more so than after that obviously.
I would love to see Hero’s Journey get released, but I’m not devoted to the idea that it will ever happen for various reasons already touched on in this thread. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to not try and emulate the big companies and go back to what has always worked for them. The original Gemstone was a very small and very rough around the edges game. Nonetheless, there was enough magic about it that it has grown to become a franchise that has lasted twenty years.
Maybe Simutronics should return to that with Hero’s Journey, get the game into a rough but workable status, and launch it as is for download and play over the web. I guess a lot depends on how much more a strain graphical games are on servers than text-based games might be and how many users are needed to support the costs. If they could manage the basics of what they had in their original text-based offering, and maintained the kind of events-running GM presence they’ve been able to in those games, people WOULD pay to play.