If Talent Points are wiped would NQ compensate us with DAC?

[blundertwink]

14 hours ago, Rokkur said:

I think dev's initially did the best they could to deliver the game they promised. As soon as they needed more money to continue, private investors punked us in hopes of profit.

Instead now EVERYONE is screwed.

 

To be honest, the VCs that invested were taking a huge, uncharacteristic gamble. 

 

It's rare for VCs to back fresh startups with no history and no product nowadays.

 

The early pitch must have been stellar and their greed for backing a sub-based product with the vague promise of "millions" of subscribers may have blinded them to the reality that this was an unproven studio led by someone with zero experience in gaming (and little experience in the private sector in general). 

 

Easy to blame investors, but DU wouldn't be a thing if they hadn't made a big mistake in investing. It would have been an even bigger mistake to keep throwing money at NQ after 6-8 years of development and the product still being clunky, unscaled, unpolished, and vastly incomplete. 

 

The push to bring DU to release is the CEO's call and has more to do with their remaining runway dwindling than investors pushing for profits. Running the company as if investors will keep funding it would be silly and arrogant. 

 

TLDR: This is one of the few cases in gaming (or in general) where investors backed someone with no experience in the field pitching a risky, ambitious, outside-the-mold product...I hate to say it, but they set DU up for success far more than investors normally do; it was NQ that bungled this rare opportunity. 

[Atmosph3rik]

51 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

TLDR: This is one of the few cases in gaming (or in general) where investors backed someone with no experience in the field pitching a risky, ambitious, outside-the-mold product...I hate to say it, but they set DU up for success far more than investors normally do; it was NQ that bungled this rare opportunity. 

 

 

Sure NQ is responsible for all the bungling in the beginning.

 

But the current blind push to make money with a product that they don't even understand, and isn't finished, is clearly coming from the investors.  At least in the beginning NQ was trying to work towards a version of "success" that included making the game that they set out to make.

 

I don't really see any reason to give the investors any credit for investing in a risk either.  It's what they do.  When it pans out, they make a thousand times more money than they would investing in a sure thing, that everyone else is already selling too.

 

The way i see it, they thought they were investing in the next Fortnite, and when they realized that it might not be a huge enough goldmine, they decided to try to recoup losses instead of seeing it through.

 

It's the classic story of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, because it wasn't laying them fast enough.

 

 

[Rokkur]

That and the goose here turned out to be a duck only laying bricks of shit. 🤣

[Atmosph3rik]

14 minutes ago, Rokkur said:

That and the goose here turned out to be a duck only laying bricks of shit. 🤣

 

All i see is gold when i look at DU though.  It's got flaws.  But the parts that work are incredible, and there's nothing else even close to it out there right now.

 

It may not be laying golden eggs yet.  But as frustrated as i am with DU's development, there are exactly zero other games being developed right now that i am interested in.  If NQ decides not to see this thing though to the end, i'll just be sitting around waiting for someone else to pick up where they left off.

 

 

[Rokkur]

Just now, Atmosph3rik said:

 

All i see is gold when i look at DU though.  It's got flaws.  But the parts that work are incredible, and there's nothing else even close to it out there right now.

 

It may not be laying golden eggs yet.  But as frustrated as i am with DU's development, there are exactly zero other games being developed right now that i am interested in.  If NQ decides not to see this thing though to the end, i'll just be sitting around waiting for someone else to pick up where they left off.

 

 

I made the same mistake with Project Entropia/Entropia Universe from 2003-2007 when the ripped out the soul of the game and replaced it with more money grubbing schemes. It was wonderful in the beginning, even if it was already graphically out dated. Which honestly the psychodelic retro 70's space art with 90's era quality was part of the charm. It still left plenty for the player to imagine.

I gave up on it years ago, and they both have similar development update time frames and too many news letters with zero substantial info.

[blundertwink]

19 minutes ago, Atmosph3rik said:

But the current blind push to make money with a product that they don't even understand, and isn't finished, is clearly coming from the investors.  At least in the beginning NQ was trying to work towards a version of "success" that included making the game that they set out to make.

 

It's not so clear, though -- you're giving NQ way too much credit, here. It's odd to think of NQ as a studio that only cared about making a great game and it was those big bad investors that forced them to publish early. 

 

They had a set runway and spent 6+ years on dev...that ~$22 million wasn't going to last forever.

 

I'm not saying NQ has a real choice, but it isn't investors "forcing them to turn a profit", it's the reality that they are running out of runway. Two offices in big cities with 50+ employees isn't cheap. 

 

That's not being forced by anyone, that's the nature of running a startup that they knew about from the beginning. Every startup I've worked at is obsessed with carefully tracking burn rate for a damn good reason. 

 

This is just how startups work and if NQ didn't understand that going in, they really can't complain about the outcome or blame it on the parties that gave them the money to begin with. 

[Rokkur]

To answer the OP's original question in the title of the thread, the answer I think will be a big fat NOPE.

[Atmosph3rik]

37 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

It's not so clear, though -- you're giving NQ way too much credit, here. It's odd to think of NQ as a studio that only cared about making a great game and it was those big bad investors that forced them to publish early. 

 

It's not that i want to give NQ a lot of credit, or even blame the investors for doing what needs to be done.  It's just that in the beginning they were trying to make something awesome, and if the mistakes that they've made in the past, and the "rules" of business dictate that they can't afford to do that anymore, that's a huge bummer.

 

I've never been involved with a startup, but i've been involved in opening a few restaurants.  And unfortunately, the trap a lot of people seem to fall into, is spending all the money on performatively "opening a restaurant".  Instead of spending the money on building something that will make money.

 

Spending money is just more fun than making money.

 

It's cool that NQ has so many offices and employees and all that.  I just wish they had saved a little money for making the game.

 

I don't know what they are supposed to do when they run out of "runway".  But i don't think pulling the plane over and just telling everyone that we've reached our destination is going to work.

 

It's unfortunate that so many mistakes were made.  But what's happening now isn't a mistake, it's a decision.  And that sucks a lot more than a mistake in my opinion.

 

Maybe there's just a point where they've spent too much money on the idea, and they just can't spend anymore.  But i still think the idea is worth money, and if they don't spend the money to make it happen, someone else probably will.

[Zarcata]

Some people forget that it was also very often pronounced that the Sanctuary area would always be protected no matter what.

[blundertwink]

1 hour ago, Atmosph3rik said:

Maybe there's just a point where they've spent too much money on the idea, and they just can't spend anymore.  But i still think the idea is worth money, and if they don't spend the money to make it happen, someone else probably will.

 

I agree, the idea of DU is great and it's unfortunate the one of the few games to challenge the boring formula of MMOs has faced so many challenges. Innovation is hard. 

 

I also agree that a game like DU will eventually materialize. I believe it will get easier over time to make something like this, especially as technology around infrastructure improves. 

 

What DU has tried to achieve is no small thing -- and while they aren't so "indie" with >$22 million, they are indie compared to simple MMOs developed by big studios with over 10 times the budget. 

 

I think NQ made a lot of mistakes that would have been avoided if they'd had more experienced leadership from the start, but I do hope that the idea of this project endures in some way, shape, or form.

[Bobbie]

.

[CptLoRes]

6 hours ago, blundertwink said:

To be honest, the VCs that invested were taking a huge, uncharacteristic gamble. 

 

It's rare for VCs to back fresh startups with no history and no product nowadays.

JC is an established researcher and well known AI expert in France, and had just completed a successful sale of his AI company when he started NQ. So I can see how the bet looked good on paper.

[RugesV]

And Research and AI have nothing to do with DU.  Granted 2 years ago when I heard the head guy was an expert in AI I got excited. I was thinking OMG we are going to get smart NPC's in the game. 

[CptLoRes]

And that is exactly how VC operates. They are not experts at anything, so it's mostly about finding people or companies that win the buzzword bingo and making a gamble.

[blazemonger]

On 6/9/2022 at 2:56 PM, blundertwink said:

The early pitch must have been stellar

 

I'm pretty sure the early pitch revolved around how the server tech and voxel engine would unlock the metaverse and generate opportunity for NQ to lease the tech as a service, I am pretty sure NQ was shooting to be a competitor to the then very hot Spatial OS. 

 

Knowing the way JC overpromised on pretty much everything, it is not unlikely he managed to secure the funding and seeing how he and the owner of the main VC were high school buddies, personal factors may also have played a role.

 

Problem is that the entire core of NQ's voxel engine and server tech was based on early 2000's ideas and theory, it was already outdated by the time the initial work started and both technology and other companies caught up with NQ very quickly.

 

In the hopes of maybe eventually recouping some of the investment, the VC pretty much were then forced into being investors in the game rather that the technology as the house of cards JC built pretty much came crashing down in 2020.

 

I honestly do not see how NQ will be able to make DU a viable and sustainable product. The pieces they have are just too rough and unfinished to stand a chance.

 

IMO, only if an experienced publisher like say Coffeestain got involved somehow and started pushing development in a direction that would make sense could I see DU survive for more than a very optimistic year or two past release. And even then, NQ will need another 8-figure funding round to come in.