Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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So let me get this straight...
The current plan is: stay mostly part-time volunteers for "a couple of years," use Early Access funds to hopefully transition into more full-time staff, and then eventually deliver a 1.0 that contains "a couple expansions worth of content"…after years of incremental development? That doesn't sound like a roadmap to me, it sounds like a prayer.
This is exactly the monetization reality people have been pointing out. You're effectively saying: We don't have the manpower now. We need subs to maybe get the manpower. Once we get the manpower, development will accelerate. Then, after years, 1.0 happens. Then the real long-term content cadence begins.
That's not how modern live service works anymore and that's what I've been pointing out ad naseum. Early Access is not a magical bridge that lets you float indefinitely while "eventually" scaling up. It's a clock. And that clock starts the second you charge money. The brutal reality is that Early Access isn't just a funding stream (though many devs treat it as such now), it's also your reputation. If players perceive that they're paying to subsidize a multi-year buildout with mostly volunteer staffing, you're dangerously close to the pattern we've seen repeatedly - early hype, paid EA influx, slow cadence, population drop, revenue shrinks, "We'll accelerate once we can hire" becomes impossible and now content ambitions quietly scale down.
That's the blueprint for the graveyard of the last decade of MMOs.
And the language here of - "we'll get to 1.0 in a couple years," "we'll scale up staffing," "we'll add more full-time team members once we can" reads less like a funded production pipeline and more like an aspirational bootstrap. That works in a single-player indie. It is extremely risky in a subscription MMO with server costs, live ops, support, and player expectations. You don't get infinite time just because you call it Early Access. Modern audiences don't wait three years for a volunteer project to find its financial footing. They churn. Fast. And once they churn, reacquisition is brutal.
The part that really jumps out though is this idea of launching 1.0 with "a couple expansions worth of content." That sounds great on paper. But expansions take teams. Systems teams. Encounter designers. Itemization balance passes. QA. Infrastructure. If you don't have that now, you're effectively saying: "Trust us to build a much larger version of this later, using money from this smaller version." That's not inherently malicious but it is financially fragile and feels very "scammy".
All of this is where the chickens come home to roost on the earlier debates. You can't simultaneously: reject Steam exposure, reject broader monetization, target a 5-10k niche, rely on volunteer labor, and promise multi-expansion-scale scope. Something has to give. Either the niche grows, monetization expands, or scope contracts. Those are the three levers. Right now this reads like an Early Access gamble: use sub revenue to slowly bootstrap toward a larger team and hope retention holds long enough to get there.
That's not impossible. But it's not some romantic "we're just making what we love" fairy tale either. It's a high-risk funding strategy in a genre that has chewed up far better capitalized teams. The concern isn't that they shouldn't dream big. It's that the timeline and financial scaffolding don't match the ambition and in 2026, ambition without runway isn't "charming". It's a massive red flag.
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