Elder Game: MMOs as Self-Sustaining Small Businesses

This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on August 10, 2013.

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[This blog post isn't related to Project: Gorgon per se.]

I wanted to take a second to answer an email I got. I tried to reply to the email, but it bounced! So here it is as a blog post. The question is from someone contemplating creating an MMO-like game. Here’s what he asked:

My specific question: do you think it’s possible to have an MMO as a “lifestyle business”? Is Project Gorgon trying to, eventually, be a lifestyle business?

If you don’t know the term, a lifestyle business is one with no intent to grow exponentially or to “be a big hit”, but which does profitably serve a niche; it’s usually built and run by just the founder(s), and pays enough to give them a “nice lifestyle.” Generally, the long-term goal of a lifestyle business isn’t money, but rather time: to grow the business enough so that some of the revenue can be used to contract out content-generation and maintenance on the service, so that the service becomes a passive income stream to the founder (“just a cheque in the mail each month”), unless they specifically want to dive in to add/change something. (See, for example, Patrick McKenzie‘s thoroughly-blogged-about Bingo Card Creator service.)

So, do you see the development on the Gorgon project reaching that self-sufficient state–where you won’t really have to touch it again if you don’t want to–or do you see it more like an old classic car: something which is fun to hack on, but which will require constant attention on your part to keep it running? Or perhaps, do you expect it to grow (and for old content to get stale) such that the live team required would keep expanding over time?

Somewhere in between. Well, yes, an MMO can definitely become a fully hands-off business in theory. But I suspect most indie MMO devs — myself included — will generally need to be around forever. Two reasons for that: first, many MMOs have fairly high maintenance costs, so it becomes tricky to hire out all the work that needs doing. And second, MMO communities are especially interactive, and being in touch with the community is really important for indies. For instance, you can get away with a lot of terrible bugs if the community knows you and trusts you’re doing your best. (Community management is also something I’m pretty bad at, so I hope to eventually hire someone to help there — but even so, I’ll need to be around forever, if only to write monthly newsletters and chime in on forums occasionally.)

I guess it ultimately depends on how much of a team you can afford! But it’s the sort of business where you need a sustained investment of energy, or it can all crash.

Paradoxically, the size of your community has a dramatic effect on… the size of your community. What I mean is that it’s a lot easier to sustain a population of 5,000 than it is to sustain a population of 50. If you drop below a certain point, the rest of the game’s community will rapidly disappear and that’ll be that. A single-player game can still sell a few copies long after the mass of players have left, but that doesn’t happen for MMOs.

But on the other hand, while MMOs will never be as turn-key as a Bingo-card app, they can definitely be self-sustaining and relatively low-maintenance. You just need to be large enough to maintain a small team of employees to keep that core cluster of happy players involved. And then yes, you can wander away from time to time, as long as you come back.

An MMO won’t last forever, but it can last a decade. A few games to look at are Furcadia and A Tale in the Desert. These aren’t particularly successful games right now, but they’re great examples of “lifestyle businesses.” They are 17 and 10 years old, respectively. Their primary developers have sometimes had other employees, and sometimes not, depending on the ebb and flow of their focus on the game. I don’t know how financially successful they’ve been in their creators’ eyes, but from where I’m sitting, they seem like successful indie MMOs. They’re both in need of a jumpstart if they’re going to last much longer, but they’ve already had a hell of a run.

Very notably, neither of these games have much pre-made content at all. Furcadia is a graphical chatroom where users create custom areas to roleplay in; A Tale in the Desert is a cooperative world-building game that wipes the world and resets every couple of years. They’re very niche games — more niche than my game, in fact.

My game will have higher overhead because I intend to release a modest-sized content update each month, much as Asheron’s Call 1 has done for a decade. Those updates don’t have to get larger and larger; they’ve stayed the same size. But they do have to keep happening on schedule more-or-less forever.

If I was trying to optimize the maintenance costs, I would definitely create a game that didn’t have any hand-made content. But that points out a trap that indies often fall into. On a large indie project, you have to be personally excited by it or you won’t have the motivation to sustain the multi-year development cycle.

When I was working as a designer for other people, I took pride in being able to make games for audiences that didn’t include me. But now that nobody’s paying me, it has to be a game I’m passionate about seeing come into existence. Which (unfortunately for me) means a rather complex game with a decent amount of pre-made content, along with user-created content experiences.

So to re-answer your question: yes, these games can be sustainable, but some game designs are much more sustainable than others because their maintenance overheads are lower. But MMOs are surprisingly difficult to create, even for expert programmers, so I’d encourage you to pick a game design that is exciting to you personally. Otherwise you’ll never make it to the finish line.

Where to go next? Let’s see… Daniel Cook often writes about aiming for audiences that are self-sustaining; his blog is a pretty good place to go next. (Though it looks like some of his more specific advice for what he calls “evergreen game designs” are only on his G+ page, not the blog.)