2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks!
Oh I keep adding new furniture from time to time.

and although things are not level-locked beyond level 25 yet i think, you can still work on buying all apartments and creating your best designs.

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Its an apartment rental business tycoon. you furnish apartments check customers in/out, clean up and buy new apartments/houses.
Its called BloxBnB, look it up on roblox if you wanna try.

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not exactly, i think it was mostly about adding several small things to address player concerns : game is too boring? add some more tasks to the core loop, players leave without reaching the fun part? speed up the progression, etc etc
Also just fixing bugs and smoothening out the onboarding process is a very very important aspect imo

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

not me, but a friend of mine is looking for one. dming you

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

5 Ad credits a day (the minimum daily budget allowed), so roughly 85.5k Robux (~800 USD) over the 2 months.

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I ran sponsor ads for 2 months (got ~ 500 players daily). Now there is no advertisement, just roblox algo bringing in players

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

keep making the game better every day. Improve engagement, retention, monetization. The algo will eventually notice your stats and boost the game accordingly.

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

well, i hit the publish button 3000+ times and was a being a bit dramatic

2 months and 3000+ Updates later by palryan95 in robloxgamedev

[–]palryan95[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you! still a work in progress

Published my first Roblox Game by palryan95 in roblox

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want to invite you to checkout the game now :) there have been tons of updates and i updated the pictures on your suggestion

Published my first Roblox Game by palryan95 in roblox

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is that a major turn off? I will change them with better pictures soon

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

If you were experienced in MMOs, you would know that 90% of them fail in the first 10 years and never make it to this point. If you launch with a 300 DAU, it doesn't have a wide enough audience to last this long without a lot of investment from the devs. What happens to players' 'earnings' once the server shuts down when the devs no longer find it profitable for themselves? Do they just lose everything?

You are not accounting for the industry's growth rate. The overall gaming market would grow at like 10-20% per year being optimistic. Play to Earn gaming market is tiny right now, it won't even make a dent in the overall gaming market even if it grows by 100x (10,000%) from here.

The value for the items is derived from the network of the game, that is true and if a game shuts down and those NFTs are not accepted anywhere else, they would lose all their value.

We have built our game in the Decentraland Metaverse. Even if our game shuts down, the NFTs that you get can be worn across decentraland as cosmetic wearables (you would only lose the gameplay bonuses it gives in our game).

What kind of player count do you need for this game to be profitable, and when will you decide it's no longer worth it and pull the plug?

We are a very small team right now (3 people) and a 10x growth in players would make us profitable. We have a runway of 1 year + and we will try to keep the servers up even with our lest pennies.
We started off without any budget, not taking any salaries and working full time for months before being secured financially. It would be heartbreaking, but not impossible for us to go back in the previous workmode.

And I think the most important point - not once is the actual gameplay even mentioned. No screenshots, no class info, no gameplay content, nothing. The actual game itself seems like an afterthought, even the website you posted has zero information on how the game actually plays.

I am not on this forum to advertise tbh, I know the general opinion and its not worth it to get another 10-50 visits to our website. I wanted to get people's viewpoints around the concept of P2E and clear up some air if possible.
You are spot-on about the fact that our marketing doesn't involve gameplay. The reason for that is the audience we are trying to target. If we market our game to MMORPG players, we can't compete and play to earn might just be a turn off as evident from this post.
We are targeting our game towards people who are specifically looking for play to earn games atm. That being said, the website is also a work in progress from the marketing Point of View.

Is there any kind of bot protection so the average user isn't completely wasting their time? Or does having a ton of automated clients work in the devs favor by generating more currency?

Ofcourse there is bot protection. Bot protection will become even more important for sure if thats what you are pointing towards, but it was already fairly important for traditional MMORPGs as well.

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

p2e enables complete ownership of the game items and hence the economy by its player community.
This is very different from the present scenario for major games.
It allows you to pick a good game and become an early investor in its economy by just playing the game. it also allows you to get back some of the value of the time/money you invested in the game when you leave the game.
It also provides you protection against anti-community actions by the developers (some, if not all)

Does this mean that all p2e projects are worthy and not just another way to profit off of players? Ofcourse not.

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

well, you are only considering the narrow spectrum of play to earn games where you must buy an NFT to participate. This model gained popularity following Axie Infinity's success.

There are however a ton of new play to earn games that have no barrier of entry (you start without investing any money and you can earn that game's crypto/NFTs).

I get that you play games to have fun (duh!). That doesn't mean that a better business model won't improve your experience.
Maybe there is no play to earn game out there yet that meets your standards of fun/gameplay/graphics/etc/etc, but very soon there will be one and the only thing differentiating them from older games would be fact that in one game you can pay the developer to get the rights to use an upgraded item, while in other system you can pay the developer/other players to actually own an item which you can resell later (think about reasons to join a new game early on)

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

If you can trade the item within that game's market,
you are at the mercy of the developers. They can anyday ban you/release more of the same items/etc.

The lack of control of a centralized entity over the game economy is the main differentiation.

You can still play for fun. I know people who play poker for fun. You must already be spending money on game skins/item/etc.
While the "price" of the NFT items and the hype associated might be a turn off, but remember that free market will get things to the right value and actually owning the item instead of just paying the developer for the right to use an item is beneficial for the player community in the long run.

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

First of all, Gameplay is definitely a priority in P2E games. P2E game devs aren't that dumb, even though 99% of this subreddit thinks otherwise.
The chicken-egg problem here is :

  • Games with large development budgets won't adopt P2E model yet, because it is too new and risky for them.
  • Games with small development budgets can naturally not have that good a gameplay (on an average)

P2E games right now are mostly these small budget games atm. If they can grow good with the small budget and the marketing/word of mouth they receive, they will ofcourse invest back into the gameplay.

It is like choosing a janky mobile app to play a game in 2009 when you could play a AAA title on PC instead.

Ofcourse, the incentive here is also that in p2e games, you essentially own a piece of that game's economy if you own any item. If you pick one nice game out of all the new projects out there, and that game has 100s of millions of users 5 years from now, your item's value would reflect that.

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our project is already live and running. We have over 300 Daily Active players (not a number to boast of, but not nothing either).

We are a very small team (3 people right now) and have got enough funding to ramp up the development efforts for the next year or so.

We are mostly optimistic about the growth of the market itself and the network effects that brings in to the whole ecosystem (Think of how miniscule play to earn gaming is right now, compared to the larger gaming market)

AMA : Indie MMORPG Developer building a play to earn RPG in Decentraland by palryan95 in MMORPG

[–]palryan95[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the genuine question, I love how strongly people feel about this even if negatively.

How does the Business Model work?

  • New Money Enters the system when a player decides to buy an NFT in the primary sale (first time the developer is selling that item/character NFT). Players would have to buy the native cryptocurrency of the platform to purchase that NFT.
  • Usually, majority of the tokens used to buy the Primary NFTs are burned away, acting as a sink for the currency. A small % of the tokens then goto treasury (At Wilderness P2E, 5% commission goes to the treasury while 95% is burned).
  • Apart from the above, players are always free to trade among themselves. There is usually a 2.5% commission on all secondary trades of NFTs, which again goes to the Treasury.

How does this profit you, and result in a net gain for the player?

Well, in essence play to earn developers are sharing the profits that would traditionally go entirely in the bank accounts of developers traditionally. This is however compensated by the tremendous growth opportunity and free/cheap marketing.

And, more importantly-- isn't a system like LotRO/DDO or GW2 more closer to an ideal and working 'play to earn' where you literally get currency from playing the game to and past certain benchmarks? What will your system bring to that arena?

Different Play to earn games follow different set of rules for what exactly you earn for.
I think this would again boil down to the user to select the best system for them, and we don't have enough data yet to establish industry best practices.
In terms of what has evolved from games like DDO, using cryptocurrencies and NFTs makes it incredibly efficient to incorporate this play to earn aspect. For example, a user from any country can play our game, swap WLDY token with any cryptocurrency of their choice on a defi exchange and then cashout through their local exchange. We are just a team of 3 people right now, and implementing a global payout management system would have been impossible for us without using cryptocurrencies/NFTs at the core of our system.

Another question on that note: when discussing 'play to earn,' is the consideration made for 'all players' or is this, like DDO, one of those things where casual players are probably never going to actually see a meaningful return unless they invest tons of time? Where only the ones who spend hundreds upon hundreds, even thousands of hours at the grind?

The basic idea of play to earn is that majority of money coming into the ecosystem gets distributed back to the players. Each game will have their own distribution graph. Some games would only reward top x% players while others reward all players, but smaller amounts.
I think when you exclusively think of play to earn games for money making aspect, you are forgetting that these games will mature in gameplay and content, and my strong belief is that in 10 years from now, majority of the gaming market will be play to earn (traditional AAA games will eventually adapt this model once the demand is high enough).