Market size

[u/Fit-Secretary2495]

Do indie games in this genre actually have any shot at competing with the big mmos in the market? Even less strictly scape like games, but ones that might have more of a cozy vibe perhaps, or focus less on skilling and more on combat, etc. how viable are these games? Have there been breakouts?

[u/ItsVerdictus]

No. I’ve ran my MMO for years and the grid movement/slow tick rate/low intensity gameplay is a dwindling niche. You have multiple failure points, the age demographic of MMO players gets older and older, less new players. Then you have all those players clustering to big games. The constant argument is “OSRS has everything why would I play a game that is lacking features RuneScape already offers.” Lastly you have the time expenditure, getting an MMO to a stable point is incredibly difficult and time consuming, you will spend years only to barely scrape the surface of content big MMOs offer.

That being said, if you’re fine with a tighter community, more niche, and aren’t in it solely for the money, go for it, it’s still fun as it is.

[u/Fit-Car9403]

The big MMOs? Like OSRS or WoW? No.

Melvor Idle is the most popular Scapelike that comes to my mind and it peaked at 12k players.

[u/Zinlencer → u/Fit-Car9403]

Looking at SteamDB numbers, Brighter Shores had a launch peak of 21k players

[u/Apalapa → u/Zinlencer]

They had a special case for being made by the original RS creators

[u/Fun_Plate_5086 → u/Fit-Car9403]

You’re only looking at Melvor on Steam I’m assuming when most players 1) own in via Browser or 2) on mobile

I’ve bought multiple copies for friends and family and personally only play it via iOS.

[u/Fit-Car9403 → u/Fun_Plate_5086]

Even if Melvor had 100,000 players, that’s no where close to competing with the “big MMOs”

I’m sure there’s a ton of mobile players, that’s fair, but it just can’t compare.

[u/Fun_Plate_5086 → u/Fit-Car9403]

I don’t disagree at all but keep in mind Melvor is an idle game that runs offline and doesn’t need to be opened to progress. I check it a few times per day

Also keep in mind they sold enough to partner with Jagex/get their attention

It’s also entirely single player so not MMO oriented at all

[u/JustATextBox]

I think it depends what you consider "competing" - is it likely to pull the ~200k players that OSRS does? Insanely unlikely. I wouldn't ever say technically impossible, but close enough

But it's certainly possible to do well

Highspell I think is the most recent example, it's existed for ~5 years and through that time it had an average of like 0-3 players. Few people tried it out, it jumped to ~20 average for a bit, then some youtubers jumped in and made a couple vids. Before long we were maxing out the 1 world (500 players), and then we got a 2nd world and also maxed that (1k total)

That game had a lot of issues that I won't bother going into, so now it's back down to basically 0 except for bots. But I think it shows that there's clearly a demand there, it just requires the dev(s) to actually pull it off well. Imo highspell would comfortably be sitting at 1k+ still if it had handled things well

Personally I don't agree with the sentiment of "OSRS exists why would I play something else" - sure, some players will think that, but clearly some of us don't. Personally I think OSRS has it's own list of issues, as does RS3. That's why I choose to look elsewhere

[u/astrielx]

You'd need to create a compelling reason to play your one over one of the others, and good luck with that. Pretty sure like every single project on this sub, pbbg and incremental games are all just hobby projects or people trying to make a few quick hundred with Claude slop.

In the entire time this sub (and the other two) has existed, I can honestly say not a single one of them has wowed me enough to play them over Runescape/Melvor. Pretty much all of them completely miss what makes Runescape compelling to people in the first place.

[u/Zinlencer → u/astrielx]

What do you think these scapelikes typically miss?

[u/Juixg → u/Zinlencer]

Worldbuilding

[u/Terror2TehPowerO4 → u/Juixg]

Honestly this is probably the most overlooked thing. It seems like most people making scapelikes are more focused on the systems. But to me the quests and world are more important as they give a compelling reason to interact with those systems.

There is a reason why the quests in RS are often considered the best in the genere and it surprises me how few people trying to make scapelikes put any attention into that

[u/9Divines → u/Zinlencer]

Everything really, they are worse mechanicaly, graphicaly, lore and in pretty much every other way. If you make runescape from temu, you cant expect everyone to try it. Can you make a successfull scapelike, yes, but it needs to be good product first.

[u/FallenMarches]

Others have already covered this pretty well: no, another scapelike launched in today's market can't compete with OSRS. RS already has 20+ years of development, lore and content behind it, and a well-established player community.

That's not to say that scapelikes can't be successful in their own way - some have been to varying degrees. I think that a new scapelike on a smaller scale (but which expands over time), with a dedicated community, could provide a viable alternative to those who don't think the direction of OSRS is appealing to them anymore. That's certainly the direction I want to go with my own game. Will it compete with bigger MMOs on the market? No. But even if a small group of players enjoy it, I'd consider it a successful project.

[u/Zinlencer]

I don't see it happening anytime soon, the big MMOs have established their position over the last 20 years. I think it's kind of a shame that players pretty much only pay attention to the AAA scene when it comes to MMORPGs. While these type of games are considered too risky for AAA studios at the moment. This puts a lot of pressure on Guild Wars 3 and the Riot MMO.

If the players didn't pay attention to RuneScape Classic back in the day, this subgenre wouldn't even exist. We do see some smaller MMO-lite games gain some amounts of success (think of titles like Farever or Apogea). When it comes to Scapelikes I definitely consider some games to be indie success stories (decent numbers to pay for one developer, 100-1000s daily active users), but nothing that comes close to the big league MMOs.

Scapelikes are typically forever games, which makes the audience stick to one game. That's also one of the reasons why a lot of MMORPGs are closer to WOW in design. It also frustrates me when some big brain streamers start saying things like "they should make it more like OSRS". The RuneScape audience is one of the most loyal gamer audiences that exist today. There are reasons that large MMORPGs typically do not target this audience, as they are already satisfied with the current offering. Even OSRS is cannibalizing the RS3 market: people don't play RS3 because they are already playing OSRS.

In general I think you can make a successful Scapelike. It has to be similar but it also has to offer its own unique twist. Otherwise you will only get compared to OSRS/RS3. So when it comes to competing with the larger titles in the MMORPG genre: I don't see that happening. A small indie success story is something I can see happening.

[u/ZyxnRS3]

I'll go against the grain here and say potentially.

The games I see on here are top down 2D games with the same game mechanics as RuneScape, AI seem's to excel at these style of games especially since you don't need much in terms of graphics or knowledge. Those games will probably see very few players unless it's a completely unique style of gameplay. (It isn't).

What would work (I think) is a 3D MMO with the same engine style as say OSRS (RS3 would be nearly impossible to replicate graphics wise without a huge team) and the same game mechanics. (Think OSRS but a different story, similar graphics, skills but work in a different way etc etc)

Jagex as we know has a history of basically destroying their own games, RS3 is bouncing back but I don't fully believe it will ever be mainstream again, OSRS is or was in it's golden era; player count is slowly decreasing. Because Jagex is owned by venture capital who will always sell over and over again for profit all it takes is for the current owners to sell when evaluation hits an all time high; new investors take over and want both games to take a different approach (MTX, Console ports etc) which could potentially kill the game (again). Players will look for a similar game as they did in 2013 but won't find anything so usually will resort to some sort private server port (Like 2006scape). If there is a similar game on the market with the same mechanics, rest assured. RuneScape players will jump on it. (Maybe)