Are not alphas expected to be broken?
Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
101–110 of 253 posts
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#102I 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 tha…
This makes sense. Forza Horizon 4 with all the money and servers Microsoft can throw at it only supports 79 live humans in the same session. It seems like a small number but with all the real-time variables from cars and liveries to backgrounds and driving behavior, it's an enormous amount of state to manage.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#103I 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 tha…
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 stuf…
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Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#104I'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 strug…
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?
Definitely damaging to the YC brand.
I'd like to see a postmortem on how these _blatant_ con artists got through.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#105So it's a "scam" because they are promising something they can't deliver straight away? Isn't that basically a description of every startup company ever?
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#106I 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 tha…
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 stuf…
Stadia isn't magic though, it just runs on whatever random GPU they have lying around. It was never going to be better than what you can build yourself.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#107I'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 strug…
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?
I've been following YC companies closely for about 6-8 years of data. Before the last big transition, I noticed virtually every founder came from an Ivy League school or something comparable. Their work experience was equally impressive before YC. Other people noticed this too and brought up the lack of diversity and complained. They felt that this strayed from pg's initial goal for YC, which was helping the little guy against the VCs instead of being yet another launch pad for Ivy League alum. Is this the result of YC wanting more diversity (not just gender and race, but for background too like education and experience)?
EDIT: The technical founder came from Apple and Cruise, and he graduated from the Univ of Michigan. He has the same cred as most YC founders. They probably didn't vet them as much since he came from a successful YC company, and I'm sure they talked to his former bosses. YC's system just had a public failure after using what seems like the same process for 15 years.
EDIT: If YC was too careful, Stripe and AirBnB wouldn't have happened. Those guys didn't have any experience in their respective industries either.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
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…
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Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#109If 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.
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
Mirrortocracy describes both that and all attempted illusions of meritocracies. In this industry, at least.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 per…
"Invest in the team" makes some sense when you're talking about bright people with a lame idea (RSS search engine, or whatever.) But in this case the idea isn't merely lame; it's a scam, and the team being invested in are a team of con-artists. What might they pivot to, if not another scam?
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