I guarantee you the thing stopping someone else from making a game like Hazeron is not the fact that Hazeron is still running. If Hazeron is shut down, some benevolent dev with enough resources and time isn't going to come along and start coding up a Hazeron replacement. Hugely beloved MMOs with thousands of dedicated fans can barely manage to get a team together to reverse-engineer a successor.
Wishing for Hazeron to "disappear" benefits absolutely no one, and unless you have a grudge against Haxus, makes no sense at all. Like, I can understand not liking a game, that's fine. Not liking its creator, sure, whatever. But actively wishing failure upon a project? What's the point? How does antagonizing a game or its fans possibly benefit you at all? If Hazeron shuts down, no one is happier.
Accepting donations is also a difficult proposition. If Haxus starts, it's hard to *ever* monetize the project afterward. Imagine if you have hundreds of people donating to a project, but it's not enough to keep the project afloat, so months later you decide you need to either put the game behind a paywall or cease development. What do you do about the donators? I hope you kept good records so you can convert their past donations to game-time. And then if your monetization efforts fail, and you have no choice but to shut down the project, what do you do about the donators who've given you hundreds or thousands of dollars? They were donations, so you're not obligated to compensate them, but I guarantee you many of them will feel betrayed.
In the worst case, Hazeron opens the project up to donations, doesn't raise nearly enough money, and shuts down the game a few months later anyway and everyone who donated feels like they wasted their money. At least if he's charging for a product, it's extremely clear what *you* are getting. When you introduce donations into the equation, everything gets significantly more complicated.
"But they're donations, so donators aren't owed anything," obviously! Most people will be understanding. But it only takes a few crazy, pissed-off internet trolls to blow things completely out of proportion.
There is no easy solution to the financial issues Haxus has run into. Ideally, Haxus finds a way to trim some of the fat and lower the performance cost of keeping the servers up, but it sounds like that's not possible. He's really backed himself into a corner. The fact that so much of the code is inseparable from the extremely expensive servers it runs on leaves him with few options. I hope he can at least salvage some of the codebase and continue development in some fashion once the servers inevitably disappear.
Author
Topic: Shores of Hazeron (new thread with the last updates) (Read 138824 times)