I want to make an MMO and I checked the minimum budget

So, what is the minimum budget you found? How many million? (Dollars.) (US.)

Lol for a decent one between 2 and 30 milion, that's coins

I understand where you're coming from, I just want to use the combat system and the concept of it all but changing the things that wouldn't get me on copyright problems. That's basically why I am asking, I want to make an MMO and I checked the minimum budget, I am a total mmo fanboy and it's the only genre that interests me because it basically has no bounds for improvement. Main reason for this is not to make profit, is to make MMOs great again, and I am sure that when going for something that is non profit always can come out as something amazing.

Okay... so not REALLY a remake, more of a "spiritual successor". Ok. That actually shouldn't get you in hot waters (might still want to check that there are no patents on gameplay elements of said game, if you want to be extra safe).

I reckon you might have a much better chance of ever achieving this with a small budget by dropping the MASSIVELY from MMO.

Just cut the expectations from 1000's of concurrent users per server to some hundreds, and your budget can be 10x times lower (or so, just throwing numbers out there).

So you could create a game with the same gameplay elements (which in an MMO usually are really "dumbed down" to reduce the stress on the server which has to do all those calculations... thus are not what will make your game expensive to create and run), and still have an online multiplayer at its center (this will make the game harder and more expensive to create, but not in the same order as an MMO), just with fewer people logged unto the same server, no clustering to "simulate" one big fat server (few MMO servers AFAIK can handle the 100'000s or millions of players that are concurrently online in some of the biggest MMOs, thus sharding or clustering), no 1000 players seeing each other in the same zone, or 10'000 players making walking through the city a slow grind because while the server might handle it, your client and your anemic Hardware isn't.

Just a few 100 players on your server to get that mutliplayer feeling, and showing the potential of your game should you get more funding to increase the concurrency your game could handle.

Just my 2 cents

alright so responding to 1st game example. This might be a very good game and have everything other games have but it doesn't have the simplest thing, first impression a.k.a presentable website, it looks like it was done with ms paint and basic code. The second game even from watching it for 2 minutes I can easily see that it will get boring after 10hours. Currently new games have "clickbait" taking no man's sky for example, it was hyped up and the creators baited people saying what audience wanted to hear, they made more money then they spent making it and it's now a regular SP game.. I fully understand all of the people above and I know this is like mission impossible but is gaming community became so generic and predictable? The game this thread was created for is Aion Online which had something different including rifts, unique combat, pve/pvp and a fly mechanism. I think currently the world is lacking a game like WoW that will make people spend time rather than money, most of the gaming communities are very toxic and I think it's just because everyone forgot how to do things together, everyone is just separated between p2w people and casuals.

Well, Conquestor still has a point though... MMOs struggle in todays market for a multitude of reasons.

The first and foremost being that while with other games, people play them for 10-80 hours, and then are in the market again for a new game (unless a massive fan puts 1000's of hours into driving over people in GTA 5), for MMOs one MMO can engage a player for years. A really dedicated MMO player might play 5 MMOs concurrently, but at about that point even the most dedicated MMO player will be completly booked with 5 different communities, and 5 different games keeping him busy for 5+ years.

He might switch an MMO for another every 2 years. Thats about it.

How many MMOs can survive in this market where maybe the top 10, maybe top 20 of MMOs get 95% of the players attention, because players just don't have time for other MMOs?

Then there is the cost which we talked in length about. But given only the top N MMO games get most of the MMO players time, attention and thus, at the end, money, how much money is left in the market for the less wellknown MMOs to claim for themselves?

I know you are not interested in money, but running an MMO is expensive, and developing one even more so. You WILL need a source of income to finance your MMO, and while your community might be ready to donate money or whatever to a good cause, you need a BIG community to have your MMO not die an early death because you can no longer pay for the server cost.

Then there is the simple fact that MMOs fell out of favour. Mostly with devs because of the time and money needed to develop one, the prohibitive cost of running one and the limitations to the amount of MMOs that can survive on the market concurrently as listed above.

But to some extent, also with players. If you look at the "fad of the day" list, you will see that "MMO" has been replaced by "Zombie shooter", "Open world game", and "Procedural content" in the last few years. Now its more and more "VR" games, and "MOBA Shooter" that have become the fad of the day.

That doesn't mean much... still, the fads get more player attention, and "the cool kids" will look for these games now, instead of an MMO.

We all understand that you love MMOs and you would like to create a "Better Aion Online". If I remember correctly, that game was a HUGE amount of wasted potential from my expierience. There is certainly a ton of things to do better.

But: you also need to face reality. Time costs money. And developing an MMO means a MASSIVE investment in time. More time you have in a single lifetime.

Running server cost money. And while you could probably get away with not so many servers should your game only reach the expected moderate success (as you are not going to be the next Notch, with about 99% certainity, no matter how good your game is), moderate success will not even pay these low number of servers, nor will it pay for the cost of developing the game.

Thus take your (hopefully good) ideas, and reduce your expectations as much as you can. Less players online, simpler graphics, cutting non-essential features.

Cut everything down to the absolute minimum, and try to build that. If you achieve that and people are interested in it, there is certainly room for extending from there....

If you don't want to do that, and actually just wish there was "a better Aion Online" to play in, and are so dedicated to the good parts of that one game that you think you would be ready to even build that yourself...

Give it up mate, you are WAY above what you could achieve with that motivation and your (most probable) skill level.

Unless you have millions of cash to pay for the development of said "better Aion Online", and even more cash so you don't care about the fate of those millions (which will likely be invested in a game that will struggle or fail to make money), not going to happen until a big dev develops an appetite for a new MMO again, and someone at that company is just as much a fan of the basic concept of Aion Online as you are.

Even if you assemble a big community of likeminded players, this is still way above what such a community could achieve. This would take a MAJOR Open source project to accomplish it for free, on the dimensions of some of the largest apache projects. Like thousands of people willing to contribute regularly for years to come (given every contributer can only contribute some hours per week, and is less efficient than a professional freelancer or full time employee).

that's coins

US dollar coins? If not, how many US dollars is one "coin" worth?

Edit: If you're talking bitcoins, those are about US$1,000 now. But that can't be what you're talking about. No way
your "minimum" budget is US$2 billion.

Edit: or does "that's coins" just mean "that's a lot of money"? If so, that's vernacular I had not heard before, and
I apologize for the derailment.

It was a sarcastic joke, meaning it's a bunch of money and joking as if it's easy to get

I understand where you're coming from, I just want to use the combat system and the concept of it all but changing the things that wouldn't get me on copyright problems. That's basically why I am asking, I want to make an MMO and I checked the minimum budget, I am a total mmo fanboy and it's the only genre that interests me because it basically has no bounds for improvement. Main reason for this is not to make profit, is to make MMOs great again, and I am sure that when going for something that is non profit always can come out as something amazing.

Okay... so not REALLY a remake, more of a "spiritual successor". Ok. That actually shouldn't get you in hot waters (might still want to check that there are no patents on gameplay elements of said game, if you want to be extra safe).

I reckon you might have a much better chance of ever achieving this with a small budget by dropping the MASSIVELY from MMO.

Just cut the expectations from 1000's of concurrent users per server to some hundreds, and your budget can be 10x times lower (or so, just throwing numbers out there).

So you could create a game with the same gameplay elements (which in an MMO usually are really "dumbed down" to reduce the stress on the server which has to do all those calculations... thus are not what will make your game expensive to create and run), and still have an online multiplayer at its center (this will make the game harder and more expensive to create, but not in the same order as an MMO), just with fewer people logged unto the same server, no clustering to "simulate" one big fat server (few MMO servers AFAIK can handle the 100'000s or millions of players that are concurrently online in some of the biggest MMOs, thus sharding or clustering), no 1000 players seeing each other in the same zone, or 10'000 players making walking through the city a slow grind because while the server might handle it, your client and your anemic Hardware isn't.

Just a few 100 players on your server to get that mutliplayer feeling, and showing the potential of your game should you get more funding to increase the concurrency your game could handle.

Just my 2 cents

alright so responding to 1st game example. This might be a very good game and have everything other games have but it doesn't have the simplest thing, first impression a.k.a presentable website, it looks like it was done with ms paint and basic code. The second game even from watching it for 2 minutes I can easily see that it will get boring after 10hours. Currently new games have "clickbait" taking no man's sky for example, it was hyped up and the creators baited people saying what audience wanted to hear, they made more money then they spent making it and it's now a regular SP game.. I fully understand all of the people above and I know this is like mission impossible but is gaming community became so generic and predictable? The game this thread was created for is Aion Online which had something different including rifts, unique combat, pve/pvp and a fly mechanism. I think currently the world is lacking a game like WoW that will make people spend time rather than money, most of the gaming communities are very toxic and I think it's just because everyone forgot how to do things together, everyone is just separated between p2w people and casuals.

Well, Conquestor still has a point though... MMOs struggle in todays market for a multitude of reasons.

The first and foremost being that while with other games, people play them for 10-80 hours, and then are in the market again for a new game (unless a massive fan puts 1000's of hours into driving over people in GTA 5), for MMOs one MMO can engage a player for years. A really dedicated MMO player might play 5 MMOs concurrently, but at about that point even the most dedicated MMO player will be completly booked with 5 different communities, and 5 different games keeping him busy for 5+ years.

He might switch an MMO for another every 2 years. Thats about it.

How many MMOs can survive in this market where maybe the top 10, maybe top 20 of MMOs get 95% of the players attention, because players just don't have time for other MMOs?

Then there is the cost which we talked in length about. But given only the top N MMO games get most of the MMO players time, attention and thus, at the end, money, how much money is left in the market for the less wellknown MMOs to claim for themselves?

I know you are not interested in money, but running an MMO is expensive, and developing one even more so. You WILL need a source of income to finance your MMO, and while your community might be ready to donate money or whatever to a good cause, you need a BIG community to have your MMO not die an early death because you can no longer pay for the server cost.

Then there is the simple fact that MMOs fell out of favour. Mostly with devs because of the time and money needed to develop one, the prohibitive cost of running one and the limitations to the amount of MMOs that can survive on the market concurrently as listed above.

But to some extent, also with players. If you look at the "fad of the day" list, you will see that "MMO" has been replaced by "Zombie shooter", "Open world game", and "Procedural content" in the last few years. Now its more and more "VR" games, and "MOBA Shooter" that have become the fad of the day.

That doesn't mean much... still, the fads get more player attention, and "the cool kids" will look for these games now, instead of an MMO.

We all understand that you love MMOs and you would like to create a "Better Aion Online". If I remember correctly, that game was a HUGE amount of wasted potential from my expierience. There is certainly a ton of things to do better.

But: you also need to face reality. Time costs money. And developing an MMO means a MASSIVE investment in time. More time you have in a single lifetime.

Running server cost money. And while you could probably get away with not so many servers should your game only reach the expected moderate success (as you are not going to be the next Notch, with about 99% certainity, no matter how good your game is), moderate success will not even pay these low number of servers, nor will it pay for the cost of developing the game.

Thus take your (hopefully good) ideas, and reduce your expectations as much as you can. Less players online, simpler graphics, cutting non-essential features.

Cut everything down to the absolute minimum, and try to build that. If you achieve that and people are interested in it, there is certainly room for extending from there....

If you don't want to do that, and actually just wish there was "a better Aion Online" to play in, and are so dedicated to the good parts of that one game that you think you would be ready to even build that yourself...

Give it up mate, you are WAY above what you could achieve with that motivation and your (most probable) skill level.

Unless you have millions of cash to pay for the development of said "better Aion Online", and even more cash so you don't care about the fate of those millions (which will likely be invested in a game that will struggle or fail to make money), not going to happen until a big dev develops an appetite for a new MMO again, and someone at that company is just as much a fan of the basic concept of Aion Online as you are.

Even if you assemble a big community of likeminded players, this is still way above what such a community could achieve. This would take a MAJOR Open source project to accomplish it for free, on the dimensions of some of the largest apache projects. Like thousands of people willing to contribute regularly for years to come (given every contributer can only contribute some hours per week, and is less efficient than a professional freelancer or full time employee).

Well I am currently trying to find aion files for a specific patch and then move forward with editing and adding stuff and removing and kind of creating a private server that would later lead to new game, the server would be for community no pay system just suggestions how to improve it and balance it. current patch for the game is 5.3 and everyone loved the 3.7 that's the one i'm looking for but would try putting the good things from higher patch to lower patch and balance it for people to to enjoy. Everything you wrote gave me quite a lot of ideas and helped me make certain decision and changes in my plan that's what i thank you for and of course thank you for taking your time replying to this thread

Ffn, sorry about misunderstanding the "that's coins" before. If the topic is moving away from the legalities of remakes, then maybe you should start a new thread in
a more appropriate forum.

Fully agree! I am thankful to everyone who gave me the information and now I know what I am doing next. This was my first thread and so far I love the way people answer and discuss on certain topics. Could you please close this thread and I'll post in correct forums if I require any more information or help!