Furcadia is Dead

Furcadia is dead. And it's been dead for a long time, at least 4 years. Look at their statistics on the front page. This game has been around since the start of 1997. I spent at least 3 years in it. It helped improve my writing and imagination, it helped me meet my best friend and others I still talk to frequently, it was a nice, creative form of entertainment that ascended beyond mere point-and-click first-person-shooters.

And yet:
135162 characters connected this month
Max players ever: 4640

I'm going to make a lot of assumptions and guesses, based on things I've heard, read, and experienced. I wouldn't put 95% certainty on any of them but I'd be surprised if I was really far off the mark. This is why I classified this post as a rant and blog fodder.

Let's start with DEP's (Dragon's Eye Productions, the company/people behind Furcadia) business model (I may occasionally regress to a 'your' in this post, meant for DEP).

Business Model and Decisions

Cost

Let's do a simple cost-analysis of Furcadia, without going into hard numbers. (It is an analysis after all.)

The primary expense, above all else, is the cost to run the servers. I'm pretty sure this has been stated by the creators numerous times, and I know they all have jobs outside the company because the company doesn't let them live an American lifestyle by itself. The primary concern, then, should be optimizing for server cost.

Just what are they doing that makes it expensive to handle a mere 4000 people at at time, max? I'd be scared to look at their server architecture. If you're incompetent in this area, which it seems like it from the outside, hire a specialist to rewrite it from scratch, making use of Amazon or another elastic server provider so you can scale. (If only 1000 people are on, you don't need the resources that 4000 users might need.) The money spent on the specialist will pay for itself in server cost savings over not a very long time.

Consider P2P. The server issue is simple: data. (Though that doesn't make it easy.) There are two main things Furcadia needs to keep track of.

The first is per-client data, such as username, and various statistics. Much of this can be readable by anyone, some should remain private. Some should be writable by the user, some writable only by Furcadia's server. This set of data is fairly small it shouldn't be expensive in storage space or bandwidth.

The second is dream data. Here we have an impossible problem, in a certain sense. By default, all dream data is public. Most dream creators are happy just to have someone visit, let alone stay around. However there are always those desperately afraid of others taking their artwork or their DS and using them on their own projects, possibly even making money from it! DEP has chosen to cater to these people (probably because DEP's mindset is artist-based and artists typically get uppity about copyright), but it's an impossible problem. You can do all the fancy data encryption you want; at the end of the day, art is going to be displayed on the screen, and programmers can extract it. There are things you can do to make it harder for a programmer to extract the data: e.g. using a binary format instead of, say, JSON. Note though that screen scraping is the maximal difficulty you can achieve; you can't make it harder on the programmer than just grabbing the art off the screen as it's rendered. Programs have always existed to do this, and programs that not only do that but also make sense of the data are always improving and are quite sophisticated these days.

So this idea of hiding your data you're going to reveal in some form eventually is a fool's errand. The client is not secure and cannot be made secure. Accepting this, suddenly you can consider P2P, as just one example. Instead of forcing every user to download the dream from the official repository, let the user download it from people already in the dream (or who have visited the dream and are online) instead or in addition. This can make a huge dent in the required bandwidth of Furcadia servers. There are some security concerns but they're mostly trivial, the most controversial one is IP revealing which is why P2P sharing should be a default install option with the ability to turn it off at install time and any other time. There are also lots of free data-serving sources you could use as mirrors. The community can help a lot in this regard, too. Allow people to register their servers as dedicated mirrors of all public data, you don't even need P2P.

Furcadia's recent updates have been pumping out a lot of new artwork. This is good as it boosts choices in the Digo Market for in-game items, but at least double the work currently spent on art/design should be spent on programming. (In other companies the reverse is true, I don't mean to imply programmers are at the top always.)

Startup Failure

This is a great example of a failed startup that hasn't admitted it yet. Failing isn't a bad thing in a startup unless you can't admit it. The faster you fail, the faster you can move on to the next thing that may go big. 14 years is far too long. If you haven't made a lot of money from a project within 14 years, you're just not going to. Move on. Do the old project on the side if you have to or want to, but don't make it a major focus. It's just not profitable.

Furthermore, many startups avoid traps of angel funding by funding themselves. This can happen if you have rich founders, but it can also happen by "leveraging" (aka whoring) you and your company out to third parties, acting as contractors or consultants. You can easily make $1800 per day in the software world. In 14 years, I'm sure there is something DEP can offer other companies from its experience and acquired expertise in terms of art, programming, management, writing, or something else. If not, that's pretty depressing.

The Market

Furcadia caters to all ages. This is both good and bad. The good is that all can find something they enjoy, and the young can interact with the old in meaningful ways instead of common authoritarian ways most young people have. I think I was 14 or 15 when I entered the Furc world, and I interacted with 16 year olds, 19 year olds, 25 year olds. Possibly some even older people as well. Public school creates boundaries between age groups making such interactions very hard for both sides.

The bad are controlling parents, inevitable child predators, and age queries. It's impossible to verify someone's age without resorting to visiting them in person and carbon dating them. (Well, not carbon dating, but you get the idea.) Even a social security number is just that: a number. You don't know that its corresponding human is the same human who gave you the number. You don't know if the age record is correct. You don't know if the human lied when they said they were born Jan 1, 1993. Be like so many other companies and have an "official" policy of requiring 13+ year olds. Be like the porn sites that mention the 18 or older warning somewhere for "explicit content" but don't require a yes/no enter/exit action. If you want to advertise to kids and have parental-like controls, fine, that can be a worthwhile goal, but it shouldn't come at the expense of the user interface.

Furcadia's target audience is tiny. The entire furry community isn't that big. (As a simple argument, consider how many [fantastic] Star Fox games there are compared to Megaman, Mario, Zelda, Sonic...) They recently added human avatars but they're simply not going to expand past the furry market as long as they call themselves Furcadia. (Of course I mean furry in the most generic sense here, it may even be as general as simply animal likers--I don't consider myself a furry though I do like Star Fox and anthromorphic-esque creatures, yet I would still be in the target market.)

Because of the tiny market, there's a tiny maximum pool of people to monetize. Other software, like video games on Steam, unite both the young and old--not for any meaningful experience, they're just shooting each other. But it's a huge market, involved in a multi-billion dollar industry. Find out how much FurAffinity makes and how much Nintendo has made off Star Fox (and other groups off other furryish games like Sly Cooper) and you may get an idea of how large this market can get. I don't imagine it's very high.

Niche markets can still be very profitable and interesting. Look up patio11's Bingo Card business. But it's a problem you should recognize and account for at all times.

Sources of income

This is the second biggest pressure point of making money from Furcadia, next to server costs. A blunt point: in-game virtual content does not work, as a rule. Valve is the exception. You are not Valve, and you do not own Team Fortress 2.

Furcadia doesn't embrace external markets like Valve does. Furcadia could enforce that clients can only trade items if they pay DEP real money (for in-game content, say minimum of $5), in the same way Valve does with Team Fortress 2. Right now you can trade anything with other users (there may be certain fees for certain things but in general it's usually free).

Furcadia can add hats. If Furcadia wants to have a chance at profiting off in-game virtual art, they need to follow Valve's example.

The Game

Players

Let's look at those stats I posted again.

135162 characters connected this month
Max players ever: 4640

Notice they talk about characters and players. There's no limit to the number of accounts a particular unique player can have. Furcadia has an artificial limit by limiting how many usernames can map to a single email address, but in the days of free email and the fact that Gmail lets you add arbitrary dots and/or a suffix of '+whatever' to your email, and still sends it to you, this arbitrary limit is meaningless and just a hassle for users. It should be removed.

Given that many people have "alt" accounts, it seems reasonable (though perhaps not conservative) that the connected characters figure converted to individual connected players is at least an order of magnitude lower. Only Furc knows. I wonder why they won't say. (Of course, it's possibly their terminology here is just conflicting and both mean unique users but that still seems odd given there's only 30 days in a month, and an average 1000 users per day is only 30,000.)

As far as the actual players go, Furcadia naturally suffers the 4chan problem of having lots of immature people around due to letting everyone in. Free ranges die just as easily as walled gardens--though in the former case they can live in zombie-form as 4chan does. Ask some Furc people who've been around for a long time, they'll tend to say they miss the old golden days when there was lots of RP happening. Now it's mostly just become a visual IRC chatroom host with some pseudo-games like races within different dreams. Has anyone monetized IRC? (Yes.)

Gameplay

Furcadia isn't a game, per se. It's visual chat. There have been minigames created within individual dreams, and some of them are even fun (and you can always recreate board games), but the medium itself is not a game. This puts limits on what's possible.

Scripting

DragonScript sucks. PhoenixScript as a DB sucks. I imagine it's nice for newbies, because they are both simple and easy for what they do, but a more powerful option should exist for those who know better. Second Life has a fully featured scripting language (which is basically just a variant on C++). Actual programmers will make amazing, awesome things if you give them the tools to do so. DragonScript lacks the fundamental concept of a function: without that, nothing can be done. (All you need are functions, the rest of computer science falls out naturally as an extension of Lambda Calculus.)

Suggestions for a future

I've interspersed some suggestions above, here are a few others to the creators, should they happen to read this someday.

Open Source It

Under the Apache License. Hosted on GitHub. Both client and server.

I know I'm not the first to make this suggestion, I'm likely not going to be the last. As I recall one initial rationalization against open source was use of the LZW compression algorithm. Ignoring my stance on whether a software patent, let alone an algorithm patent, a mathematical equation patent, a frikkin fits in a few lines of unobfuscated code patent, this is all moot since it's been expired for quite some time. If there are any other pieces DEP is not legally allowed to open up, those should be the very first things being worked on, not any new features, and the interface (which is not patentable) should be opened up so that open source contributors can speed the process of creating a replacement.

The other main reason not to open source is it destroys their business model because people then have no incentive to buy in-game assets if they can just modify their own clients to always show them, or connect to non-official servers to show them. But... um. Well. How do I put this... Furcadia players have been using their own assets since the start of Furcadia, in dreams, which is where most players hang out, not on the main map. DEP's business model was already questionable, as I explained above.

I think if a single person forked Furc on github with the intention of extending it, DEP would be incredibly lucky. I wouldn't be that person. I would think it'd be pretty cool to have a 3D first/third person of Furc though with a dream creator that makes Second Life's look primitive.

Look and feel

The game and its website and the idea are firmly stuck back in 1995, two years before the game was released. It needs a new, slick look. Hire a really young designer. Rewrite the website in Ruby on Rails or Node.js or Python with Flask or PHP 5.4, with a frontend making lots of JS use with jquery et al.

Conclusion

Furcadia is Dead. The best suggestion is to just abandon it and do something completely new and at least 20% cooler. I can always rant some more but this has taken enough of my attention. But please if you agree/disagree post in the comments and I'd be happy to continue a discussion/debate and even be corrected on the assumptions I've made here.

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Posted on 2011-10-14 by Jach

Tags: business, fodder, furcadia, philosophy, rant

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