Opinion: For God's sake, don't make an MMO for your first indie game - Part 1

16.11.2023 - 18:27 / mmorpg.com / Indie Game

So, you’re a new independent game developer who wants to create an MMORPG— the greatest one that has ever existed. You’re going to have dragons and spells and castles and armies, or perhaps spaceships and laser guns and hundreds of planets, all wrapped up in a “living, breathing world” with thousands of players building a society together. 

Sounds exciting. It might even sound feasible. Perhaps you come with some talent: you might be a skilled 3D artist or a brilliant fiction writer and worldbuilder, or maybe you’ve got some programming experience from university. But before diving into your project, designing dungeons and drawing assets, it’s worth looking at the hallowed and well-trodden path you are walking.

The MMO community has had a number of successful indie titles over the years. But the scene of indie MMOs is bleak when accounting for survivorship bias. Far too many massively multiplayer games have been built on the dreams of a starry-eyed game dev studio (like yours), hyped up by a large community (perhaps with millions in funding), and fallen apart. 

But not you, you think. You will be the exception to the rule. You have been studying the realm of MMOs for your entire life— you see what is wrong with the genre and how to fix it. You will be the indie developer who rises above the others to go down in the grand history of gaming. You will make an incredible game all by yourself. And you will not , in five years' time, be called out in an embarrassing article on MMORPG.com.

Consider this a reality check.

The last thing that the MMO community needs is more seven-figure vaporware made by amateurs. By starting with something smaller and working your way up, you will be doing a great service to yourself, to your audience, and the games industry as a whole.

Players often forget this, but developing a video game is extremely expensive. Just look at Starfield , a game that cost at least $200 million to develop (and possibly more) after many years of work. Even a little indie game like Shovel Knight has racked up a production budget as high as $9 million, according to a report from Game Developer .

These staggering figures mostly come from the cost of labor. Video games need specialized workers of all kinds, everything from digital artists to network engineers to quest writers. These people rightly demand high salaries. Your content-rich game is going to take many years to develop, and your budget is going to balloon at a staggering rate.

Of course, you could try to get money from a publisher or investor, with whom you would share the revenue from your game. Good luck with that if you haven’t ever shipped a game on your own— these people are looking for a return on their investment, and they get