[HN Gopher] Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant ...
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Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
Author : astlouis44
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-05-28 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| KuiN wrote:
| If you're thinking "how bad can it really be?", please treat
| yourself to watching a couple minutes of "gameplay".
|
| It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man
| team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an
| exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just
| absurd.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| VC seed stage backing is based on two things: the team (or who
| they know) & the addressable market. VC backing is not some
| meritocracy. YC is better at bridging the gap but it's
| certainly not perfect. uBiome is another pretty blatant YC-
| funded fraud
| dvt wrote:
| I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot
| minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got
| through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice
| (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant,
| motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many)
| times as well and were rejected (YC _is_ mega-competitive after
| all).
|
| IMO, it's a bit insulting to the struggling startup community at
| large, and not to mention damaging to the YC brand.
| new299 wrote:
| The statements regarding YC in the article don't make a whole
| lot of sense to me. Firstly:
|
| > Y Combinator has a rigorous vetting process topped off by an
| exclusive demo day with "selected investors."
|
| I don't think anyone whose been through the YC interview
| process would describe it as rigorous. It's streamlined, and I
| suspect design it minimize false negative rate while spending a
| minimal amount of time reviewing companies. They have a huge
| number of companies to evaluate. Personally can't imagine they
| spend more than 30mins evaluating each company (including the
| interview).
|
| Then later in the article:
|
| > The most serious accusation is that DreamWorld only got its Y
| Combinator backing through nepotism. According to Upton, a
| senior employee at Y Combinator claims that Bellack has a
| friend in the accelerator who helped greenlight DreamWorld
| without the appropriate due diligence
|
| I don't know what "appropriate due diligence" is here. I don't
| think YC generally check references, or dive into code... maybe
| a quick look at the demo in the 10m interview? It probably
| helps knowing people on the panel.
|
| > "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to
| show on demo day, and they were still allowed through."
|
| Doesn't make sense to me. Do YC ban companies from demo day if
| they don't have enough to show? It's not part initial DD? Have
| they raised from demo day investors?
| esturk wrote:
| Just like brilliant people that gets rejected from prestigious
| universities and companies, there's bound to be undeserving
| people that gets in.
|
| Even if there's a vetting accuracy of 99.9% (for the sake of
| argument), there's still a chance that some lemon will fall
| through the cracks. So after 1000 seeds, there should be 1
| lemon.
|
| Now does that make the program any less prestigious? No, but
| these things happen.
| dvt wrote:
| > Just like brilliant people that gets rejected from
| prestigious universities and companies, there's bound to be
| undeserving people that gets in.
|
| This isn't that great of an analogy because there are plenty
| of "hard" cutoffs at both elite companies and elite schools.
| For example, no matter who you are, you'll never get into
| Yale Law with an LSAT of 125.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| If you have to ask, I'll go ahead and take a wild guess. I
| looked at the founder's bios. A couple of white guys, think one
| worked at a few FAANGs - textbook archetype for 'certainly
| people of this type know what they are doing'.
|
| Yeah, we do live in _that_ world. This shit might be the most
| valid textbook case of white male privilege ever.
|
| Edit:
|
| I usually have a very high bar for throwing around while male
| privilege thing (I'm talking Joe Rogan levels of defense
| against the claim), for what it's worth.
|
| But my spidey senses are tingling on this one from a mile away.
| This shit looks worse than the Asian mmo's that are still being
| built on the Unreal3 engine.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Plenty of articles, including this one, have interviewed
| insiders that have revealed that they got to skip the vetting
| process due to nepotism. You might want to re-asses your
| "high bar" and stop making "wild guesses".
| elliekelly wrote:
| I (woman without a CS degree) once pitched to an investor and
| his first question was "okay, but who's going to build it for
| you?"
|
| Um... me? I _built_ it. It exists and I have users and I said
| that several times but apparently the idea of me being able
| to do that on my own was simply too confusing for him to
| understand. His next question? Who'd I hire to build it?
|
| _facepalm_
| nscalf wrote:
| Plenty of reasons to actually criticize the company, without
| the intellectually lazy act of crying racial and sexual
| preference with no basis.
| kleinsch wrote:
| Yea, I've found it interesting reading about YC companies from
| this batch that include:
|
| - A scam MMO
|
| - Terminal autocomplete as a service
|
| - A Splitwise clone
|
| - An app that puts your next meeting in your menu bar (for
| $10/month!)
|
| YC gets 5K+ applications/cycle, accepts 1-3%, so they rejected
| 4500+ companies for these?
| new299 wrote:
| I have some sympathy for the difficulty evaluating tech plays
| when "an RSS search engine" turns into twitter.
|
| These ideas are the starting point, but it's difficult to
| tell what they might turn into. Quite possibly they evaluate
| the ability of the founders to shape the company into
| something interesting during the program.
|
| But more than that, they're probability are trying to figure
| out how well the founders will perform at demo day, after
| they've helped them polish the play.
| debarshri wrote:
| We have been following YC's devops companies. It seems like
| they are basically investing in pretty much similar
| companies, which we found a little bit weird. I would assume
| as fund or incubator you would diversify your investments.
| mattnewport wrote:
| Part of the scandal mentioned in the article is the accusation
| that they got in through nepotism and bypassed the usual
| vetting process.
| kemonocode wrote:
| Which is why I suspect the title will be changed, even though
| it _is_ relevant to the discussion.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| It is an editorialized title and should be changed.
| kemonocode wrote:
| The "blatant scam" part, maybe. The fact it's Y Combinator-
| backed is still relevant, though.
| wyxuan wrote:
| To give them credit, dream world has provided a lot of
| entertainment, unfortunately not the video game kind
| Tialco wrote:
| Trash article like the majority of stuff that comes out of PC
| gamer.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Some guys try to basically ATP bootstrap a game concept. And
| there are other guys including the author of the article, that
| want to rip it apart.
|
| If there is a scam, where are the victims?
|
| All I can see here is only a lot of speculative and targeted hate
| and smear that makes me wonder why on earth it is on Hacker News.
| OutThisLife wrote:
| The default UE4 mannequin makes it so much funnier.
| coldcode wrote:
| I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10
| years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today
| (small audience though).
|
| Building something like these people are talking about requires
| more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could
| manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a
| reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to
| manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real
| behavior, even then its hard to maintain the illusion of fluidity
| with the random latency of so many streams using prediction.
| Supporting millions of users like these people claim is fantasy
| even if you only saw a handful. Maintaining state in a single
| world at that volume is impossible with real people (you can fake
| a lot of "AI" characters but not actual players). There is reason
| why most MMO and similar games limit the number of players, or
| like Eve throttle the game time and slow everything down if too
| many ships appear in the same place (not possible in a "on
| ground" sort of world).
|
| Also building something of this magnitude and even getting it to
| do even a small subset of what they want requires people with
| lots of experience, as this is highly complex and specialized
| programming, not to mention an enormous amount of art creation,
| lighting, audio, story and other content, unless you go the No
| Man's Sky route and generate everything. But they don't support
| huge numbers of"local" players either.
| angrais wrote:
| Could you explain how world of Warcraft works then? You can
| certainly have more than 200 in one place at once... Are they
| doing some tricks to make this appear as if it's working but in
| reality it is not?
|
| Would love to hear your opinion.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > 200 in one place
|
| 200 players in one map instance.
|
| But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on
| real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details,
| if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all
| after a certain visibility range threshold.
| MattieTK wrote:
| This was part of the exciting suggestion of the original Stadia
| trailers: with the entire game and all the interactions
| happening in Google datacentres, you would only need to receive
| a rendered version, and suddenly all this would be possible.
|
| Of course none of that has happened and Google folded their
| games studio, which is par for them, but does go some way to
| reinforcing this point that there's a reason this stuff isn't
| done.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| See star citizen for a recent example
| rcxdude wrote:
| Exactly, on the server side player interaction is an N2 problem
| (where N is the number of players who are currently
| interacting). Each of N players need updates on the (N-1) other
| players they can see. And without strong in-game reasons not
| to, players will test the limits, no matter how efficient your
| code (see EVE where despite them making huge improvements to
| their servers and code as well as already using an extremely
| low update rate, player battles are still basically limited by
| how many you can get into a system before the server topples
| over).
| Shadonototro wrote:
| i knew this project was a scam
|
| it was obvious, default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs
| and people asking for 10k to make an MMO, LOL
|
| what people can do for a quick buck, this not only expose the
| pseudo "scripters & asset flippers", but also everyone who
| promoted the project
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs
|
| I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs
| seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more
| software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing
| on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows
| them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later,
| when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around,
| people would be criticizing them for focusing on looks first
| instead of writing game code.
|
| All that said, the rest of the criticism appears damning.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > [DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They apparently had nothing to show
| on demo day, and they were still allowed through
|
| "It's their money" and all that, but if true I do wonder how
| often this kind of 'line-skipping' happens. Maybe an elevator
| pitch and passion is enough for YC sometimes?
| [deleted]
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Of course it's a scam; I'm not there.
| jokoon wrote:
| Its totally possible to make a large online game with proper
| procedural generation of geometry and sharded servers for zones.
|
| It's a bit of work but it's doable.
|
| Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer
| experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or
| background. A game without story is a software product.
|
| Not saying this is not a scam though, but real of the old gods
| proved it was possible to make a real MMO game with just 2
| people.
| kevingadd wrote:
| "Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer
| experience. Online games don't need content or scenario or
| background."
|
| With a few notable exceptions, this is literally not true. Just
| do a survey of all the big money-earning PC MMOs or phone
| games. Picking a random result from page 1 of the google
| results for "best selling MMORPGs" - I'll place their list here
| and comment on it:
|
| Guild Wars: (I worked on this one) heavily story-driven, with a
| PvP mode. Can confirm lots of time and money was spent on the
| story content, and we had a competitor that tried to do our
| thing without the story, and it flopped. We released updates
| almost entirely made up of authored content and stories every
| year or so and they made good money.
|
| TERA: Gameplay-focused with lots of story content. Definitely
| would not have hit without the content.
|
| Planetside 2: One of the exceptions I mentioned - this is just
| a scaled up multiplayer FPS. (I kind of disagree with
| classifying this as an MMORPG, but I'm taking this list as it
| comes).
|
| Black Desert Online: Story focused. Haven't played this one so
| I can't comment in detail, but I've watched enough gameplay
| footage to be confident about this.
|
| Star Trek Online: Story focused (with some procedural content).
| Players are there for the content because they love Star Trek
| and (in some cases) want to role-play as a Starfleet captain.
|
| EverQuest: Somewhat story focused, but not in the way you'd
| normally see it now - more like a MUD with some very heavy
| developer guidance. They literally don't make them like this
| anymore, though, for good reason.
|
| Rift: Very much in the World of Warcraft mold. If you look at
| the promotional content on their website, it is clearly story
| focused even if it has some PvP and cooperative elements.
|
| Lord of the Rings Online: I feel like it shouldn't need to be
| said, but this game is _entirely_ about story content and
| roleplay. When a friend of mine interviewed to join that team
| before getting hired, they quizzed him on the Silmarillion.
|
| Guild Wars 2: Like Guild Wars 1, story driven - probably more
| so than the original.
|
| EVE Online: One of the exceptions - this game is almost
| entirely about roleplay, player vs player combat, etc. It's not
| procedural for the most part though. I'd say this is one of the
| ones closest to a "metaverse". I should note that CCP tried to
| go all-in on building a Metaverse out of EVE, releasing tie-in
| games that shared its universe along with first-person gameplay
| and character customization... and players soundly rejected all
| of it, forcing the studio to go back to focusing on the core
| game.
|
| Runescape: Know almost nothing about this one. Certain it's not
| procedurally generated, though.
|
| Star Wars The Old Republic: See Star Trek Online and LOTR
| above. Story driven, very heavy on roleplay. People came to
| this game for its unique crafted story campaigns for each
| class, and the studio spun up to build it used the name of EA's
| leading story game studio (BioWare).
|
| Final Fantasy XIV: Heavily story driven. Story is why people
| talk about this game. If you look at user reviews or
| professional reviews, they all mention the story.
|
| Elder Scrolls Online: This might have a good amount of procgen
| in it, since Bethesda does use that stuff - but my
| understanding is that this is a story-driven game as well.
| Could be an exception to the rule, I suppose.
|
| World of Warcraft: The textbook example, presumably why they
| put it at the end of the list. Wholly story-driven, every major
| piece of group content has story motivations attached to it and
| the bosses talk to you. They do things like obliterate parts of
| the game world and replace it for the purposes of plot.
|
| Games that are "not about content" are a subset of the larger
| games market, and some of them do make good money. However,
| even the ones that "aren't about story", like say the latest
| Call of Duty multiplayer shooter, are still "about content",
| because they sell you hand-crafted maps to play on and people
| pay money to get the latest expansion or update with new maps.
|
| Anyone familiar enough with the market knows this. It's okay if
| you don't, but I would hope investors would do their research
| before handing money to another "games startup" that's doomed
| to fail.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, there was a notorious reddit thread a
| long time ago with a comment by someone supposedly in the MMO
| industry [1] that echoes your point about content:
|
| > Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-
| produced MMO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to
| create, and it has to be turned around fast
|
| That thread mostly focused on how unrealistic it is for one
| person to develop an MMO by themselves, which is not exactly
| the case here. But it gives a bit of a taste as to why MMORPG
| is one of the most challenging game genres to succeed with.
| "Half of all MMOs commercially developed never release; half
| the survivors immediately fail", and the remaining successes
| almost all have staggeringly huge amounts of art & lore like
| you mentioned.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_inter
| net...
| polytely wrote:
| Thanks for your work on Guild Wars! That game meant a lot to
| me growing up, it's really something special.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer
| experience.
|
| The amazing success and critical acclaim of single player games
| such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Metal Gear Solid series and the
| Deus Ex series, among others, might make you reconsider your
| position on that.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| > Games are not about content, they're about multiplayer
| experience...
|
| Did you play Fallout 76 at launch? Oof. It was terrible.
| They've since added NPCs, but it's really hard to fix a bad
| first impression.
| rcxdude wrote:
| This is very rare in MMOs. Most are not really sandboxes but
| theme parks, where most multiplayer is through interacting with
| the content cooperatively.
| cbsks wrote:
| Previously discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266
|
| If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a scam?
| What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
| gameswithgo wrote:
| The answer to your question in isolation is no. However people
| with some experience in game development would largely agree
| that these people can't have believed they were going to
| deliver it, and YC certainly should have known.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| Theranos believed in what they were originally taking investors
| over.
|
| I don't see why this is not a similar case of fraud if
| investors have not been informed about current expectations of
| their original promise.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The difference with Theranos is they were promising people
| tangible medical results. Clearly, if a metaverse startup
| convinces a bunch of VCs to back them and the venture fails,
| that risk was known from the beginning.
| ska wrote:
| I don't think the point was what the tangible result would
| be, or risk of failure. Everyone putting money into an
| early venture knows that there is a good chance they just
| kissed it goodbye.
|
| The problem is when said venture later lies about progress,
| or otherwise obfuscates, especially to get _more_ money.
| That 's certainly what Theranos did, and I think what GP
| was suggesting happened here.
| qzw wrote:
| They also collected $64K from a Kickstarter while boasting
| about having "secured the majority of our funding from some
| of the best investors in Silicon Valley." So arguably they
| did promise some tangible results to some non-professional
| investors/potential players. Of course, by now everyone
| should know that _Caveat Backer_ is the unofficial motto of
| Kickstarter.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I do think calling this a "scam" is difficult to defend from an
| intent perspective, but it does not appear like it has any
| realistic chance of succeeding. At some point projects cross a
| line from being optimistic to being negligent and deceptive. YC
| should know better and I think using hyperbolic rhetoric is a
| legitimate counter to a company that seems to be sleepwalking
| into failure with other peoples' money.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I am all for investor protection, but "other people" here are
| supposed to be accredited investors. Caveat emptor etc.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I can see why you would say that other investors should do
| their own research, but many people view a YC investment as
| a vote of confidence in the company in question. Your view
| makes me curious about how you think about the role of an
| incubator. Like...are there any lines YC could cross? Does
| their investment in a company reflect on them at all? What
| value do they provide other than seed money to companies?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| YC provides seed money. No one should rely on YC for due
| diligence.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| And people on kickstarter. But it would probably get no
| play here if it were just another pie-in-the-sky
| kickstarter game rather than being backed by YC.
|
| They did say they were backed by SV investors in their
| kickstarter, though, I'm not sure if that had anything to
| do with their success there.
| wmf wrote:
| I would hope that one of the services provided by YC is a
| reality check to convince startups like this to stop
| overpromising.
| krapp wrote:
| No one ever threw millions of dollars at founders with modest
| goals and realistic expectations. Every startup has to be
| changing the world, disrupting the status quo, innovating the
| next big thing.
| serf wrote:
| >If a company promises more than they can deliver, is it a
| scam?
|
| I think I can squeeze water out of rocks. Pay me now to do it,
| and i'll figure it out. Everyone around tells me I can't, but I
| know I can.
|
| >What if they believe that they actually can deliver it?
|
| I absolutely believe I can do it if I set my mind to it. Fund
| my company so we can find out.
|
| Do you see any possible issues with this style of transaction?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Do you plan to license the technology or build water plants
| yourself? What is your advantage relative to desalination?
| ultrastable wrote:
| this is extremely embarrassing for YC. whether or not it's an
| intentional scam, anyone remotely involved w/ the tech industry
| should have seen how implausible the whole project was
| tptacek wrote:
| You're not meant to editorialize titles like this on HN. People
| who submit stories have no more claim to their viewpoint than any
| commenter does. The title here should be:
|
| "This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a
| giant fiasco"
| [deleted]
| serf wrote:
| "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a
| story is spam or off-topic, flag it. "
|
| Feels weird to nitpick scam versus fiasco, but whatever.
|
| I'd be upset either way as an investor, but just flag it if
| need be -- as per guidelines.
| qzw wrote:
| What about the video embedded in the article with the title
| "DreamWorld - Exposing the Scam Game" and "Ultimate Scammers"
| in big yellow 60pt font?
| [deleted]
| tobr wrote:
| If the reason for the rule is to avoid the submitter pushing
| through their viewpoint, this particular case shouldn't be a
| problem. The "Y Combinator" part is a reason why it's relevant
| to this site, and it's not a viewpoint.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game has become a giant
| fiasco
|
| Would be editorialized enough to provide context, but not as
| much of a click-bait title.
| tptacek wrote:
| Submitters don't get to decide why things are relevant to the
| site; that's a hole people have driven trucks through in this
| guideline. The YC angle is a perfectly good comment to write
| (so is the "scam" thing, if that's a case you want to make);
| it's not the title of the story.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's possible to submit stories and a comment simultaneously
| (fill in _both_ the URL and "text* fields on the submission
| form).
|
| An early-entry comment carries a lot of weight in steering
| conversation, and quoting the portion of the story citing
| YC's involvement as well as the alleged fraud would be
| proper.
|
| Unless unclickbaiting titles or working with arbitrary text
| (e.g., a Twitter stream submission), changing titles is
| strongly frowned upon, _especially_ where the source does in
| fact have a viable title.
|
| I'd lose the preemptory "This" from the original source, but
| otherwise recommend the original title be used.
|
| (Meantime, the discussion is now derailed by title
| discussion, which dang will have to clean up.)
| sanxiyn wrote:
| "Scam" is the problematic part. The article avoids the word
| in the title because the article itself says:
|
| > "I think we use the word scam as a colloquial term mostly
| and there's some nuance to this. I don't think either game's
| developers have the actual intention to not deliver."
|
| So it's not a scam, not to speak of blatant scam.
| onli wrote:
| That's a quote in the article. He also said this:
|
| > _" I think for me, the base intent matters very little
| when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone
| throughout."_
|
| If it's true that the game developers promised this:
|
| > _The campaign promises, among other features,
| "multiplayer with the population density of real cities"
| and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction
| points._
|
| Then it's clearly a scam. And both statements really are on
| the kickstarter. There is also this gem:
|
| > _We plan to expand to every internet connected device
| with a screen very soon!_
|
| Ridiculous.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "blatant scam" is editorializing beyond "giant fiasco" and is
| a viewpoint.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Scam = fiasco + company claims. I don't see it as a large
| leap based on the company claims. You could argue that it's
| not a scam as long as they're trying but if what they
| claimed was inherently impossible, I don't think it's a
| stretch.
| akerl_ wrote:
| Thankfully, we don't have to debate whether it's a small
| or large leap. The fact that it is a leap makes it
| editorializing.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I wonder if this post will be deleted
| xmly wrote:
| Nepotism at Y Combinator ?
|
| What is this about?
| ffhhj wrote:
| Favoritism shown or patronage granted to relatives and friends.
|
| But I think this is just an example that shows investment is
| merely gambling.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Not necessarily, the article mentions that YC allegedly never
| even vetted the project:
|
| > According to Upton, a senior employee at Y Combinator
| claims that Bellack has a friend in the accelerator who
| helped greenlight DreamWorld without the appropriate due
| diligence. "Originally, I thought this was a bit of a joke,
| but they called me and validated all their information and
| their sources. This person is actually higher up than just
| investing," he says. "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They
| apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were
| still allowed through."
| sombremesa wrote:
| The big issue relevant to YC is "[DreamWorld] wasn't vetted. They
| apparently had nothing to show on demo day, and they were still
| allowed through" (if true), but the people being affected are the
| LPs who were likely aware such things would happen to their
| money.
|
| Edit: removed the word scam from my comment since I expect the
| title will be changed and then my comment won't make sense.
| new299 wrote:
| I didn't understand this comment in the article.
|
| Demo day comes after being accepted to YC... Do YC ban
| companies from demo day? I thought everybody presented. I can't
| see any reference to them having raised any money at demo day
| either.
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