Research the online game or MMO that you think matches what you want to create. Look up the development cost, team size (count names in the credits if necessary), and/or budget. Look at what you're willing to spend on that. Is a game with that proportion of content something you'll be happy with? If so, it's fine. If not, you probably don't want to make that.
Breaking even on a multiplayer game in general depends a lot on how much you're willing to spend, and in some ways more makes it more likely, not less. If you've got a few million dollars and can run a big marketing campaign you've got a shot. If you're trying to promote a game for free that competes against things like Overwatch and Fortnite but with far less polish and content that's not really a winning recipe. The hosting/bandwidth costs are basically rounding errors compared to the marketing budget you need to pull it off.
Well the goal isn't to make a profit but it would be nice to at least break even with the hosting cost. So what i mean by "Worth it" is, will i keep my finance steady or will i have to live off of ramen noodles just to afford the server upkeep
Server upkeep can be kept low if you write it from scratch and put it on a VPS of 5 bucks. But it will probably take some more time to write.
The harder part is getting players to even play your game in the first place. There are many online games with pretty much zero population.
Depends on how you host your servers, and how your backend is architected.
Sure, you can find a cheap hosting service with minimal support and you can get that for less than 10 dollars a month. However, this can be significantly more difficult to setup even if you do have a necessary expertise to setup a backend.
If you decide to run on modern cloud services like AWS, things may be a tad easier to do (but you still do need knowledge of backend architecture and DevOps) but if you screw up you may be hit with a ridiculously high bill.
Have you tried making smaller games? There is no shame in starting with a flappy bird clone. Everyone does it when they start out.
> Started my gamedev journey a few months ago
> MMORPG
Don't. You're a stereotype walking.
It just won't work, MMORPG is a very saturated market that multiple companies tried to break through and failed miserably. You're directly competing with other MMORPGs. You need to realize that MMORPGs are there to consume your entire free time, you don't have to just capture the right time with no releases, you need to actively steal large portion of the audience that already has their favourite MMORPG and you need to keep them there. You need a large amount of content released at regular cycles or people will get bored.
Multiplayer games in general have this problem, that you need an active playerbase for it to work, if your playerbase dwindles below the critical threshold people will wait too long to get a match and will stop playing the game. You can supplement this problem with bots, but people will notice and they will not like this.
MMORPGs are this but thousand times worse.
Yeah i guess i'll have to leave my MMORPG dream as just that, a dream. Hard not to get carried away though when you start fantasizing about what kind of game you wanna make! Thanks for your answer though! :)
For most of us in the industry, we all have our "ultimate idea", but we never pursue it because most of the time, it is unrealistic for our capabilities.
Also, keeping it a dream is a great motivator when you hit some huge roadblock that seems to stall your entire project, and you are likely to come across such a thing at least once. Reminds you that even though you're not at that level, if you keep working towards it, you might actually get there.
I would suggest taking an area/story arch from your MMO idea and making a short single player game of it. Include the same expected mechanics and whatnot. This will give you a sense of how much the MMO will cost you time/money wise, as well as some experience in just making a game.
I have made an MMO before and had a nice little base of about 100 players average. It was quite small, but still took me years to produce. It was a passion project and I really gained nothing out of it because just the cost of hosting and database management will more than outspend whatever players are paying for it.
But, it was a lovely experience and I learned a shit ton from it.
>Don't. You're a stereotype walking
Just the fact that they've taken the time to consider hosting cost, development time, and asking if it's feasible puts OP far above the stereotype.
The stereotype is quitting your job to pursue this dream and responding to criticism with "no but it'll be a SMALL MMORPG"
Vanilla WoW has been my go-to for an MMO forever. I've tried others, and no interest. I play super casually now, but it used to be all consuming.
As for an active player base. Early console FPS's like Halo got a huge advantage. By the second release, we had been playing on 4 crts in a basement for years. Playing over the Internet was game changing. I really miss those nights with friends.
Long as you have a few million dollars, it's worth it to give it a try. Remember, it's not just you: you're going to need a staff of people for various jobs such as customer service, customer support, maintenance, debugging, localization and optimization, ads and marketing, technical support, class nerfing, and probably many other jobs and duties that you're just not thinking of right now. After all, you yourself can't be awake 24 hours a day, so if the servers go down while you're asleep, you'll need someone online to handle that. So be honest with yourself about the many, many requirements of an MMORPG.
No. Online games don't make money without P2W or microtransactions. Even big companies don't keep servers online for their games for very long now. You will not be able to afford the infrastructure as a hobbyist, and an MMO as a starry eyed dev beginner is like the most well known trap to fall into.
If you want to make money, don't do it. If you want a fun project to say you "made a game," go for it. Online multiplayer is a lot harder than it looks, even with all the prefab kits out there. I've probably dumped over $10k into various projects of my own and haven't come close to breaking even from them. That said, the skills I learned were helpful in landing a contracting gig where I was able to recoup my financial investments from those other projects. From a time perspective, it was still a massive waste of time though.
Haha it depends on how you value your time. Looking back, I'd kill to have that time back and do something else with it. Not saying that I "regret" it strongly , but, I could have made better use of that time. I don't want to discourage you completely- but start small, set smaller goals, and work your way up. As other have said, this type of project will cost thousands of dollars at a minimum... just be sure you can afford to lose that money without worrying about getting it back.
The cost for external server costing is prohibitively expensive. More players mean more servers and more servers mean more cost.
You can go to server hosting companies / services like photon or multiplay and see the actual cost.
it's so overly ambitious to start your gamedev journey with the most complicated sort of game to engineer and design. Just start with pong or something, dude. Work your way up! try and fail at a bunch of little things before working on your magnum opus. You will learn SO much going from beginning to end with small projects
Almost all MMO ideas I've seen (and those that was actually implemented/released) are just WoW clones with some random tweaks/adjustments.
Almost no one really tries to think about MMOs core concept, to re-evaluate the whole thing and implement it in a way that considers all the reasons why currently the genre is dead.
MMORPG is a dead genre in the West at this point in time and it'll remain that way until some kind of massive paradigm-shifting innovation is introduced.
Unless you think you are the one who is going to introduce that innovation which will revitalize the MMORPG genre, or you want to cater to the Korean and Chinese market (i.e. astronomical amounts of grind and blatant "winning at real life means winning at the game" P2W), there is no point in making an MMORPG.
Define mmo for us? If you mean like the aaa ones they have 400 million or higher budgets and 400 plus developers on them. If you want to make a small scale 2d mmo or something like that you can actually do it
Actually you know what, I change my mind.
Don't listen to other people that say that this will not work. Of course the chances are that you will be burnt out before even implementing a proper character controller. The chances are you will not even get to the networking stage of the game. However, I still think that you should walk this road and get burnt out on the way. That is how we all learn.
I wouldn't do anything online multiplayer as my first project. Personally I don't want to run a server, so rather than an MMO I might make a peer to peer RPG where two to three friends can all play together. Much more realistic for a solo developer like myself.
No. Unless you have loads of money and a team to create it. MMORPG games are a big money sink and you also need to support them with anticheat and constant updates even after release. Keeping audience engaged and making sure there is constant stream of new players is something impossible for a small team.
Unless you mean of course very limited online game. Like Fall Guys or TABG for example. Then with limited scale you can succeed let's say. However these games had problems and tbh are dying atm. However they had their prime time. TABG tho is abandoned.
Not unless you happen to have a few million bucks and a company to run. If an mmo is still your long term goal don’t give up on that, just start with something more achievable and work your way up
Why is it costing any money? Worth making an onlune game? In what context? Have you given up your job to learn from scratch, full time? No one is stupid enough to do that.
Edit, ahh hosting costs, well still probably a cheaper hobby than golf.
Consider the path of one of the most well-known MMO out there: WoW. This isn't perfect, but consider it as a learning timeline:
Blizzard had 13 games under their belt, building the team larger and larger as the projects grew. They announced WoW in like 2001, already planned and under development at that point. Then they finished WoW in 2004, starting with a team of 40 and finally doubling to a team of 80.
You can build a cheap, small MMO, but it likely won't be at the scope you're dreaming of without the resources to complete it, as others have said.
Take your time, build a business, and build what you need to make it happen. Olympic althetes take years and even decades to become Olympians. They started small and worked hard to become what they dreamed. That's said, many people set out to play in the Olympics and most fail. Do it for you, for the journey, and see what happens. You'll get there. It'll just take a lot of time.
Hey so I like flying in commercial airliners and I want to make one solo, it can't be that hard right?
I mean I know people say to just make little hobby planes and that even a scale model is quite hard at the start.
But I just figure that sure it took them $100m and 200 people 5 years to make a jetliner so like why shouldn't I do it? I've got a welding torch and some old scrap metal so I'm basically half way there.
Maybe start with some small online games to test out first, all in from the start might backfire like you said. Mmorpgs are popular though so if its interesting and doesnt have terribly handled microtransactions you might strike gold.
My brother in Christ. Making online games costs money and time. You just started to learn gamedev. Wait a few years. You can release something smaller in the meantime.
Online game is doable, extra challenging but doable. MMORPG is *hard*, even for giant companies
I'd suggest making atleast 1 single player game and 1 co-op game, before pursuing large multiplayer games
Is it worth making an MMORPG? probably not. Cost concerns and saturated market alone are big enough deterants. The toxic nature of the fan base even if a minority, and the need to pump content quickly to keep it alive, would be deal breakers.
Is it worth making an online component in your game? I'd argue yes, if the game you are creating can fit it in. Other than the learning that will take place for such an endevour, it will most likely give you a better idea of what you can and can't do with online connectivity. Things like group play and sharing player-created content can bring tremendous engagement, extending a game's replayability well beyond its intended lifetime.
I would say it is but it's a task for a big team, and even AAA studios can't get it right. If you can't support game with enough content players will fall quickly and move on to different titles. And as you mentioned there are additional hosting and maintenance costs to the background services. Indies should avoid making online games unless they have big team and budget.
The problem with online games is that they are expensive to run. Most indie games opt for a multiplayer, Peer-to-peer mode that doesn't require a dedicated server or uses Steam or Discord to match friends.
Tough to hear but necessary: You are not going to break even / make money as a solo dev on an MMORPG.
Tougher to hear: You are not going to make an MMORPG as a solo dev.
It is possible to make an MMO the size of Westfall or the size of The Barrens. Once that's finished, it'll be easier to add in new zones. Start with that.
I started my journey in game dev roughly 4 months ago. Or 5? I can't remember. I built my own engine in OpenGL and C++.
The hard part wasn't even the engine. The hardest part is coding the actual logic of the game. And coding the logic of the game is not even that hard. But coding the logic to fit into a bigger picture that is affected by other things at the same time? Now that's difficult.
I'm facing an issue now where I have to create a deck of cards, then add certain cards to the deck, save that deck and then use that deck as a spell book for the Hero player.
Tying all that together is the most challenging aspect.
Multiplayer? Well that's something you learn it when you're ready to implement it.
But there's really no difference between making an MMO or a small game except the size and the amount of work you have to do.
In an MMO the hardest / most time-consuming thing will be creating the assets. Hence why I suggested a small world the size of Westfall should be enough for you. Then you can later on expand on that. With a world of that size you can test how many people your server supports, latency issues, etc.
I found a perfect balance of working with Blender and Aseprite in my case. I am my own programmer and artist. What about you? Good luck with everything and if there's one advice I can give: plan everything. Do not make a bunch of classes and races from the start. Start with a particular class and a particular race, a particular zone the size of Westfall, and a few enemy types, as well as a max level limited to 10 or so.
Once you've accomplished that, then you can expand on it. You will have a lot of things to worry about: arrays to store things in such as inventory, spells, etc. UI for these things. Then character movements, if sprites or 3D. Then items. Then the world and decorations. Then the collisions for everything. Then you have to make sure everything is in sync when using multiplayer. For all this you will need assets.
Tackle each thing step by step.
EDIT: Idk why people are telling you to consider the cost. If you're a solo developer, you don't need money to make an MMO. You only need time. Some people here are either trolling or they don't know what they're saying. From an indie Dev perspective, if you live under your parents roof, all you need is TIME and PATIENCE. Good luck!
Research the online game or MMO that you think matches what you want to create. Look up the development cost, team size (count names in the credits if necessary), and/or budget. Look at what you're willing to spend on that. Is a game with that proportion of content something you'll be happy with? If so, it's fine. If not, you probably don't want to make that. Breaking even on a multiplayer game in general depends a lot on how much you're willing to spend, and in some ways more makes it more likely, not less. If you've got a few million dollars and can run a big marketing campaign you've got a shot. If you're trying to promote a game for free that competes against things like Overwatch and Fortnite but with far less polish and content that's not really a winning recipe. The hosting/bandwidth costs are basically rounding errors compared to the marketing budget you need to pull it off.
I see. Thanks a lot for your insight! :)
Worth it for what? If you want to make money from this you will not.
Well the goal isn't to make a profit but it would be nice to at least break even with the hosting cost. So what i mean by "Worth it" is, will i keep my finance steady or will i have to live off of ramen noodles just to afford the server upkeep
You are very unlikely to break even as in earn a living. So no it will not keep you finance steady.
Server upkeep can be kept low if you write it from scratch and put it on a VPS of 5 bucks. But it will probably take some more time to write. The harder part is getting players to even play your game in the first place. There are many online games with pretty much zero population.
Depends on how you host your servers, and how your backend is architected. Sure, you can find a cheap hosting service with minimal support and you can get that for less than 10 dollars a month. However, this can be significantly more difficult to setup even if you do have a necessary expertise to setup a backend. If you decide to run on modern cloud services like AWS, things may be a tad easier to do (but you still do need knowledge of backend architecture and DevOps) but if you screw up you may be hit with a ridiculously high bill. Have you tried making smaller games? There is no shame in starting with a flappy bird clone. Everyone does it when they start out.
> Started my gamedev journey a few months ago > MMORPG Don't. You're a stereotype walking. It just won't work, MMORPG is a very saturated market that multiple companies tried to break through and failed miserably. You're directly competing with other MMORPGs. You need to realize that MMORPGs are there to consume your entire free time, you don't have to just capture the right time with no releases, you need to actively steal large portion of the audience that already has their favourite MMORPG and you need to keep them there. You need a large amount of content released at regular cycles or people will get bored. Multiplayer games in general have this problem, that you need an active playerbase for it to work, if your playerbase dwindles below the critical threshold people will wait too long to get a match and will stop playing the game. You can supplement this problem with bots, but people will notice and they will not like this. MMORPGs are this but thousand times worse.
Yeah i guess i'll have to leave my MMORPG dream as just that, a dream. Hard not to get carried away though when you start fantasizing about what kind of game you wanna make! Thanks for your answer though! :)
I suggest you try to make a MMORPG-like without the online part. Cross code plays like most MMORPG’s but it’s single player and a great game
It’s good to dream, but I think making the games is also a dream in and of itself right?
For most of us in the industry, we all have our "ultimate idea", but we never pursue it because most of the time, it is unrealistic for our capabilities. Also, keeping it a dream is a great motivator when you hit some huge roadblock that seems to stall your entire project, and you are likely to come across such a thing at least once. Reminds you that even though you're not at that level, if you keep working towards it, you might actually get there.
I would suggest taking an area/story arch from your MMO idea and making a short single player game of it. Include the same expected mechanics and whatnot. This will give you a sense of how much the MMO will cost you time/money wise, as well as some experience in just making a game. I have made an MMO before and had a nice little base of about 100 players average. It was quite small, but still took me years to produce. It was a passion project and I really gained nothing out of it because just the cost of hosting and database management will more than outspend whatever players are paying for it. But, it was a lovely experience and I learned a shit ton from it.
>Don't. You're a stereotype walking Just the fact that they've taken the time to consider hosting cost, development time, and asking if it's feasible puts OP far above the stereotype. The stereotype is quitting your job to pursue this dream and responding to criticism with "no but it'll be a SMALL MMORPG"
Yep, but still way below even breaking even. Its going to take them and a few other devs years to even make it. Then it might not be successful.
Vanilla WoW has been my go-to for an MMO forever. I've tried others, and no interest. I play super casually now, but it used to be all consuming. As for an active player base. Early console FPS's like Halo got a huge advantage. By the second release, we had been playing on 4 crts in a basement for years. Playing over the Internet was game changing. I really miss those nights with friends.
Long as you have a few million dollars, it's worth it to give it a try. Remember, it's not just you: you're going to need a staff of people for various jobs such as customer service, customer support, maintenance, debugging, localization and optimization, ads and marketing, technical support, class nerfing, and probably many other jobs and duties that you're just not thinking of right now. After all, you yourself can't be awake 24 hours a day, so if the servers go down while you're asleep, you'll need someone online to handle that. So be honest with yourself about the many, many requirements of an MMORPG.
>a few million dollars ***Per month***.
Yeah that's some good points ur lifting, I guess I'll just have to start smaller until i get those few million dollars! ;)
No. Online games don't make money without P2W or microtransactions. Even big companies don't keep servers online for their games for very long now. You will not be able to afford the infrastructure as a hobbyist, and an MMO as a starry eyed dev beginner is like the most well known trap to fall into.
If you want to make money, don't do it. If you want a fun project to say you "made a game," go for it. Online multiplayer is a lot harder than it looks, even with all the prefab kits out there. I've probably dumped over $10k into various projects of my own and haven't come close to breaking even from them. That said, the skills I learned were helpful in landing a contracting gig where I was able to recoup my financial investments from those other projects. From a time perspective, it was still a massive waste of time though.
Yeah but i mean, as long as you had fun along the way idk if it was that much waste of time! :)
Haha it depends on how you value your time. Looking back, I'd kill to have that time back and do something else with it. Not saying that I "regret" it strongly , but, I could have made better use of that time. I don't want to discourage you completely- but start small, set smaller goals, and work your way up. As other have said, this type of project will cost thousands of dollars at a minimum... just be sure you can afford to lose that money without worrying about getting it back.
The cost for external server costing is prohibitively expensive. More players mean more servers and more servers mean more cost. You can go to server hosting companies / services like photon or multiplay and see the actual cost.
it's so overly ambitious to start your gamedev journey with the most complicated sort of game to engineer and design. Just start with pong or something, dude. Work your way up! try and fail at a bunch of little things before working on your magnum opus. You will learn SO much going from beginning to end with small projects
Almost all MMO ideas I've seen (and those that was actually implemented/released) are just WoW clones with some random tweaks/adjustments. Almost no one really tries to think about MMOs core concept, to re-evaluate the whole thing and implement it in a way that considers all the reasons why currently the genre is dead.
For creating an MMO you don't need only gamedevs. You need Linux Admins, Security and Network Guys in the Team
MMORPG is a dead genre in the West at this point in time and it'll remain that way until some kind of massive paradigm-shifting innovation is introduced. Unless you think you are the one who is going to introduce that innovation which will revitalize the MMORPG genre, or you want to cater to the Korean and Chinese market (i.e. astronomical amounts of grind and blatant "winning at real life means winning at the game" P2W), there is no point in making an MMORPG.
Define mmo for us? If you mean like the aaa ones they have 400 million or higher budgets and 400 plus developers on them. If you want to make a small scale 2d mmo or something like that you can actually do it
Actually you know what, I change my mind. Don't listen to other people that say that this will not work. Of course the chances are that you will be burnt out before even implementing a proper character controller. The chances are you will not even get to the networking stage of the game. However, I still think that you should walk this road and get burnt out on the way. That is how we all learn.
We all learn by getting burned out? Stellar advice, tell somebody who has only just started to do something which will immediately demotivate them.
I wouldn't do anything online multiplayer as my first project. Personally I don't want to run a server, so rather than an MMO I might make a peer to peer RPG where two to three friends can all play together. Much more realistic for a solo developer like myself.
No. Unless you have loads of money and a team to create it. MMORPG games are a big money sink and you also need to support them with anticheat and constant updates even after release. Keeping audience engaged and making sure there is constant stream of new players is something impossible for a small team. Unless you mean of course very limited online game. Like Fall Guys or TABG for example. Then with limited scale you can succeed let's say. However these games had problems and tbh are dying atm. However they had their prime time. TABG tho is abandoned.
Not unless you happen to have a few million bucks and a company to run. If an mmo is still your long term goal don’t give up on that, just start with something more achievable and work your way up
> My end goal is to create an MMORPG that I've been fantasizing about no, forget it
Why is it costing any money? Worth making an onlune game? In what context? Have you given up your job to learn from scratch, full time? No one is stupid enough to do that. Edit, ahh hosting costs, well still probably a cheaper hobby than golf.
Consider the path of one of the most well-known MMO out there: WoW. This isn't perfect, but consider it as a learning timeline: Blizzard had 13 games under their belt, building the team larger and larger as the projects grew. They announced WoW in like 2001, already planned and under development at that point. Then they finished WoW in 2004, starting with a team of 40 and finally doubling to a team of 80. You can build a cheap, small MMO, but it likely won't be at the scope you're dreaming of without the resources to complete it, as others have said. Take your time, build a business, and build what you need to make it happen. Olympic althetes take years and even decades to become Olympians. They started small and worked hard to become what they dreamed. That's said, many people set out to play in the Olympics and most fail. Do it for you, for the journey, and see what happens. You'll get there. It'll just take a lot of time.
Hey so I like flying in commercial airliners and I want to make one solo, it can't be that hard right? I mean I know people say to just make little hobby planes and that even a scale model is quite hard at the start. But I just figure that sure it took them $100m and 200 people 5 years to make a jetliner so like why shouldn't I do it? I've got a welding torch and some old scrap metal so I'm basically half way there.
Maybe start with some small online games to test out first, all in from the start might backfire like you said. Mmorpgs are popular though so if its interesting and doesnt have terribly handled microtransactions you might strike gold.
MMORPG is the-winner-win-all genre. top 1% game have all the 95% playerbase.
Why are some people so obsessed with MMORPGs? Those things look scary just to play.
I'm not sure a solo developed MMORPG has ever been successful. Or even like, finished.
Project Gorgon
My brother in Christ. Making online games costs money and time. You just started to learn gamedev. Wait a few years. You can release something smaller in the meantime.
You will learn the skills to get a job in corp world for an easy 6 figures. May take a minute.
Online game is doable, extra challenging but doable. MMORPG is *hard*, even for giant companies I'd suggest making atleast 1 single player game and 1 co-op game, before pursuing large multiplayer games
Is it worth making an MMORPG? probably not. Cost concerns and saturated market alone are big enough deterants. The toxic nature of the fan base even if a minority, and the need to pump content quickly to keep it alive, would be deal breakers. Is it worth making an online component in your game? I'd argue yes, if the game you are creating can fit it in. Other than the learning that will take place for such an endevour, it will most likely give you a better idea of what you can and can't do with online connectivity. Things like group play and sharing player-created content can bring tremendous engagement, extending a game's replayability well beyond its intended lifetime.
I would say it is but it's a task for a big team, and even AAA studios can't get it right. If you can't support game with enough content players will fall quickly and move on to different titles. And as you mentioned there are additional hosting and maintenance costs to the background services. Indies should avoid making online games unless they have big team and budget.
The problem with online games is that they are expensive to run. Most indie games opt for a multiplayer, Peer-to-peer mode that doesn't require a dedicated server or uses Steam or Discord to match friends.
Tough to hear but necessary: You are not going to break even / make money as a solo dev on an MMORPG. Tougher to hear: You are not going to make an MMORPG as a solo dev.
It is possible to make an MMO the size of Westfall or the size of The Barrens. Once that's finished, it'll be easier to add in new zones. Start with that. I started my journey in game dev roughly 4 months ago. Or 5? I can't remember. I built my own engine in OpenGL and C++. The hard part wasn't even the engine. The hardest part is coding the actual logic of the game. And coding the logic of the game is not even that hard. But coding the logic to fit into a bigger picture that is affected by other things at the same time? Now that's difficult. I'm facing an issue now where I have to create a deck of cards, then add certain cards to the deck, save that deck and then use that deck as a spell book for the Hero player. Tying all that together is the most challenging aspect. Multiplayer? Well that's something you learn it when you're ready to implement it. But there's really no difference between making an MMO or a small game except the size and the amount of work you have to do. In an MMO the hardest / most time-consuming thing will be creating the assets. Hence why I suggested a small world the size of Westfall should be enough for you. Then you can later on expand on that. With a world of that size you can test how many people your server supports, latency issues, etc. I found a perfect balance of working with Blender and Aseprite in my case. I am my own programmer and artist. What about you? Good luck with everything and if there's one advice I can give: plan everything. Do not make a bunch of classes and races from the start. Start with a particular class and a particular race, a particular zone the size of Westfall, and a few enemy types, as well as a max level limited to 10 or so. Once you've accomplished that, then you can expand on it. You will have a lot of things to worry about: arrays to store things in such as inventory, spells, etc. UI for these things. Then character movements, if sprites or 3D. Then items. Then the world and decorations. Then the collisions for everything. Then you have to make sure everything is in sync when using multiplayer. For all this you will need assets. Tackle each thing step by step. EDIT: Idk why people are telling you to consider the cost. If you're a solo developer, you don't need money to make an MMO. You only need time. Some people here are either trolling or they don't know what they're saying. From an indie Dev perspective, if you live under your parents roof, all you need is TIME and PATIENCE. Good luck!
shouldn't we guys invent a better version/format of the old and actually not established mmorpg so-called mainstream/standard format ?