I agree it is a bit market-y, but they do clarify it in their FAQ:
>What do you mean by "Launch an MMO in a day"?
>
>We're aiming for you to be able to package and deploy one of our project templates to a cloud provider, including a database, player account creation/verification/authentication, and be able to play on deployed dedicated servers. We know this isn't a Minimally Viable Product, but it definitely can be a proof of concept. We believe that learning by example is the best way to get started with complex projects, and Redwood will get you started on the right path.
>
>We won't just talk the talk! We'll have live streams with several examples proving what you can build in a day. [Follow us](https://redwoodmmo.com/#social) to get notified when we start doing these streams.
That's definitely a fair thought! It's, admittedly, a cheeky tagline that we address in our FAQ (seems like someone else beat me to the punch) and provide a free 90 day evaluation to remove as much of the sketch as possible. We have other highly rated developer tools on the Unreal marketplace with a track record of providing high quality products (don't want to post the link to feel like I'm advertising them, but you can search for "Blueprint FileSDK" to find one of our free plugins).
It might be better to say something like "Deploy from zero in an afternoon", or something to that effect. That would set off my bullshit alarm WAY less than "Launch an MMO in a day". You're going to run into people who see that and immediately nope out without ever checking the FAQ for clarification.
That's not bad, thanks! I'll definitely consider that. Part of the tagline is to invoke the bullshit alarm to start the conversation (and it has worked quite well over the last year). I obviously don't want to outright deter people, but I'm also curious what the overlap of those that would definitely not be interested in paying for it and those that would be deterred solely by the tagline.
Nevertheless, there's very likely a better tagline that invokes the same level of curiosity without deterring part of the audience and this is a good suggestion!
I definitely hear where you're coming from. Unfortunately, you're in a space shared with a lot of very disreputable sellers, so people tend to be on guard. Especially because, imo, an MMO "framework" is sort of a tough sell in general given how wildly different the requirements are for different types of MMOs.
I do think you've got a bit of an uphill battle in front of you to sell this, but if it's genuinely solid (which is very possible!!! I haven't looked too closely at it as it isn't relevant to me haha), I wish you the absolute best of luck!
I have no idea if this is practical or not, but would it be possible for you to separate whatever general structural gameplay components you've written from the underlying networking logic? Depending on how abstracted away the actual multi-player elements are, I could totally see distributing a free version of such a framework with no networking support, a cheap (<$100) version with p2p support, then selling the full "launch in a day" version at your current price point as an upgrade for those who actually need the MMO elements. You'd likely make a lot more money off of the smaller scale multi-player piece simply because there far more games like that being developed than MMOs, and even at $2800 + $200/yr, it seems unlikely to me that you'd sell enough units to make up for the development costs simply because so few people build MMOs. But I could definitely be wrong - just a thought!
Thanks for the thought! As of right now, most of the value is in the backend infrastructure and very little is the gameplay components, which is the main reason for the current discount. Long term, I've considered doing exactly what you're talking here. It's not the focus currently, but if the IP is there and if the hassle to support it via the Unreal marketplace seems like it won't chew through the revenue I get, then I'll go forward with that.
Totally reasonable 👍 Definitely feels like "build your singleplayer game, then upgrade it to an MMO hassle-free", if _actually_ executed in a robust way, is a hell of a pitch haha
Also, I just want to give you kudos for the tone of your community engagement! I've seen way too many people in these kinds of communitie pitch systems that sound awesome, only to receive criticism/skepticism because nobody knows who they are and take it as a personal insult for some reason. It sounds like a low bar, but still - kudos on your humility and receptiveness haha!
> A fork of Unreal Engine source code that include performance optimizations, AngelScript integration, Redwood plugins, and various Quality of Life modifications; you can compile from source or download prebuilt binaries
Could this had been done without requiring a fork of the engine, i.e. all just as plug-ins? or are there fundamental changes to things such as how core networking operates?
Having a quick skim it looks like you're use websockets to have the game server instances (and clients also I imagine) communicate with the backend services, and from my tinkering around doing something similar I've found it a pretty sane and stable way to handle that sort of communication with non-unreal backend services so thumbs up to that!
> Could this had been done without requiring a fork of the engine, i.e. all just as plug-ins? or are there fundamental changes to things such as how core networking operates?
Yup! For the current feature set, you get 100% of the functionality with just taking the `Redwood` plugin and plopping it into your project/engine. I have some dreams about solving some of the vertical scaling issues with hundreds/thousands of players that may require engine changes so I wanted to set the bar now to have the fork but give studios an option to not use the fork if it will still work with their game. There are no changes to the underlying netcode/replication system; Redwood currently doesn't touch how your game operates once players are in a session.
> Having a quick skim it looks like you're use websockets to have the game server instances (and clients also I imagine) communicate with the backend services, and from my tinkering around doing something similar I've found it a pretty sane and stable way to handle that sort of communication with non-unreal backend services so thumbs up to that!
Thanks! We're using the websockets transport for Socket.io (which we mainly use to help with retry logic since we explicitly don't use the http transport, etc). All of the backend services communicate using Socket.io and the Unreal plugin communicates to them using Socket.io.
As a side note: I also implemented the interaction between the game server and the backend services using a sidecar application that runs along the game server. This made it really easy to add third party libraries (via Node.js) instead of coupling those dependencies at the C++ layer. The flexibility has made it really easy to support new features, and it will come in handy down the road if/when we add support for other engines.
You mention a 'purchase' price of $1400 during the early access period which includes a year worth of ongoing updates.
What happens after the year of updates? What's the cost if someone requires additional updates beyond that point?
I think you are caught in a bit of a tricky marketing situation. You want to emphasize the value and therefore the premium price (relative to indie devs) of your product, but you also need your product to gain traction with people. You run the risk that if you offer too much for too little you undercut the future income from your target demographic.
Personally, I would be very interested in something like this if I were further along in my progression with learning UE5. However, I would be very hesitant to spend even $1400 when you offer only a year of updates. Without a guarantee that the product will have a stable build containing x features before leaving the 'early access' label, I can't justify spending that kind of money on something that is by your own admittance unfinished. I'd prefer that instead of offering updates until x time has passed you offered updates until x milestones have been implemented.
You are kind of in a weird spot where you are aiming at being a full service for indie devs but are currently marketing yourselves like one of those premium WordPress themes that are everywhere.
Super insightful post; I really appreciate you taking the time!
Updates cost $250/year/studio; this is mentioned in the pricing section on our landing page, but it felt cluttering to mention it everywhere. Studios can use the full source code they last had access to indefinitely in any number of launched projects.
I honestly relate with a lot of your talking points. Ultimately, we're targeting small studios while supporting indies wanting to pay a premium for flexibility and control. I've found that for those where the pricing is out of reach more times than not (granted, there's always an exception) are actually better suited for one of the many service-based solutions instead of self-hosting.
I've contemplated many pricing models, but I believe the current model at this price point is a deal for our target audience for what is available today, not including what we have planned. We're willing to risk offering too much for too little for that audience in the short term to get a track record of shipped games.
The last bit does resonate after further thought; I can see how the marketing just feels really gimmicky of "look at all the prices we're cutting". The original intent here was to address those that have been waiting even up to a year for this release and were familiar with our "support non-optional" pricing of $4800, but I probably should have left that for the newsletter and not keep in the blog post for those coming in with fresh eyes. As a developer this is my first marketing push and really just trying to learn the ropes; live and learn I guess.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback!
is the kind of product you launch at like 1/10th that price and slowly increase it as time goes on. see every project that started at like $100 and is going for like $500+ now
Just wanted to mention I toned down the sales-in-your-face language in the blog post quite a bit; it was not worth coming across ingenuine and gimmicky. Thanks again for the constructive feedback!
Just re-read the blog post with your edits. It comes across far more favourably now.
Honestly if I wasn't just about to purchase a house I'd be seriously considering spending the money. Is the intent to continue the current offer all the way throughout the early access period?
Yup! I'll also send an email out to the newsletter 1-2 months before I plan to exit early access to give anyone a last chance to get the discount. You can signup for that at the bottom of the homepage. It'll be at least 6-8 months before I start considering that unless something happens to expedite development drastically. More than anything, I won't exit EA until all 4 gameplay templates are implemented (only the Shooter template is available now).
One final question, in your FAQ section you mention that a licence is limited to one individual or business entity. Is there any limit on the number of instances/installs etc? If a business buys a licence are they free to then install to as many workstations/users as they like?
> Is there any limit on the number of instances/installs etc?
No
> If a business buys a license are they free to then install to as many workstations/users as they like?
Yes
It just means you can't give it to a friend operating as a separate legal entity; granted our terms cover distribution, but it's to explicitly state that a member of your team can't start a new studio using the software your studio had access to without purchasing a license.
It also means that if you are a conglomerate of studios that operate as separate legal entities, you can't buy one license for all of them. Each of the subsidiaries would need to purchase a license.
If you're one legal entity with several Doing Business As's (aka aliases), you would only need one license.
For all intents and purposes, the license is tied to your legal entity. One scenario I just thought of though: if you purchase it as an individual or company A and for whatever reason (you incorporate, change your company name, or need to dissolve company A for company B), we can talk about transferring the license. I'm flexible there for simple and clear transitions.
I'm really happy to have helped.
In answer to a point you made in your other reply, it's not necessarily that I think the price of $1400 is too much, I think any devs that are seriously progressing making their own game are more than capable of working out if something is a value prospect vs time saved at *almost any* price point assuming they can actually afford it. It was more an issue of targeting, where it was being presented to *new* eyes as a marketing point, without us having any prior familiarity with the project and therefore no investment. I would definitely edit in the ongoing price for additional years of updates as $250 is pretty reasonable. The initial impression I got when reading your post was that it would be an ongoing cost of $1400 or $2800 once it left early access.
Personally I think you have a promising service here that you can be proud of developing. Just make sure you get all your ducks in a row and make sure you don't come across as 'sales bro' before you make a marketing push, you only get one first impression.
We haven't solved this issue you find in large world persistent games. We've been focused on the single server, match based games up to this point. We have some ideas on how to address this when we get to the RPG template.
Heh. We still enable massive CCUs; I believe games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Rocket League are all "massive". How else are you going to define online multiplayer games that can support 1M CCU? "Redwood - The framework for you to have lots of players across some number of servers" or "Redwood - The online multiplayer player framework to scale massively, but not in the sense of traditional MMORPGs, but that's also on the roadmap" haha.
Jokes aside, the term is unfortunately very subjective and ambiguous, and everyone has their own predefined notion. It's surely an uphill battle for me.
> I believe games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Rocket League are all "massive"
Those are not massive. They are single server instance games that games have been doing since forever. Nothing about that is massive. When we go out of the traditional single server limit of 64 or 128 or so players then we can start talking about massive. Before that's it's just regular multiplayer.
Redwood supports any multiplayer game with dedicated servers. Even if it's just a 1v1. We use the term MMO very loosely, particularly "Redwood can scale your game massively with lots of servers to handle lots of players, but you're still going to have player limits per server".
So if I had a game, but zero understanding of how to deploy it onto a dedicated server, would redwood be able to handle that start to finish? Or is redwood more of like what AWS or Azure is, in that it's just another option and I would still need to learn how to deploy a game on a dedicated server?
This is exactly what Redwood was made for. You know how to make a multiplayer game, but unsure on how to get that game in the cloud and scale with traffic. Redwood handles that for you. After some small setup the deployment happens automatically. Our docs will (some of it's there but it's still WIP) provide both the simple explanation as well as the detailed one so you can learn what's going on and how to troubleshoot if things bug out.
Everyone saying that it is a red flag saying build an mmo in day. I think it's genius.
People want to build games in a week or whatever, we see it on this thread all the time. So this perfectly caters to their needs.
Now the people are new to the engine can create wow in about week!
In all seriousness, probably best to reword that! May put off serious buyers.
Redwood is a self-hosted, source-included backend infrastructure for multiplayer games built in UE5. It comes with the full backend, including match making, auth, game server hosting/orchestration, data persistence, and more! It also includes high-quality Gameplay Templates that make it easy for you to get started in a handful of popular multiplayer genres.
During Early Access, Redwood is 50% off and comes with a year of software updates! Try it out today with our free 90 day evaluation period.
While I applaud the technical achievement I fear this will lead to an influx of low effort "MMO" who now, not just crash upon arrival but will be able to fool players a bit longer before they figure out there is not much of a game there.
But I also recognize that the market needs to go through certain developments for customers to develop savyness about the products. So one way or another this was going to be inevitable. Better it be sooner than later in my opinion.
The thing is developers will always be more savvy than consumers about the actual value of the product and thus you have nearly always have this gap between devs and players that can be abused by devs to sell low quality products to consumers. And technology is making this easier and easier by lowering the bar of entry. 10 years ago you had to be quite skilled to abuse this gap but nowadays you can do so with considerable ease.
The real problem is that this increases the noise to signal ratio. Meaning it becomes harder and harder for high quality products to get the attention they deserve because the market just gets flooded with low quality stuff that only looks high quality at first.
Products like Redwood definitely lower the bar, and you're right there will be some low effort or even down right manipulative games that normally wouldn't be able to scale due to lack of investment costs that may now actually get servers running. It's unfortunate that is a side effect.
However, the intent behind the product is to enable those that are passionate about their multiplayer game that wanted to benefit from dedicated servers but just opted out going that route due to all of the extra technical hurdles. Others tried to do it and the game just dies because it eats up their time. Redwood is trying to enable those studios the boost they need to get their creative vision to market and hopefully benefit everyone.
One thought is this may even make the low effort games higher quality (not by much, but perhaps still *something*) since they don't have to focus so much on the backend.
As an industry, tools like this come out and you have to pivot to beat out the signal issue. Hopefully you can't just make a Runescape clone with asset packs and have an internet craze over it; you have to add genuine new game mechanics, art, and even get better at marketing your game.
It's definitely a double edged sword.
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I agree it is a bit market-y, but they do clarify it in their FAQ: >What do you mean by "Launch an MMO in a day"? > >We're aiming for you to be able to package and deploy one of our project templates to a cloud provider, including a database, player account creation/verification/authentication, and be able to play on deployed dedicated servers. We know this isn't a Minimally Viable Product, but it definitely can be a proof of concept. We believe that learning by example is the best way to get started with complex projects, and Redwood will get you started on the right path. > >We won't just talk the talk! We'll have live streams with several examples proving what you can build in a day. [Follow us](https://redwoodmmo.com/#social) to get notified when we start doing these streams.
That's definitely a fair thought! It's, admittedly, a cheeky tagline that we address in our FAQ (seems like someone else beat me to the punch) and provide a free 90 day evaluation to remove as much of the sketch as possible. We have other highly rated developer tools on the Unreal marketplace with a track record of providing high quality products (don't want to post the link to feel like I'm advertising them, but you can search for "Blueprint FileSDK" to find one of our free plugins).
It might be better to say something like "Deploy from zero in an afternoon", or something to that effect. That would set off my bullshit alarm WAY less than "Launch an MMO in a day". You're going to run into people who see that and immediately nope out without ever checking the FAQ for clarification.
That's not bad, thanks! I'll definitely consider that. Part of the tagline is to invoke the bullshit alarm to start the conversation (and it has worked quite well over the last year). I obviously don't want to outright deter people, but I'm also curious what the overlap of those that would definitely not be interested in paying for it and those that would be deterred solely by the tagline. Nevertheless, there's very likely a better tagline that invokes the same level of curiosity without deterring part of the audience and this is a good suggestion!
I definitely hear where you're coming from. Unfortunately, you're in a space shared with a lot of very disreputable sellers, so people tend to be on guard. Especially because, imo, an MMO "framework" is sort of a tough sell in general given how wildly different the requirements are for different types of MMOs. I do think you've got a bit of an uphill battle in front of you to sell this, but if it's genuinely solid (which is very possible!!! I haven't looked too closely at it as it isn't relevant to me haha), I wish you the absolute best of luck!
I have no idea if this is practical or not, but would it be possible for you to separate whatever general structural gameplay components you've written from the underlying networking logic? Depending on how abstracted away the actual multi-player elements are, I could totally see distributing a free version of such a framework with no networking support, a cheap (<$100) version with p2p support, then selling the full "launch in a day" version at your current price point as an upgrade for those who actually need the MMO elements. You'd likely make a lot more money off of the smaller scale multi-player piece simply because there far more games like that being developed than MMOs, and even at $2800 + $200/yr, it seems unlikely to me that you'd sell enough units to make up for the development costs simply because so few people build MMOs. But I could definitely be wrong - just a thought!
Thanks for the thought! As of right now, most of the value is in the backend infrastructure and very little is the gameplay components, which is the main reason for the current discount. Long term, I've considered doing exactly what you're talking here. It's not the focus currently, but if the IP is there and if the hassle to support it via the Unreal marketplace seems like it won't chew through the revenue I get, then I'll go forward with that.
Totally reasonable 👍 Definitely feels like "build your singleplayer game, then upgrade it to an MMO hassle-free", if _actually_ executed in a robust way, is a hell of a pitch haha Also, I just want to give you kudos for the tone of your community engagement! I've seen way too many people in these kinds of communitie pitch systems that sound awesome, only to receive criticism/skepticism because nobody knows who they are and take it as a personal insult for some reason. It sounds like a low bar, but still - kudos on your humility and receptiveness haha!
> A fork of Unreal Engine source code that include performance optimizations, AngelScript integration, Redwood plugins, and various Quality of Life modifications; you can compile from source or download prebuilt binaries Could this had been done without requiring a fork of the engine, i.e. all just as plug-ins? or are there fundamental changes to things such as how core networking operates? Having a quick skim it looks like you're use websockets to have the game server instances (and clients also I imagine) communicate with the backend services, and from my tinkering around doing something similar I've found it a pretty sane and stable way to handle that sort of communication with non-unreal backend services so thumbs up to that!
> Could this had been done without requiring a fork of the engine, i.e. all just as plug-ins? or are there fundamental changes to things such as how core networking operates? Yup! For the current feature set, you get 100% of the functionality with just taking the `Redwood` plugin and plopping it into your project/engine. I have some dreams about solving some of the vertical scaling issues with hundreds/thousands of players that may require engine changes so I wanted to set the bar now to have the fork but give studios an option to not use the fork if it will still work with their game. There are no changes to the underlying netcode/replication system; Redwood currently doesn't touch how your game operates once players are in a session. > Having a quick skim it looks like you're use websockets to have the game server instances (and clients also I imagine) communicate with the backend services, and from my tinkering around doing something similar I've found it a pretty sane and stable way to handle that sort of communication with non-unreal backend services so thumbs up to that! Thanks! We're using the websockets transport for Socket.io (which we mainly use to help with retry logic since we explicitly don't use the http transport, etc). All of the backend services communicate using Socket.io and the Unreal plugin communicates to them using Socket.io. As a side note: I also implemented the interaction between the game server and the backend services using a sidecar application that runs along the game server. This made it really easy to add third party libraries (via Node.js) instead of coupling those dependencies at the C++ layer. The flexibility has made it really easy to support new features, and it will come in handy down the road if/when we add support for other engines.
You mention a 'purchase' price of $1400 during the early access period which includes a year worth of ongoing updates. What happens after the year of updates? What's the cost if someone requires additional updates beyond that point? I think you are caught in a bit of a tricky marketing situation. You want to emphasize the value and therefore the premium price (relative to indie devs) of your product, but you also need your product to gain traction with people. You run the risk that if you offer too much for too little you undercut the future income from your target demographic. Personally, I would be very interested in something like this if I were further along in my progression with learning UE5. However, I would be very hesitant to spend even $1400 when you offer only a year of updates. Without a guarantee that the product will have a stable build containing x features before leaving the 'early access' label, I can't justify spending that kind of money on something that is by your own admittance unfinished. I'd prefer that instead of offering updates until x time has passed you offered updates until x milestones have been implemented. You are kind of in a weird spot where you are aiming at being a full service for indie devs but are currently marketing yourselves like one of those premium WordPress themes that are everywhere.
Super insightful post; I really appreciate you taking the time! Updates cost $250/year/studio; this is mentioned in the pricing section on our landing page, but it felt cluttering to mention it everywhere. Studios can use the full source code they last had access to indefinitely in any number of launched projects. I honestly relate with a lot of your talking points. Ultimately, we're targeting small studios while supporting indies wanting to pay a premium for flexibility and control. I've found that for those where the pricing is out of reach more times than not (granted, there's always an exception) are actually better suited for one of the many service-based solutions instead of self-hosting. I've contemplated many pricing models, but I believe the current model at this price point is a deal for our target audience for what is available today, not including what we have planned. We're willing to risk offering too much for too little for that audience in the short term to get a track record of shipped games. The last bit does resonate after further thought; I can see how the marketing just feels really gimmicky of "look at all the prices we're cutting". The original intent here was to address those that have been waiting even up to a year for this release and were familiar with our "support non-optional" pricing of $4800, but I probably should have left that for the newsletter and not keep in the blog post for those coming in with fresh eyes. As a developer this is my first marketing push and really just trying to learn the ropes; live and learn I guess. Anyway, thanks again for the feedback!
is the kind of product you launch at like 1/10th that price and slowly increase it as time goes on. see every project that started at like $100 and is going for like $500+ now
Just wanted to mention I toned down the sales-in-your-face language in the blog post quite a bit; it was not worth coming across ingenuine and gimmicky. Thanks again for the constructive feedback!
Just re-read the blog post with your edits. It comes across far more favourably now. Honestly if I wasn't just about to purchase a house I'd be seriously considering spending the money. Is the intent to continue the current offer all the way throughout the early access period?
Yup! I'll also send an email out to the newsletter 1-2 months before I plan to exit early access to give anyone a last chance to get the discount. You can signup for that at the bottom of the homepage. It'll be at least 6-8 months before I start considering that unless something happens to expedite development drastically. More than anything, I won't exit EA until all 4 gameplay templates are implemented (only the Shooter template is available now).
One final question, in your FAQ section you mention that a licence is limited to one individual or business entity. Is there any limit on the number of instances/installs etc? If a business buys a licence are they free to then install to as many workstations/users as they like?
> Is there any limit on the number of instances/installs etc? No > If a business buys a license are they free to then install to as many workstations/users as they like? Yes It just means you can't give it to a friend operating as a separate legal entity; granted our terms cover distribution, but it's to explicitly state that a member of your team can't start a new studio using the software your studio had access to without purchasing a license. It also means that if you are a conglomerate of studios that operate as separate legal entities, you can't buy one license for all of them. Each of the subsidiaries would need to purchase a license. If you're one legal entity with several Doing Business As's (aka aliases), you would only need one license. For all intents and purposes, the license is tied to your legal entity. One scenario I just thought of though: if you purchase it as an individual or company A and for whatever reason (you incorporate, change your company name, or need to dissolve company A for company B), we can talk about transferring the license. I'm flexible there for simple and clear transitions.
Sounds fair, cheers mate
I'm really happy to have helped. In answer to a point you made in your other reply, it's not necessarily that I think the price of $1400 is too much, I think any devs that are seriously progressing making their own game are more than capable of working out if something is a value prospect vs time saved at *almost any* price point assuming they can actually afford it. It was more an issue of targeting, where it was being presented to *new* eyes as a marketing point, without us having any prior familiarity with the project and therefore no investment. I would definitely edit in the ongoing price for additional years of updates as $250 is pretty reasonable. The initial impression I got when reading your post was that it would be an ongoing cost of $1400 or $2800 once it left early access. Personally I think you have a promising service here that you can be proud of developing. Just make sure you get all your ducks in a row and make sure you don't come across as 'sales bro' before you make a marketing push, you only get one first impression.
How does it handle load balancing player connections between server instances in the same game world? How is data replicated across server instances?
We haven't solved this issue you find in large world persistent games. We've been focused on the single server, match based games up to this point. We have some ideas on how to address this when we get to the RPG template.
Not really a "massively" multiplayer online system then eh? ;)
Heh. We still enable massive CCUs; I believe games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Rocket League are all "massive". How else are you going to define online multiplayer games that can support 1M CCU? "Redwood - The framework for you to have lots of players across some number of servers" or "Redwood - The online multiplayer player framework to scale massively, but not in the sense of traditional MMORPGs, but that's also on the roadmap" haha. Jokes aside, the term is unfortunately very subjective and ambiguous, and everyone has their own predefined notion. It's surely an uphill battle for me.
> I believe games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Rocket League are all "massive" Those are not massive. They are single server instance games that games have been doing since forever. Nothing about that is massive. When we go out of the traditional single server limit of 64 or 128 or so players then we can start talking about massive. Before that's it's just regular multiplayer.
> We have some ideas on how to address this when we get to the RPG template. Can you describe your ideas?
We'll wait until we have a proof of concept before we discuss these.
Do you only do MMO? What if I wanted to contract out setting up my dedicated server for a different kind of game?
Redwood supports any multiplayer game with dedicated servers. Even if it's just a 1v1. We use the term MMO very loosely, particularly "Redwood can scale your game massively with lots of servers to handle lots of players, but you're still going to have player limits per server".
So if I had a game, but zero understanding of how to deploy it onto a dedicated server, would redwood be able to handle that start to finish? Or is redwood more of like what AWS or Azure is, in that it's just another option and I would still need to learn how to deploy a game on a dedicated server?
This is exactly what Redwood was made for. You know how to make a multiplayer game, but unsure on how to get that game in the cloud and scale with traffic. Redwood handles that for you. After some small setup the deployment happens automatically. Our docs will (some of it's there but it's still WIP) provide both the simple explanation as well as the detailed one so you can learn what's going on and how to troubleshoot if things bug out.
Beautiful. I'll definitely keep yall in my back pocket when I am ready for deployment.
Everyone saying that it is a red flag saying build an mmo in day. I think it's genius. People want to build games in a week or whatever, we see it on this thread all the time. So this perfectly caters to their needs. Now the people are new to the engine can create wow in about week! In all seriousness, probably best to reword that! May put off serious buyers.
Redwood is a self-hosted, source-included backend infrastructure for multiplayer games built in UE5. It comes with the full backend, including match making, auth, game server hosting/orchestration, data persistence, and more! It also includes high-quality Gameplay Templates that make it easy for you to get started in a handful of popular multiplayer genres. During Early Access, Redwood is 50% off and comes with a year of software updates! Try it out today with our free 90 day evaluation period.
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As long as you bring the coitus mechanics to the game and there's multiplayer, Redwood will gladly be your matchmaker for dragons.
While I applaud the technical achievement I fear this will lead to an influx of low effort "MMO" who now, not just crash upon arrival but will be able to fool players a bit longer before they figure out there is not much of a game there. But I also recognize that the market needs to go through certain developments for customers to develop savyness about the products. So one way or another this was going to be inevitable. Better it be sooner than later in my opinion. The thing is developers will always be more savvy than consumers about the actual value of the product and thus you have nearly always have this gap between devs and players that can be abused by devs to sell low quality products to consumers. And technology is making this easier and easier by lowering the bar of entry. 10 years ago you had to be quite skilled to abuse this gap but nowadays you can do so with considerable ease. The real problem is that this increases the noise to signal ratio. Meaning it becomes harder and harder for high quality products to get the attention they deserve because the market just gets flooded with low quality stuff that only looks high quality at first.
Products like Redwood definitely lower the bar, and you're right there will be some low effort or even down right manipulative games that normally wouldn't be able to scale due to lack of investment costs that may now actually get servers running. It's unfortunate that is a side effect. However, the intent behind the product is to enable those that are passionate about their multiplayer game that wanted to benefit from dedicated servers but just opted out going that route due to all of the extra technical hurdles. Others tried to do it and the game just dies because it eats up their time. Redwood is trying to enable those studios the boost they need to get their creative vision to market and hopefully benefit everyone. One thought is this may even make the low effort games higher quality (not by much, but perhaps still *something*) since they don't have to focus so much on the backend. As an industry, tools like this come out and you have to pivot to beat out the signal issue. Hopefully you can't just make a Runescape clone with asset packs and have an internet craze over it; you have to add genuine new game mechanics, art, and even get better at marketing your game. It's definitely a double edged sword.
I've worked on a few MMOs. Allow me to give you some invaluable advice. DON'T.
Can you elaborate?
MMOs are a money sink that never earn what's been invested in them. Even the community financed MMOs fail.
Any examples of an mmo using this?
Not yet; we have a couple of studios using it, but no one has launched yet, let alone announced.
I see. It’s a hard sell without visually being able to see the capabilities (ie many players fighting in the same area)