Building Statum — a text-based geopolitical strategy MMO (looking for feedback & your take on browser games)
Hey IH 👋
I'm building Statum, a browser-based multiplayer game where players are citizens of real-ish nations, competing across economy, military, and politics — think e-Sim/eRepublik-style gameplay, built from scratch.
What you can do in Statum:
Pick a country (61 playable nations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas) and become a citizen.
Work in companies, produce goods, and trade in a per-country market with real supply/demand.
Train and fight in region-based wars — battles have rounds, terrain bonuses, weapon quality, and real territorial conquest.
Run for Congress or President on real calendar-based election cycles, and govern: manage the treasury, appoint a General or Finance Minister, declare war.
Write articles, build a readership, level up through combat, work, or politics — whatever you're into.
The design principle I care most about: you shouldn't need to do everything.
A lot of games in this genre quietly punish you for not grinding every system at once. I'm building Statum so a player who only wants to run a company and trade, or only wants to fight, or only wants to do politics/journalism, can go deep in that one lane and still matter — without feeling like they're falling behind players juggling all four. That's shaping a lot of the balancing decisions (XP curves, daily limits, income sources) as I go.
Why I'm building this:
I've always loved this genre, but every implementation I played eventually got abandoned, or the balance drifted somewhere strange. I'm building Statum incrementally — one system at a time, tested properly before moving to the next — and keeping a public design log of every decision so the game stays coherent instead of accumulating cruft.
Where it's at:
Core economy, military, and political systems are live and tested. Currently working on daily combat limits and a diplomacy/alliance system between nations.
What I'm actually asking:
Browser/text-based MMOs like e-Sim, eRepublik, Politics & War, TravianW — most of them either shut down or got left to rot by their studios. Why do you think that happened? Bad monetization, dev burnout, the genre itself losing appeal, something else?
Is this still a gap in the market, or has it been filled by something else you'd point me to?
Do you actually like this kind of game, or is it a relic that had its moment? Honest takes welcome.
If "focus on one system, still matter" sounds appealing (vs. "grind everything or fall behind"), I'd love to hear that too — and if you'd want to try an early beta when it opens.
Happy to go deep on mechanics or the build process in the comments.
The interesting question seems bigger than whether individual mechanics work — you're trying to distinguish between a genre that was underserved by its implementations and one whose underlying demand has actually declined.
What have you seen from potential players so far that makes you uncertain which of those two explanations is closer to reality?