In November, I wrote a shouty opinion piece crying out to the masses of budding indie developers: “For God's sake, don't make an MMO for your first indie game!” It is worth a read on its own, but in summary, I made the case that most fresh independent game studios simply do not have the resources or knowledge to develop an MMO. Compared to any other genre of game, it takes orders of magnitude more money, marketing, and community management to even produce a viable MMO, let alone a successful one.
But if there’s one truth in the games industry, it is that for every rule, there is an exception. The same is true of my argument. In the months since that original article went live, I have been investigating the many success stories of indie MMOs; case studies of the people who managed to do it right. And amazingly, I was able to get a word in with a couple of them.
On the Definition of “Indie”
This topic probably warrants a whole article in itself. The whole idea of an “indie MMO” is nebulous, with the term “indie” having different definitions depending on who you ask. Some might tell you that an indie game is defined as a game produced and distributed without a third-party publisher. Others might say an indie game is one produced on a low budget and/or with a small team.
Personally, I think that coming up with criteria to define the indie genre is a bit of a pointless exercise. “Indie” is not a true category; it’s something that gamers and developers tend to agree upon on a case-by-case basis. Super Meat Boy is decidedly an indie game, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is decidedly not.
Why is this relevant? Because in my previous article, I didn’t do a good enough job explaining exactly who I was trying to talk to. I think what I said was basically true for most people, but again, there are exceptions.
I’d like to introduce you to two people: Robin Henkys, the Game Director for Albion Online— a 2017 MMORPG with a player count that regularly tops 10,000, and Lukas Meisegeier, the developer actively working on the barely-known, $2.59 early access MMORPG, Raiding.Zone.
Skills of the Trade
Building an MMO is a very, very hard thing. It’s one thing to get started in Unity or Godot with some YouTube tutorials and put together a platformer in an afternoon. A project like an MMORPG requires considerable knowledge in networking, backend infrastructure, and the crunchy statistical balancing act of mechanics design. For the aspiring MMO-maker, a background in these skills would be useful.
Robin Henkys of Sandbox Interactive, the team behind Albion Online, is a veteran of the games industry. He got his start back in 2007 and moved between many different projects, working in programming, design, and production before coming aboard the Albion team. In 2014, Henkys was the 13th developer to join the project.
“I was impressed by the ambition of the project,” he told me, “and could see how my knowledge of MMORPGs (I’d tried to play pretty much every major MMORPG from 1997 to 2004), combined with my experience working on large-scale RPGs, could help the team achieve its vision.”
Similarly, Lukas Meisegeier of Raiding.Zone approached his indie title with technical skills. But not in game development. Based in Germany, he is a software developer by trade with ten years of experience. He works on web apps and business software. It pays the bills, but he had a long interest in game development.
Because of his background in networking, Meisegeier found the backend architecture of creating a basic multiplayer framework (setting up the networking and servers, etc.) rather straightforward, saying he mostly employed “stuff I already knew”. For him, the hard part was the frontend component, using Unity to create a game world that could interface between his servers and the player.
The first lesson here is clear: diving into a new MMORPG project, just like any other project, is a lot easier when approaching with skills you already have. Even though both AO and Raiding.Zone started from basically nothing, the knowledge that their teams brought made all the difference.
That said, an aspiring indie developer probably doesn’t have the time to develop a decades-long programming career before starting work on their game. But prior experience was hardly the only thing that the devs I spoke to brought to the table. Let’s talk about niches.
Standing out in a Big Pond
In today’s evolving video game landscape, shipping and publishing a game has become easier than ever before. But this raises a new problem for developers. It’s not enough just to make an MMORPG, you have to have a unique value proposition.
The Sandbox Interactive team was acutely aware of this when they began work on Albion Online. For Sandbox, there was a growing trend in 2012 of “theme park” MMO experiences, games where the player is not so much a free actor in the world as they are guided through experiences handcrafted by the developers. There’s nothing wrong with this particular model— it certainly sells well— but Sandbox wanted to do something different.
“The original motivation for Albion Online was to build a game that the founders wanted to play themselves,” Henkys told me. “In this MMORPG, players are the driving force. All items in the game are crafted by players from resources gathered by players. These items are then used in the ‘You Are What You Wear’ item system, which allows players to design their own classes by combining different equipment pieces with each other.”
It took Sandbox eight long years to turn their idea into an established product. But undeniably, having a clear vision for their game’s uniqueness was a factor in Albion Online’s success.
At this point, it is worth explicitly acknowledging that the scale and resources available to Albion and Raiding.Zone are obviously extremely different. But even Lukas Meisegeier— a solo creator with no more game design training beyond a four-month university game dev course— realized that he needed his game to be different if it was going to stand out.
“Take dungeons out of WOW and put it into a separate game,” is how he pitched Raiding.Zone to me. “That’s all it is.”
For Meisegeier, the hack-and-slash action of the dungeon is the core of the entire MMORPG experience. He believes that the MMO scene of the 2020s is lacking an emphasis on the traditional trio of DPS, healer, and tank, and he hopes to offset this with a “legacy game” that is designed for players to sink many hours into. For now, RZ is just a side project for him. But the fact that it has attracted enough in Steam revenue to cover the server costs is a testament to the validity of his philosophy: in the current MMO scene, your game needs a schtick.
Overcoming the Challenge
Nothing about game development is easy, especially not the development of an MMORPG. There are challenges everywhere: not just in the technical work of programming and art, but also in publishing, marketing, and distribution. The genre is highly competitive— even still, the two indie MMO devs I spoke with were willing to share some advice on overcoming the great challenge they’re working at.
Henkys spoke largely from a professional background. After all, he’s been working in game development teams all his life. And something he made very clear is that a team of skilled developers isn’t the only ingredient to an excellent product.
“You also need enough business experience to build up the publishing side— you need to be able to navigate self-publishing without giving up significant revenues to third parties, otherwise it may become very hard to be profitable.”
Of course, the team and Sandbox Interactive talk about video games in terms of business. Rightly so. Nonetheless, Lukas Meisegeier also has some advice for all game makers whether or not they actually seek a return on their investment.
“I think you have to find your ‘box’; find the thing you can implement for sure and get something working. Don’t get lost in the whole game design process. It’s really easy to have a great design document and all these features, only to realize that they’re not feasible and you can’t implement them.”
Both Meisegeier and Henkys, despite their very different backgrounds and project scopes, had a lot to share. To be honest, my opinion remains that first-time indie developers should not start by creating their dream MMORPG, and I think that both of them would agree.
However, the hard work done on both Albion Online and Raiding.Zone goes to show that, with enough determination, the unthinkable is still possible— an indie MMO can be a good game.
Related:
Opinion: For God's sake, don't make an MMO for your first indie game - Part 1
