Despite 2500 Players, Leading Second Life Game Developer MadPea Shifts Away from Major Projects Like UNIA

Second Life can be a great platform for indie games and indie game developers, but does it have a large enough user base to support ambitious multiplayer-type projects from for-profit studios? Likely not, to judge by the experiences of UNIA, the survival horror FPS game from MadPea Studios which launched last April in Second Life (blogged last on NWN here), and has since attracted nearly 2500 players, adding about 50-100 new players every week (according to development lead Kiana Writer). Based on Kiana's estimates (below), the game has earned her and the UNIA team about USD$7000.

Despite that success, however, Kiana just announced that MadPea will no longer develop major SL-based games on a scale of UNIA, which required dozens of developers:

UNIA Part 1 is not going anywhere for a while. It has been a HUGE accomplishment to realize in Second Life. It took us over two years to make and cost over 12 000 USD... With our current resources we could do either one of the two things: Continue developing the UNIA saga or put our focus on smaller adventures such as BURIED and the Collection. Making smaller adventures takes us around 2 months while UNIA 2 would be at least 6 more months of waiting.

Read the rest here. This announcement brings up several concerns: Widely promoted by Linden Lab and Second Life's community/social media ecosystem, 2500 is a pretty good number of players, but not enough to sustain relatively big budget game projects like UNIA. Instead, it could be Second Life is only feasible as a game platform for labor of love, non-profit projects like the popular MMO Remnants of the Earth, or (as MadPea is shifting toward) smaller games created and supported by smaller teams.

To tease out those details for future SL-based games, I asked Kiana more details on her studio's announcement:

How many players total does UNIA have now?

"UNIA will soon reach 2500 players with a steady growth of 50-100 new players weekly." 

How many more players would UNIA need to be profitable enough to continue? 

"At this point is not as much about the amount of players, but about the human resources. It's challenging to be able to get people to commit to a year long project in Second Life. 

"However, you can do the maths. If the Gold HUD costs 1000L and we have 2500 players where maybe 70% purchased the gold option. That's our income for two years worth of work done by a large team. 

"It's not realistic to support a large game design team on one game only on this platform, unless we can add another 0 or two to the amount of weekly new players. Increasing HUD costs is not an option. 

"Games on this scale will be much more suitable for platforms with more users and less restrictions on how many users can be in the same space at the same time." 

What's the team's advice for developers of other mass collaborative game projects?

"Make sure that everyone believes in the same vision and is committed to finish the project they have started. Second Lifers are not keen on paying for add-ons to the game so find an innovative way to monetize your product. Plan the whole scope carefully and be prepared for setbacks."

Thanks to MadPea press rep Kess Crystal, who added this: "I would like to emphasize the fact that stopping UNIA 2 development doesn't mean that we are stopping game development in Second Life. We are focusing on smaller scale games that are more suitable for the platform. With support from Linden Lab we'll be able to bring out multiple games at a much faster speed as you already see with Collection and its success."

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[Levio Serenity]

It sucks that even the very best experiences in SL find it so hard to monetize well.

[Metacam Oh]

That's because SL pretty much grinds to a halt when there are more then 10 people around

[Melanie]

$7000 is not much. Is that before or after tier and salaries?
I mean, yea... if it is post expenses, it is not much.
But I am in SL 8-10 hours a day, and I had never heard of this game before. And I would definitely play if I had, so maybe they need to advertise in-world more.
SL does not grind to a halt with 10 people around. Even on a low end machine.
100 or so in the same region is barely weird on my $300 Win 10 Laptop, so I wouldn't listen to Metacam. He must be on a Commodore 64.

[Ob-server]

Did you ever hear of the word SATURATION in an industry?Everything is expected to be dirt cheap. People over overwhelmed with the amount of content which is always better and more spectacular for a couple of Dollars. A top video game costs 40$ and you get hundreds if not thousands of hours entertainment from that. Games evolve into open worlds like Second Life without all the griefers. Games started to offer player housing on the cheap through the years.

I'm interested to know the net profit of this particular game. Also important to mention is how Madpea gets fucked over by Linden their PaleoQuest who directly compete with him.

Linden puts up 100's of sims and pays moles 8US$ an hour to build for them. Moles have tiny brains so they just accept. The end result is people like MadPea having their projects fail.

Alberg you are such a genius you should get a TED award, wait you should get the Nobel price for economy.

[Ob-server]

* Alberg = Altberg

[metacam oh]

yea sorry Melanie you're wrong, if you want to actually play a game you cant have 100 people on the sim. Nice try tho.