Hello everyone,

I'm quite sure this is the wrong place to post this but I hope at least few people would be able to point me in the right direction.

I am studying various things regarding programming and development due to gaming being my life since I was very young. I made loads of friends there and I spent 8 years playing it but everyone I know quit, because it became grinding game and pay2win. This might be a long post but I want to be as clear as possible, so let's begin.

I have friends and community that basically want this particular game made into something that it could have been but never became, and I have everything written down and I'm 90% sure people would be playing it and it would be mmo reborn. I know making the game is very expensive and hard to do, so my main question is how should I present my concept to developers, how to basically show them the vision I have and be in charge while everything gets created the way the community wants? I can't find any templates for game presentations and I was not able to contact even the smallest mmo creators to talk about this and discuss the possibilities. Please show me the way and guide me!

You wouldn't want to remake an MMO either, you'd want someone to make an emulator for it using the existing client, then build out new functionality after it's properly emulated.

May want to try asking for people on a forum like ragezone which specializes in mmo development/emulators for that.

1) You are breaking IP Laws if you are trying to take an existing game and modify it. Taking the general concept of the game, minus gameplay elements that have been patented (not many of those exists, but they do exist), and creating a new game with original art, story and names is fine. Using the name, the art or the un-modified story of the original game is not.

Keep that in mind when thinking "I could make this game MUUUCH better!".... even if you could, you should make your own game inspired by the other game, not the other game plus your improvements.

2) As Tom said. You will not be successfull pitching to devs. You need money to pay devs. If you have the money, you don't need to pitch to them. You CAN try to pitch to publishers, though I don't think you have much of a chance any of them will listen to you, no less if you try to pitch an MMO now (every publisher must have 3 or so failed or dying MMOs in their cellar by now... nobody REALLY wants to waste money on MMOs anymore).

3) An MMO is expensive as hell, and takes an incredible amount of manhours to build. Depends on the MMO in question of course (building a mobile MMO client is of course much cheaper than a PC AAA MMO Client, and the backend might also be a little bit cheaper because of simpler gameplay and all), but generally, you are looking into the 10+ million $ realm at least, with AAA MMOs being 100+ million $, and very expensive to run for anything above 1000 concurrent users.

Are you sure your pitch is good enough to make ANY publisher reach for their wallet to give you a budget for it (even if there are still publishers interested in MMOs)?

If you have the money to pay developers, are you sure your game idea is good enough to sink this much cash into an game that is most likely going to fail in the market (in this case, if you pay 100 million for development, and servercost + marketing make for another 100 million, anything under 200 million $ profit is failure)?

4) If you pitch to a publisher, you will no longer be in charge. Sure, if you are a person with a name like Carmack, or Mollineux, or Sid Meier, you might pitch an idea AND get the position as the lead for the project. Still, the publisher owns the game now, not you as the lead. They will let you do your thing as long as you follow their guidelines and your name still has value for them.

They will kick you from the project as soon as they feel you no longer share THEIR vision.

The only way to really be in charge of something is if you have the money to pay for the WHOLE shebang. If you are a millionaire, you can be in charge.

Great information guys! going through it all and writing everything down! thank you, I want to make something now even more lol

1) You are breaking IP Laws if you are trying to take an existing game and modify it. Taking the general concept of the game, minus gameplay elements that have been patented (not many of those exists, but they do exist), and creating a new game with original art, story and names is fine. Using the name, the art or the un-modified story of the original game is not.

Keep that in mind when thinking "I could make this game MUUUCH better!".... even if you could, you should make your own game inspired by the other game, not the other game plus your improvements.

2) As Tom said. You will not be successfull pitching to devs. You need money to pay devs. If you have the money, you don't need to pitch to them. You CAN try to pitch to publishers, though I don't think you have much of a chance any of them will listen to you, no less if you try to pitch an MMO now (every publisher must have 3 or so failed or dying MMOs in their cellar by now... nobody REALLY wants to waste money on MMOs anymore).

3) An MMO is expensive as hell, and takes an incredible amount of manhours to build. Depends on the MMO in question of course (building a mobile MMO client is of course much cheaper than a PC AAA MMO Client, and the backend might also be a little bit cheaper because of simpler gameplay and all), but generally, you are looking into the 10+ million $ realm at least, with AAA MMOs being 100+ million $, and very expensive to run for anything above 1000 concurrent users.

Are you sure your pitch is good enough to make ANY publisher reach for their wallet to give you a budget for it (even if there are still publishers interested in MMOs)?

If you have the money to pay developers, are you sure your game idea is good enough to sink this much cash into an game that is most likely going to fail in the market (in this case, if you pay 100 million for development, and servercost + marketing make for another 100 million, anything under 200 million $ profit is failure)?

4) If you pitch to a publisher, you will no longer be in charge. Sure, if you are a person with a name like Carmack, or Mollineux, or Sid Meier, you might pitch an idea AND get the position as the lead for the project. Still, the publisher owns the game now, not you as the lead. They will let you do your thing as long as you follow their guidelines and your name still has value for them.

They will kick you from the project as soon as they feel you no longer share THEIR vision.

The only way to really be in charge of something is if you have the money to pay for the WHOLE shebang. If you are a millionaire, you can be in charge.

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.

Assuming you make an amazing MMO deserviing of hundreds of thousands of players, you'd still get no where without a multi-million $ marketing budget.

Example: http://hazeron.com/

It has every features of No man's sky/Star citizen and much, much, much, much more,, yet barely ever passes 12~ online players. It frequently has to be taken down because of how much it costs.

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Example 2: Face of mankind

Fantastic open world mmofps with full loot on death/politics/elections/good developer support

It died because it was unable to find enough players to sustain it's development, re-launched with a successful kickstarter, and died again after a few months because they didn't advertise enough.

The MMO market has glaring issues that will prevent games that are extremely fun from gaining steam. There's dozens of other examples that are pretty much objectively unique/fun games that have died because they launched as an MMO.

Assuming you make an amazing MMO deserviing of hundreds of thousands of players, you'd still get no where without a multi-million $ marketing budget.

Example: http://hazeron.com/

It has every features of No man's sky/Star citizen and much, much, much, much more,, yet barely ever passes 12~ online players. It frequently has to be taken down because of how much it costs.

1 Manager Server
23 Worker Servers
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Master Up 9/8/2016 14:44 MDT
4 Worker Servers

Login Servers
Master Up 9/8/2016 14:42 MDT
4 Worker Servers

Example 2: Face of mankind

Fantastic open world mmofps with full loot on death/politics/elections/good developer support

It died because it was unable to find enough players to sustain it's development, re-launched with a successful kickstarter, and died again after a few months because they didn't advertise enough.

The MMO market has glaring issues that will prevent games that are extremely fun from gaining steam. There's dozens of other examples that are pretty much objectively unique/fun games that have died because they launched as an MMO.

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.