A YCombinator-backed Kickstarter scam?
The title may be subjective, but at best this YC W21 batch company leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I'm talking about DreamWorld, the last game you'll ever play, and probably also the game you'll never get to play. I hold YCombinator in such high regard, but seeing this makes me really sad/disappointed.
Dreamworld is a massively multiplayer video game that will support millions of players in the same world with player-versus-player combat, procedural generation, minecraft-style building, pets, NFTs, mounts, pirates, roblox-style user-generated content, distributeed networking, DNA simulation, biomes and farming. Did I mention it will have millions of players in a single game instance? It's the game that can do everything.
Every genre, every style, every game type there has ever been.
Maybe that sounds amazing, but given their $10K kickstarter goal and team size (2 people) it is wildly unrealistic. The kickstarter video gives a tour of free and non-free Unreal Marketplace assets duct-taped together to make a trailer: clearly they are far off from their goal. A game without any direction doesn't make for a good game, but let's ignore that for now.
There are a ton of Reddit posts (e.g. 0) and youtube videos (e.g. 2, 3) that go into details why this will never be. The Reddit post and thread is especially worth reading if you want more details. Being a backer of this project will inevitably lead to disappointment.
Execution likelihood
Anybody can a create kickstarter fundraiser with the best intentions. All too often creators will start a fundraiser to build the video game equivalent of a supercar that can runs on solar power. Often they don't have having anything that points at why they would be able to actually ever make it a reality. Sometimes these fundraisers even hit their funding goal, but backers will end up disappointed when either nothing gets released, or when what does get released doesn't even come close to their expectations.
I don't want to speak ill of anybody, but this project fits that pattern. One founder has a background of software engineering (non-game development) and the other has more of a marketing/design/web development background, no reasons are given why they would be able to build this holy grail game. Even with $200M raised I doubt it is realistic to develop such a game by any founding team.
The founders mention that it takes more than $10K to develop a video game of such scale and that is why they raised between $500K and 1M so far for this project from Silicon Valley investors, but that is still nowhere near the money required to pull off this dream.
Here's what gets to me
DreamWorld is a Ycombinator company. How did this project pass due diligence? Even the name Dreamworld is owned by Dreamworks so they won't even be able to use the name.
Recently some argued YCombinator has lost its way when they backed a Mac-only calendar widget. For that company you could say that it is simply a product to get their foot in the door from which the company can expand to more productivity-tooling verticals. Their pitch to YCombinator must have been more grand and explained how they could capture a billion dollar market eventually.
But in DreamWorld's case they are taking money from gamers who don't understand what goes into making a game. They are not able to tell that their $99 will never get them what they are promised. I think it is fair to call this a scam.
I am all for putting money into moonshot projects with less than 1% chance of succeeding, but selling a game to unsuspecting consumers that will never be is just wrong. I really hope the founders cancel their kickstarter campaign. This tarnishes the good reputation that YC companies have. There are 2 weeks remaining for the fundraiser at the moment of writing.
I really hope the founders will cancel the KS and don't collect any of the funds pledged. Use YC and other VC money for your moonshot project, not naive gamers' pocket money. Use the would-have-been backers as market validation and please let's stop this.
Is there something I'm not understanding?
Agree 100% with you. And also agree that YC lost its way since they expanded their batch size to like 150(?) companies. I see YC now as more of an index fund - just sample 150 "perspective" startups ranging from concrete to absolutely bonkers ideas, take 7% stake in them. Some are bound to become billion-dollar companies - that's how the statistics works out. And YC will make expected return. It's not so much about carefully vetting companies or working with them to grow them like in years past. Now its more of a numbers game. Maybe few companies they really like (their internal top picks) - they will focus more effort on.
Not long ago I saw a YC company nearly promising "AGI" (3 undergrads working on it). To quote the company's website:
"Our software reads and reasons about text the same way that you do.
Just like humans build pictures in their minds as they read, our software builds a simulation. It understands the goals, beliefs, and assertions of the people discussed in the text. It reasons about spatial and temporal relationships. It stores and learns from its experiences."
Let's put it this way - no one - not Google's DeepMind, not Google Brain, not Google, not Microsoft - no one- has software with this kind of capability. 3 undergrads saying they will build it is obviously complete nonsense - much like this "DreamWorld" example. But because YC is an index fund - why not? 125K bet isn't much to them anyway.
"I doubt it is realistic to develop such a game by any founding team." - you talk sense, bro. I did some research and carefully analyzed this post on Reddit to be sure of that. My friend works in a small game development company, and he agrees with your point too. It's almost impossible to create this game in a given period with such a small team. He also mentioned that their company sometimes receives similar suspicious offers from independent developers. They're lucky that their boss implemented the trustchain software by covery.ai to prevent cooperation with such people. Anyway, I hope gamers won't donate to Dreamworld anymore.
I'm all for going big, but I am doubtful this team or any team for that matter can pull off such an ambitious game in a reasonable timeframe. Developing any game, especially an MMO, takes a ton of money, time, and expertise.
I hope these guys succeed. If not, I hope people are able to pull their money out before it's gone.
That said, if you read through some of the comments they are making on Kickstarter and other places they are pretty outrageous - even beyond supporting 1,000,000 players on a single server.
Kickstarter comment from the DreamWorld team -
"We already have a "DNA" of sorts planned for each creature, giving it different dispositions, interactions, coloration, dimensions, even abilities, based on a genetically-originated system (one of our good friends is a professional geneticist pursuing his PHD, so we have these conversation often actually!)"
Nobody on the YC team is stupid, so maybe they see something we don't, but definitely questionable goal-setting here.
The Kickstarter is really light on information and 7 of 13 FAQs are questions about Kickstarter rather than the game.
I don't want to judge people by what they've done, rather by what they can do, but I feel compelled to share one of the founder's previous projects...
https://coreaegis.world/ --> 2012 - 2020
https://thetrendbaron.com/ --> 2018 - 2020
I'm not sure I get the point about the past projects
The T's are kinda nice designs
While the wearable BT speaker is a bit of a flayer, it could of made some money, the details are important if it's 8 years just getting a prototype vs having some dramatic sales, like I would probably not take a bet on it but seen things that weird that made money
They are a bit non related to the startup but you do get it's a marketer..
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The DNA comment for example also looks like marketing speak due basically saying, Yea we will get a few properties randomised
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Hi Primer,
I may apply to YCombinator at a later point and don't want this on my public record.. Honestly it's hard to go about this, I am not sure if YC is even aware of this happening (the batch has ended), and I would like to create some awareness for it as I feel there's some injustice here but it's not too late to cancel the KS still and make it right..
I wanted to post it on Hackernews, but with a new account your posts aren't even visible, and my actual account is trivial to link back to me. If anyone wants to post a link to this thread go ahead
Hope that makes sense!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
It's not that black and white, YC backs a few hundred companies per batch nowadays and the vast majority are really great. It's hard to be perfect, especially at such scale.
I'm just calling out one rotten apple that I hope can still be rectified in some way (e.g. by canceling the KS).
Their parents are on the Y-Combinator selection committee.