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Indie MMOG Developer Fails

Posted by Zonk on from the gator-no-longer-smiling dept.

Gamespot has the news that independent developer of the MMOG 'Twilight War' Smiling Gator has unfortunately closed up shop. Funding was the primary reason for their closure. From the article: "Twilight War, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game using the Source engine (first featured in Half-Life 2), would have been Smiling Gator's first game. The company had billed Twilight War as 'an MMORPG with an integrated first-person-shooter-style combat system where thousands of online players come together in an expansive and immersive three-dimensional world.'" The Twilight War HQ site has information on the game for those interesting in what might have been.

3 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Ya' know... by Godeke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    An independent game developer with zero track record attacks one of the most thorny game development problems (the MMO) and fails. I think I'm going to die of not-surprise.

    Good grief, just go back and take a *quick* look at the company they are in and it becomes quickly apparent just how many have delusions of grandeur and then take the fall. Even the "big boys" screw up MMO development with alarming (some would say with near 100%) failure rates.

    Sadly, these kinds of companies are often trying to take the high road and do something innovative with the MMO space, but that only *adds* to the likelihood of failure. I used to code and admin MUDs and even with a fraction of the user base, trying to be innovative only brought us grief 80% of the time... and we weren't financially vested in the outcome to we *could* be innovative without worrying about ticking off investors.

    --
    Sig under construction since 1998.
  2. it takes more than developer talent... by Beatbyte · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... to run a game business. it sounds as if the only problem they had was the problem of not being funded enough. if they didn't get the VC before they started, they wasted a humongous amount of time/effort/money in the months they've been "developing" the game.

    it takes more than developer talent to run a game business because it is still a business! it operates on the mathematical practice of incoming cash being greater than outgoing cash. once that fails, the business has failed.

    --
    Get paid to code OSS
    1. Re:it takes more than developer talent... by 2megs · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Most likely, they had the funding they THOUGHT they needed, but through a lack of development experience they underestimated what it would take to actually get their game out the door and ran out of money. Companies with no track record tend to not be aware of all the pitfalls and problems along the way. You'll notice that most would-be MMO developers are either very, very experienced teams (Origin, Sony, Blizzard) or have never done anything big before. They either know enough to pull it off, or they don't even know what they don't know. Middle-tier teams stay away: they know enough to know they don't have the resources. Occasionally someone comes out of nowhere and gets it right, but they're the rare exception.

      This project was probably doomed from the start for another reason, too. I've worked on a Source Engine project (Vampire) and at an MMO company (Mythic). Source does have some really really great tech for rendering expressive characters, but its architecture was definitely not targeted at a massive, continuous, persistent world with thousands of simultaneous players and 24/7 uptime. It's a great engine for building a single-player or 50-player game with discretely contained environments, but... right tool for the wrong job, and the fact that they picked it points back into the "not fully understanding the problem" issue.