Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a strange thing to hear. Even I can tell you that many more than "two" YC companies have become profitable, and I'm pretty removed from the business side of YC.
Which ones? There are only two public companies that currently make a profit that I'm aware of: dropbox and coinbase. I don't really pay much attention, but that's all I can think of at the moment.
Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
211–220 of 253 posts
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#212I'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…
The real skill is in (a) raising funds from LPs, and (b) creating a wide enough deal funnel to service it.
The individual investments aren’t that important, just like a single bet doesn’t matter when you’re playing poker. It’s more about spreading the money over as many hands as possible and letting your mathematical advantage do the rest.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
"Invest in the team" gets you Juicero. Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money. Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art. Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™! Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out o…
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#214YC never claimed to have a perfect selection process. I wouldn’t hold them accountable for the teams they pick based on a business plan and a 10 min discussion. Its just a good guess. If they doubled down on the team after demo day, then I am with you. Compare this with hiring. I have heard successful people say they do get 1 in 5 hires wrong, even after a process which is 10x more thorough.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Stadia et al. your computer sends keystrokes and mouse movements to Google's servers, and the server returns a video feed that's then displayed on your screen. Today's multiplayer games send and receive movement information and such, but the graphics rendering, which I believe is the main issue here, is still done client-side.
I don’t think graphics rendering is really the problem — worst comes to worst, you just reduce graphical fidelity — and regardless, rendering 300 AI characters roaming around is clearly doable, and it’d be the same with viewing real players. It’s a client-side problem, and doesn’t have to really scale much with player count (Stadia’s main pitch was that you didn’t need high end PCs to play AAA games — not that it wou…
We know this because what this game is trying to do is done already a long time ago. It's a description of the original vision for Second Life. In fact Second Life was explicitly an attempt to create "the metaverse", with all user-generated content. Linden Labs used to write about the challenges they faced in making that vision real so we have a good idea of where the challenges really lie, or at least did 10-15 years ago.
First problem: physics. LL sharded their world, which was indeed infinite. The problem is each shard required its own dedicated high end server, which made "land" extremely expensive. Amazingly, people bought it anyway, LL developed a small but extremely rich customer base who were willing to literally rent high end (what would be today) cloud VMs just to have a very small space to call their own online. For a brief period it was also trendy for companies to open up spaces in Second Life.
The reason land was so expensive was that physics (collision detection and movement, mostly) required the server to constantly iterate every object within the zone and the calculations scaled with number of objects. Shutting down physics when nobody was there also wasn't possible because the metaverse concept implied allowing arbitrary scripting, and scripts frequently expected the world to keep running even if nobody was there. The answer in SL to "if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound" was a resounding yes.
The second big problem they faced was that user generated 3D content was extremely un-optimized. The biggest complaint users had about SL was always performance. Eventually they gave up promising to improve it and came clean with the userbase: SL was slow and always would be because users kept making slow content. In particular SL was set mostly outdoors, and even when indoors, people loved doing things like creating semi-transparent windows. The ability for any object to change at any moment (users created content in-game) also implied they couldn't use all the "baking" techniques professional games use to optimize rendering. So the rendering algorithms had to be very primitive, and there was lots of overdraw, so SL really chugged even when drawing scenes that looked very basic compared to what high end games could do. And of course hobbyist metaverse users are not pro grade 3D artists so they tended to make a lot of ugly stuff anyway.
So syncing player data was certainly a sub-challenge, but compared to the difficulties posed by cost effective sharded physics and totally un-optimizable 3D scenes, it wasn't that big a deal.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#216Previously 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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
The Lesson of Peter Molyneux
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...
Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
A contemporary broadband connection can manage way more than 100 simultaneous characters. You only need to send an updated position and direction on every frame, which can fit in 10 bytes (16-bit screen space fixed point coordinates, 3 position coordinates + 1 orientation + one 16-bit animation/action ID). With a 100mbps connection you can send 160 KB per frame at 60fps and thus support 16K characters.
100mbps is much much faster than a the majority of consumer broadband connections, I don’t think that’s a particularly realistic figure. Don’t these games have to support a lowest common denominator type speed rather than a fantastic one? I’m not in game dev so not sure if there’s ways to get around things like that
A "fantastic" customer connection speed currently would be 2.5gbps or 10gbps.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 extr…
Is this really true? I would imagine you get something more like Zipf’s law in practice, N log N. Even if there were interactions between everyone, presumably you could still exploit locality, like: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/aaai10b.pdf
But even within an area you can cut down on the n^2 in various ways, with one set of estabilished techniques cutting down server side compute and other set for network communications.
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Invest in the team" gets you Juicero. Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money. Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art. Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™! Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out o…
The Juicero was very overbuilt, I know because I watched the AvE video, but isn't that a sign of amateur engineering? I'm thinking of the old saying that anybody can make a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
>it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
Engineers do not build bridges that barely stand. They build bridges that they reason will stand for an amount of time in the conditions they predict the bridge will be subject to versus the cost required to build said bridge. They build realizing that no bridge will stand forever but it must stand for a specified amount of time.
They build to "Correct",
Not "Perfect"
Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the people downvoting me, I only said that because his response was directly about somebody mentioning World of Warcraft. In WoW, if they only limited you to seeing 50 people the game would feel completely different when you go into cities and do open world PVP and such. It would literally break the game. In fact when they released WoW Classic they had a new technology they called layering where even if you were i…
On HN to uphold civil discussion it’s best to avoid dismissive references and assumptions directed at “you”. Best to address the idea alone with your example/argument, rather than the imagined speaker. Otherwise it can be interpreted as needlessly antagonistic and will be downvoted.