I would like to stress: No one ever said that RNG is costless. What people do say, thought, is that it costs a lot less, both short-term and long-term.BloatedGuppy said:As it is your game, you're going to be more conversant with its costs than the rest of us, but one cannot just winkle their nose and create compelling game worlds out of thin air. I cannot imagine there would not be significant costs to do properly.tragicnumberone said:Crowfall does not have the same costs as a standard MMO. The two main costs in MMOs are PvE content (raids, quests, events etc.), and making the actual world. Crowfall has neither of these expenses. All the content is PvP driven, and all the world(s) are randomly generated.
Your other major issue, of course, is having an entirely PvP focused game. It's absolutely essential to hit and maintain a high concurrent player base in a PvP only title, or you'll get sucked into the death spiral of "no one is playing because no one is playing". Without much money to spend on marketing, how do you get the game into as many hands as possible? Huge, well funded games like Warhammer Online were on their last legs months after release, in large part because they lacked sustainable populations. Indeed, this problem has plagued almost every post WoW MMO, including The Old Republic, and lead directly to the proliferation of free to play models just to get butts in seats (often with minimal and short term success). And these games had robust PvE content..."other players" were not the entirety of what was on offer.
I wish you all the luck in the world, this is a genre badly in need of invigoration and I have absolutely nothing against the game or the concept of the game. It's just a murderous space to try and compete in.
As to your PvP focus and player retention point: You are 100% correct. Ensuring that there is a strong player-base is Vital to any MMO, ESPECIALLY a PvP-only one. However, your point starts to fall apart when you say:
"Without much money to spend on marketing, how do you get the game into as many hands as possible?"
You assume that the only way to get a good sized player-base is through spending money on marketing. This simply isnt true. The kickstarer alone generated a ton of hype, and, as I will reference again bellow, the absolutely rabid fan-base spreads the word far and wide across the vast plains of the internet. Another advantage Crowfall has against suffering from a shrinking player-base is that its a niche game with (as I said before) a rabid fan-base. The niche nature ensures that it doesn't need massive player-counts to ensure success; and the rabid fan-base means retention will likely be very good. (This is only compounded with the 60$ buy-in. So if you pay, you want your money's worth and will play for a long time).
There are lots of other unique systems in Crowfall that combat these issues, so I wouldn't shun it away so quickly!