As someone may remember i was working on a MMORPG concept which i was thinking of using for making a gamemode for Gmod.
Well, As known the main problem has been and always will be the max players amount and wasted resources in source servers. So to run this thing atleast 6 good game servers for one realm(plus the lounge server, webserver, database and other things which may be required) each able to hold 60(-10) players(which means that 300 players can play in 1 realm, 50 in 1 area.). Right now the concept hasn't exceeded the limitations of source engine which was exactly what i wanted. But the problem is that the servers arent free and at this scale it's going to be expensive to keep these servers.
After going through all the generally used methods to fund the MMORPGs i found out that these methods were not effective enough to fund the whole thing. And that the only working option would be to use the gametime system which means that every player pays something amount of money to play for a month.
So i ask you facepunch, How many of you would be ready to actually pay to play a gamemode?
Many of you may ask: how much? Lets say that opening an account costs 35€ and 30 days gaming time costs maybe 20€ or so, I can't say for sure. I'm just making up these numbers so i could get some answers.
The reason i'm asking this is because most of the garrysmod players are underage and they don't have creditcards nor bank accounts or anything similiar which could be used to pay, even if they wanted to.
So i need an estimation to even know how many players there would be interested to play the gamemode(I can't actually post any concept art or anything like that for obvious reasons. Therefore this is a poll to find out if the players would be ready to pay to play. Not if they would be ready to play a specific game).
In a case where there would be no funds for keepping the servers, the servers would have to be shutdown. Which has lead me to consider using the concept in a different game engine(might be actually cheaper since not so many servers would be required or that there would be more slots for players available, which means that not so many realms would be required. but developing a decent game engine and a server program is a time consuming project. And advertising and other crap would be required which won't really solve the problem since they cost money aswell).
It should only be around $200 of bandwidth to host 300 players simultaneously.
And it would really depend on how well the game was put together.
[QUOTE=DarkSpider;19535355]It should only be around $200 of bandwidth to host 300 players simultaneously.
And it would really depend on how well the game was put together.[/QUOTE]
Well i'm trying to keep the quality good as possible but it's going to be a lot of wasted work hours if there's no one to play it.
The idea of paying for the gamemode will keep allot of players at distance...
buy a server box....
[QUOTE=Roleplay World;19535595]buy a server box....[/QUOTE]
This is a hobby project. Something which i do on my free time when i have nothing better to do. Or when i just feel like it. I try to avoid spending any money on it because in a case where i'd spend money i could just aswell hire people to do all the work for me.
So if there's going to be some funding its definitely coming from someone elses pocket than mine.
Isn't this illegal?
Also, I'm going to be blunt, trying to make an MMO with garrysmod lua is a terrible idea. Lua is a scripting language, Garrysmod is a source mod, and the source engine isn't designed at all for an MMO setting.
Subscriptions are worthless as well. You aren't going to get many people willing to pay per month, and those that are willing have no reason to choose you over a true MMO like World of Warcraft. The only way you would be able to get any subscribers is if you charged a very low fee, probably under 5$, and then you wouldn't get enough money to support the servers. To sum it up, no, that isn't going to work.
[QUOTE=Morcam;19536312]Isn't this illegal?
Also, I'm going to be blunt, trying to make an MMO with garrysmod lua is a terrible idea. Lua is a scripting language, Garrysmod is a source mod, and the source engine isn't designed at all for an MMO setting.
Subscriptions are worthless as well. You aren't going to get many people willing to pay per month, and those that are willing have no reason to choose you over a true MMO like World of Warcraft. The only way you would be able to get any subscribers is if you charged a very low fee, probably under 5$, and then you wouldn't get enough money to support the servers. To sum it up, no, that isn't going to work.[/QUOTE]
No, I don't see why it would be illegal.
And about the subscriptions, That's why i made this thread. To find out if the players would be ready to do such a thing.
Also i have no idea how much it the subscribing would cost, But you're right if it's 5$ a month it isn't going to be enough to pay anything.
Not worth it, no one will pay, this idea is not very good.
This is actually illegal, as said by STEAM in their agreement. Read it sometime.
[QUOTE=1live;19536536]No, I don't see why it would be illegal.
And about the subscriptions, That's why i made this thread. To find out if the players would be ready to do such a thing.
Also i have no idea how much it the subscribing would cost, But you're right if it's 5$ a month it isn't going to be enough to pay anything.[/QUOTE]
It's illegal because you're charging people for a game without having bought a license...
You can run it on donations, though, which is what most servers do.
[QUOTE=Morcam;19538473]It's illegal because you're charging people for a game without having bought a license...
You can run it on donations, though, which is what most servers do.[/QUOTE]
Not a lot of players would donate.
But, if you can host it, host it for free to players, then it'd be a lot more fun and you'd get more users.
[QUOTE=Morcam;19536312]Isn't this illegal?
Also, I'm going to be blunt, trying to make an MMO with garrysmod lua is a terrible idea. Lua is a scripting language, Garrysmod is a source mod, and the source engine isn't designed at all for an MMO setting.
Subscriptions are worthless as well. You aren't going to get many people willing to pay per month, and those that are willing have no reason to choose you over a true MMO like World of Warcraft. The only way you would be able to get any subscribers is if you charged a very low fee, probably under 5$, and then you wouldn't get enough money to support the servers. To sum it up, no, that isn't going to work.[/QUOTE]
But hey, they have managed to do everything else with it, for example that 2D gamemode.
You might have better luck finding someone with a server and convincing them to host it for free.
[QUOTE=hoot14uk;19539383]But hey, they have managed to do everything else with it, for example that 2D gamemode.[/QUOTE]
A 2D gamemode isn't even remotely close to the complexity of an MMO. The 2d gamemodes are just a calcview with a forced direction to your movement. An MMO is far, far more.
How much people are willing to pay to play a game depends purely upon their experience within that game. I suspect the hardest part for you is getting started, you need people to play the game and decide it's worth paying money - some sort of trial period, or demo or whatever. To be honest, as a GMod gamemode, it's gonna have to be pretty impressive to get people to pay for it. Look at communities such as Sassilization and PE, they make enough off donations to pay for servers because people like their games.
I'd suggest getting server box that can have up to 6 IP's and dual quad core xeon's; It'd cost around 200 bucks a month and for 300 players you should be able to run off donations if you reward the players with something good, but not unobtainable for normal players.
[url]www.serverffs.com[/url] have a quad i7 with 12gb's of ram, 2tb of bandwith hosted in the Netherlands for around £100
[QUOTE=Morcam;19536312]Isn't this illegal?[/QUOTE]
Just consider the payment a donation, Here, I'm going to pay you some money to help out the community, and in return I get to pay. It's like paying for services.
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There are a couple ways you could go about this.
1. Make the opening month or whatever free.
It'd be simple. Lets take a Month for this. You klet people play for free that first month. Then ask for feedback and if they'd pay to play, but play like 10 dollars. If enough people pay, you're good. If people dont like it, dont bother.
2. Pay for Premium,VIP,Full Membership,etc
This is the not so good way. Allow people to train there skills or levels to a certain point, or only let them access certain areas, or a mix of that. Let them pay to pass those limits. Personally, only if its REALLY good would I do this.
If you're that desperate for money I have a better solution: Get a job.
That's more likely to work for you than trying to get this community to pay you for a game.
Don't expect to make money with this. If that is your plan you are definitely off track.
I would say your best bet would be starting small. Have a free server with only 40-60 players and see if it succeeds over a few months. If it does not then there is no point in attempting to get a 300 slot server with enough donators to pay for it all.
1.Finish Beta Game Mode
2.Test on a 60 slot server
3.Gauge interest
4.Continue or finish development
Just some thoughts.
I really think the whole mmorpg idea for garrys mod would totally have to be redesigned for the most part. I mean the whole idea isint all that bad, I hate to down any project but if you had to level up to spend the time of getting 6 to 8 prop spawns. I think i might just play the regular Garrysmod ):
And Frigid is totally right.
Heck just try and make a sort of RP_map modified version of your idea.
Well here's the methods that would have made it possible on source engine:
-Running the Gmod as an mod(allowing to replace menu scripts for better visual effects in start menu and such).
-Adding an additional start button which would launch a singleplayer game with the gamemode
loaded.
-Using the IRC servers for:
-chatting
-player movement(theres not anykind of watchdog system here, When the player moves the clientside gamemode script sends the X,Y,Z locations to the IRC server. Everyone in the area channel gets the message. Also the player doesn't just pop out of nowhere when he enters the next area channel. There is a borderline where the player is on 2 channels. This is fairly easy but it makes a big visual difference.)
-possibly other things which don't require verifications
-Using the HTTP servers for:
-battles, drops, constructs and other things which require calculations or database functions.
-Rescaling the player and other objects in the world to give the illusion of a bigger world(The maps are all basically valleys or half valleys. There's just going to be objects around which distract the player from the fact that they're in a closed and limited valley)
-Using HotFix emergency update system(a safe way to download scripts from the server)
But it turned out that some of the methods were not good as i thought(ex: There was no way to permaban anyone, and the orginal plan was to keep it f2p -So theres no way that would have worked out).
Anyway since it turned out that this is impossible to do with Garrysmod due to the legal issues with steam.
[QUOTE=Zcom;19565500]If you're that desperate for money I have a better solution: Get a job.
That's more likely to work for you than trying to get this community to pay you for a game.[/QUOTE]
I'm not desperate for money, It's just something i thought i'd do to learn things. But i'm not willing to pay the servers and later on get hatemail for being too greedy to get more playerslots. As i said i'm not interested of investing money on the project.
But yeah -if anyone comes up with a good plan to afford running atleast 1 realm, it would be prety good for this project(donations, advertising, full membership etc arent a real options since they're not reliable and they usually don't generate enough money to pay server bills. As said running a realm can be very expensive.).
[QUOTE=1live;19535908]This is a hobby project. Something which i do on my free time when i have nothing better to do.[/QUOTE]
If you don't care, I guarantee nobody else will. Also, even if you call it a "donation", selling a gamemode that is played within another game is illegal.
[QUOTE=Benstokes;19572613]If you don't care, I guarantee nobody else will. Also, even if you call it a "donation", selling a gamemode that is played within another game is illegal.[/QUOTE]
Be honest, Did you read the thread before posting?
...Well.. why not do what every MMORPG dose? give one free week to first time players, if they liked this Game mode enough and wanted to play it more, they would be more than willing to pay a sum of money so they can stab and or, burn more things, its what World of War craft dose, one free week, if you like, you join the other billions of people via £8 a month
[QUOTE=1live;19535908]This is a hobby project.[/QUOTE]
Thus you don't care for the community.
If you want to start up a community, you better get some money.
I cant see this going anywhere.
Even if you manage to circumvent valve's rules by saying players are "donating", you're still going to have a hard time finding anyone who is willing to donate.
The Source Engine isn't designed for MMO-type games and it doesn't appear that you really have any progress made at all. This is a pipe dream.
If you want to test your gamemode with a extremely priced server without a paying community you will never get this started. Try making the gamemode a tad simpler(1 server) and get a community.
Or just make an entire Source mod.
Cheaper to buy World of Warcraft and pay for it.
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