Posted June 30, 2021 It's not so much whether they're paid or not. Fact is most mmorpgs out there have dev teams upwards of 100+ people working on it, with designers, producers, programmers, artists and animators, not to mention people who work specifically on economy and world balance. Any live service game is a huge endeavour just to maintain, let alone expand. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 I don't disagree, but fact as it is, Wurm doesn't even have 10 paid devs let alone 100+. I can't see Wurm expanding without hiring devs, it's as simple as that. What happens when no one volunteers for Wurm anymore? Will we keep just 1 dev on the team responsible for keeping the servers going and that's it? Will Wurm even survive a year after that point? It's quite a shame since GCG has a diamond in the rough here, if they only bothered to invest in polishing it up. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 12 minutes ago, elentari said: I don't disagree, but fact as it is, Wurm doesn't even have 10 paid devs let alone 100+. I can't see Wurm expanding without hiring devs, it's as simple as that. What happens when no one volunteers for Wurm anymore? Will we keep just 1 dev on the team responsible for keeping the servers going and that's it? Will Wurm even survive a year after that point? It's quite a shame since GCG has a diamond in the rough here, if they only bothered to invest in polishing it up. Sure, but the cost of those devs adds up, the need to profit goes up, and more aggressive tactics are used. This is why mmos are funded by huge studios and investors, raising millions in funds, and it's also why they close so often. It's all about finding the size that works for wurm, and the update frequency that works for that size. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 Crowfunding and crowdsourcing options exist. Hell even a gofundme for a wurm expansion content pack would be an option. Look at Valheim. An overhyped, simplistic, barebones game that managed to raise about 60 million dollars or more. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I blazed through its content in about 40 hours only to understand it's pretty shallow and buggy. I can't see why porting Wurm to a new engine, more code friendly so to speak wouldn't be feasible. Sure, we all have things invested on these servers, but porting basic player skills / ingame bank shouldn't be much of a database challenge. I know the costs, especially since wurm is in java and I suspect a lot of spaghetti code in there. But the options are there and you can't grow or expand without taking a little risk here and there. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 6 hours ago, elentari said: Probably why Rolf sold it in the first place. Game chest group saw a company that basically could be run "for free" with minimal server costs. That's pretty much the golden grail of any parent company. No reason for GCG to actually hire devs, and if Wurm pop plummets to critical unsustainable levels : aka subscription income < server costs, then they can pull the plug and still come on top. Maybe they'll resume development for WU afterwards since that's also popular. If only.. WU was thriving... it's almost at live-support.. unless kids pirate it and that doesn't show here, the steam stats seem tragic.. https://steamcharts.com/app/366220 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 7 hours ago, elentari said: Crowfunding and crowdsourcing options exist. Hell even a gofundme for a wurm expansion content pack would be an option. Look at Valheim. An overhyped, simplistic, barebones game that managed to raise about 60 million dollars or more. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I blazed through its content in about 40 hours only to understand it's pretty shallow and buggy. I can't see why porting Wurm to a new engine, more code friendly so to speak wouldn't be feasible. Sure, we all have things invested on these servers, but porting basic player skills / ingame bank shouldn't be much of a database challenge. I know the costs, especially since wurm is in java and I suspect a lot of spaghetti code in there. But the options are there and you can't grow or expand without taking a little risk here and there. Porting Wurm to another engine would take years with pretty much no updates inbetween in the mean time. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 (edited) 4 hours ago, Finnn said: If only.. WU was thriving... it's almost at live-support.. unless kids pirate it and that doesn't show here, the steam stats seem tragic.. https://steamcharts.com/app/366220 Steam Wurm Online is actually worse. Granted it doesn't show the non steam players, but still. With competent developers and proper planning and thought to it, WU and Steam WO could and should have been combined into a single game with the ability to connect to either private servers, or to the official servers via the server browser and with each update going into "both" games at the exact same time. Instead it was treated as a quick cash grab, rushed out and immedietly abandoned after it was making little to no money thanks to poor marketing decisions. All we got in the end was broken promises. Hell they can't even be bothered to finish and release the final patch that's been in beta for years now that they explicitly said would be the last patch for WU. Edited June 30, 2021 by atazs Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 30, 2021 5 minutes ago, atazs said: Steam Wurm Online is actually worse. Granted it doesn't count the non steam players, but still. With competent developers and proper planning and thought to it, WU and Steam WO could and should have been combined into a single game with the ability to connect to either private servers, or to the official servers via the server browser. Instead it was treated as a quick cash grab, rushed out and immedietly abandoned after it was making little to no money thanks to the poor marketing decisions. could be done.. but probably a terrible idea.. easier and safer to create an instance on your pc... or temporary server with some sort of loot you could explore and search for.. having most of the things local and the server just saying ok or no-no.. because it's easy to cheat in such places.. yet.. warframe for example uses that kind of model and seems to work pretty ****** well for them... yet .. then you play with other people, sometimes the lag is terrible and that is due some poor potato pc owner with potato internet in some odd corner of the 'flat earth'.. pros and cons to that as for WU... idk ccab can probably monetize it again with DLC and services.. maybe running your own server at specific hosting.. and from the whole thing ccab could just create(SaaS WU) a few preparation and starting scripts and possibly offer live support and fixing in case you ***** up your settings.. but at a cost wo/wu can take so many directions.. for the moment imo the game still needs to fight it's wogic.. make a bunch of things easier to be more appealing to new players - nobody have the time wurm requires, especially w/o the rmt it makes no sense to be this slow and painful to play, server could use some improvement to behave better with more monkeys on single branch.. and rest is some random update, doesn't even have to be big.. just a lure to promote and throw out there to get player's eye and make them try the game; rough deal remains to lure somebody with subscription based model, but that's probably the last thing to figure, other things could use a bit of polishing before that's given any thought Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
