[erikpukinskis]

Bummer for Stewart Butterfield. But maybe third time's the charm!

This does seem to count as a vote against Big Production Up Front. I have to wonder if they had started smaller, used a more "Lean" strategy, got a product to market quicker, and started working on revenue, if they would've A) discovered the "insurmountable" problems sooner, B) had some revenue to play with, and C) been in a position to pivot when the shit hit the fan.

[rkischuk]

I spent 3 years as a CTO and Executive Producer in social and children's games.

The world of gaming is surprisingly unreceptive to the premise of a "minimum viable product". It is EXTREMELY difficult to "pivot" a game. The level of polish and extent of gameplay required to meet consumer expectations for a game requires a commitment well beyond the bounds of any typical B2B or B2C product.

From my experience, the best approach to a gaming company is to build many, small games, taking on client projects to fund the company while building company projects with bench time. It's sustainable, but painful, and is an inferior path to success relative to most other startups.

The bar of quality in gaming has been set too high by companies willing to lose money on failures to make the occasional hit. You might as well start a movie production startup.

[clavalle]

Some problems, MMORPGs being one of them, are not very amenable to the lean approach.

[squidsoup]

There are always exceptions of course - I believe both The Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) and Love (www.quelsolaar.com/love) are products of individuals. Neither are typical MMOs, and both embrace different sorts of simplicity. KoL uses rudimentary (yet charming!) graphics and a rather clunky web interface, and Love's world is generated procedurally.

I think it is possible to bootstrap _certain_ types of "massively multiplayer" games, but with the necessity of making significant compromises in design.

[aj]

Also Battlemaster (http://battlemaster.org) (Text based MMORPG)

[peteforde]

My initial reaction to your comment was to snort and roll my eyes, but I am sincerely curious: can you name any similar games that found success by building an MVP and evolving into a sophisticated MMPORG?

[trotsky]

I doubt there are too many, but from memory these guys pretty much did exactly that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert

I am just talking out of my ass here, but I could see an argument for the "build big and go live" strategy being more an affectation of the single player focused studio system than a mmo best practice. at least for the traditional pc/3d style mmos it is much easier to find gross examples of pre-launch implosion, launching years late, launching alpha quality etc. than it is to find the opposite. Yet almost all of those games seem to enjoy a core fanbase often for years before they launch that would be all over an mvp. i can certainly see how launching with a small amount of content could be a big risk, but there are clearly a lot of problems with aaa title dev that a launch and iterate approach might be helpful for.

[ecdavis]

RuneScape was initially developed by two people and has grown to become extremely successful.