[Serious] Genuinly interested what happened to this game

[miblan]

I've played this game for a few days in the past when it was still alive.
After having some kind of nostalgia trip some years later, I came back to older games on Steam to see how they were going, and I saw some peculiar reviews on 8BitMMO.

Some of the reviews said the developer/moderators had toxic behavior, there were false promises, gamebreaking bugs, and other stuff that sounded really interesting. Of course I took these with a grain of salt, but it's interesting nonetheless.

So my question is: what happened to this game? Are there some major things that happened in its lifespan (big events, major bugs/glitches, infamous players,...)? This was quite a popular F2P game back in the day, and I'm sure a big chunk of the younger users on Steam gave this a try (since it's, according to them, Minecraft-like), so I'm fairly sure some stuff happened.

Considering this(/was) is a '100% player-build world', there must exist some interesting stories.

[Bits]

You described everything that happened. Bad mods, game abandoned (atleast i thought until i read the forums, still lack of updates), and the game just sorta... died.

[miblan]

Originally posted by Btx360:

You described everything that happened. Bad mods, game abandoned (atleast i thought until i read the forums, still lack of updates), and the game just sorta... died.

I went to the official website of the game and I was surprised it has a event-leaderbord thing that dates back to Februari 2021... so it's still active, wich I think is really damn weird.

Thanks for replying!

[RobbyZ]

It had a pretty good run. Lots of fun times between 2010ish to 2016ish, especially around 2014ish when it really hit its stride in kind of a golden era. There's a post on my blog with screenshots dating back to 2001ish, but wordpress broke multipage support at some point so only a few are viewable right now. A bunch of them are here[mod.htmod.com] though. Ultimately, I was forced to give up and spend most of my time on different projects when this one just wasn't financially viable.

Lots of fun events - octoberbits, bitmas, landrush, major streamers filling up the servers with their communities, tokyo game show, SIGC, and so much more. The blog still has all of it up, and probably lots of references on the official forums, too. If you're looking to do some archaeology, those are good places to peruse. So many fond memories.

Best bug - glitchblocks. Was really cool to see what people could do with them!

Worst bug - ghost doors. They will forever haunt me :P

The drama/harassment stuff was unfortunate. I'm not going to get too much into specifics, but in general a small group of people did some bad things and most of them eventually apologized later on. It's not their fault the game died off, since despite all that drama, it didn't affect the game's metrics at all.

In fact, basically nothing did despite years of trying to make it financially viable. There were various fixes that improved the game's metrics a bit, but ultimately there were some insurmountable core problems that in the long term prevented it from going further. Over on the official forums there's a few threads I go into more detail on specifics and what I'd make if I do another MMO one day.

But overall, its limited success was still pretty cool. On 8BitMMO, I had this amazing window of opportunity to launch a unknown game in Steam ~2013 and make it big back when we did and I really lucked out to hit the timing just right (and also did some crazy crunch to get it out before the store started getting flooded.). For a while, we had some really good visibility, and though the traffic inevitably tailed off, it was fun while it lasted. If 8BitMMO had launched in 2021, I don't think anyone would have heard of it since kongregate is dead (RIP :'(), and launching an unknown game on Steam in 2021+ and having anyone see it is hopeless. "All New Releases" in 2021 (if you can even find it) is a graveyard of developers' dreams.

So, I'm extremely grateful that 8BitMMO had what success that it had, and got to enjoy a couple years of it. Most games never even get that chance.

[miblan]

Originally posted by RobbyZ:

It had a pretty good run...

Thanks a LOT for you reply Robby, I did not expect to get an answer from the actual developer himself!

I know exactly what you're talking about, since I released a game on Steam myself 2 years ago and I still haven't gotten any money from Valve thanks to lack of popularity, it's a shame. I've lost a lot of motivation for my dream as a gamedev myself thanks to that experience.

As said before, I took every drama with a grain of salt. People will always hate the devs of any game (especially MMO's) and they will only point out (and overexaggarate about) the negative encounters. I'm glad to hear it's all resolved peacefully.

You had something special with 8BitMMO, since it was the first default avatar you could pick on Steam, it was always on top at TOP F2P GAMES and it was probably the first game on Steam for a lot of people.

I can't even imagine how hard it must've been to program an entire MMO by yourself. With the popularity, it probably wasn't easy to cope with the amount of feedback it got (since, again, nobody talks about positive things, especially gamers). So props to you for that!

I hope to hear from future projects from you, since this game was definitely noticeable when it was popular at the time (and I think this fact can give quite a boost if you try to release something new). Thanks again for the detailed reply and I'm definitely checking out the blog posts!

[Tipoff Giggots]

Originally posted by RobbyZ:

It had a pretty good run. Lots of fun times between 2010ish to 2016ish, especially around 2014ish when it really hit its stride in kind of a golden era. There's a post on my blog with screenshots dating back to 2001ish, but wordpress broke multipage support at some point so only a few are viewable right now. A bunch of them are here[mod.htmod.com] though. Ultimately, I was forced to give up and spend most of my time on different projects when this one just wasn't financially viable.

Lots of fun events - octoberbits, bitmas, landrush, major streamers filling up the servers with their communities, tokyo game show, SIGC, and so much more. The blog still has all of it up, and probably lots of references on the official forums, too. If you're looking to do some archaeology, those are good places to peruse. So many fond memories.

Best bug - glitchblocks. Was really cool to see what people could do with them!

Worst bug - ghost doors. They will forever haunt me :P

The drama/harassment stuff was unfortunate. I'm not going to get too much into specifics, but in general a small group of people did some bad things and most of them eventually apologized later on. It's not their fault the game died off, since despite all that drama, it didn't affect the game's metrics at all.

In fact, basically nothing did despite years of trying to make it financially viable. There were various fixes that improved the game's metrics a bit, but ultimately there were some insurmountable core problems that in the long term prevented it from going further. Over on the official forums there's a few threads I go into more detail on specifics and what I'd make if I do another MMO one day.

But overall, its limited success was still pretty cool. On 8BitMMO, I had this amazing window of opportunity to launch a unknown game in Steam ~2013 and make it big back when we did and I really lucked out to hit the timing just right (and also did some crazy crunch to get it out before the store started getting flooded.). For a while, we had some really good visibility, and though the traffic inevitably tailed off, it was fun while it lasted. If 8BitMMO had launched in 2021, I don't think anyone would have heard of it since kongregate is dead (RIP :'(), and launching an unknown game on Steam in 2021+ and having anyone see it is hopeless. "All New Releases" in 2021 (if you can even find it) is a graveyard of developers' dreams.

So, I'm extremely grateful that 8BitMMO had what success that it had, and got to enjoy a couple years of it. Most games never even get that chance.

I clocked about 400 hours into this game starting in February 2014. I was still a kid but had a blast, this game shaped how I played games, it was the first thing I ever really got into. Lots of cringy moments looking back but it was just so fun and I was and still am genuinely proud of what I did. Thanks for the amazing game, it was such a wonderful experience and I will always remember some of those I played with, as well as the majority of my experience with this game.

[Tipoff Giggots]

Originally posted by RobbyZ:

It had a pretty good run. Lots of fun times between 2010ish to 2016ish, especially around 2014ish when it really hit its stride in kind of a golden era. There's a post on my blog with screenshots dating back to 2001ish, but wordpress broke multipage support at some point so only a few are viewable right now. A bunch of them are here[mod.htmod.com] though. Ultimately, I was forced to give up and spend most of my time on different projects when this one just wasn't financially viable.

Lots of fun events - octoberbits, bitmas, landrush, major streamers filling up the servers with their communities, tokyo game show, SIGC, and so much more. The blog still has all of it up, and probably lots of references on the official forums, too. If you're looking to do some archaeology, those are good places to peruse. So many fond memories.

Best bug - glitchblocks. Was really cool to see what people could do with them!

Worst bug - ghost doors. They will forever haunt me :P

The drama/harassment stuff was unfortunate. I'm not going to get too much into specifics, but in general a small group of people did some bad things and most of them eventually apologized later on. It's not their fault the game died off, since despite all that drama, it didn't affect the game's metrics at all.

In fact, basically nothing did despite years of trying to make it financially viable. There were various fixes that improved the game's metrics a bit, but ultimately there were some insurmountable core problems that in the long term prevented it from going further. Over on the official forums there's a few threads I go into more detail on specifics and what I'd make if I do another MMO one day.

But overall, its limited success was still pretty cool. On 8BitMMO, I had this amazing window of opportunity to launch a unknown game in Steam ~2013 and make it big back when we did and I really lucked out to hit the timing just right (and also did some crazy crunch to get it out before the store started getting flooded.). For a while, we had some really good visibility, and though the traffic inevitably tailed off, it was fun while it lasted. If 8BitMMO had launched in 2021, I don't think anyone would have heard of it since kongregate is dead (RIP :'(), and launching an unknown game on Steam in 2021+ and having anyone see it is hopeless. "All New Releases" in 2021 (if you can even find it) is a graveyard of developers' dreams.

So, I'm extremely grateful that 8BitMMO had what success that it had, and got to enjoy a couple years of it. Most games never even get that chance.

Is the megamap broken now? I wondered if I could find my old stuff. I found a wiki with my old username on it saying I was a prick and stopped playing haha. Love to see it, good memories.

[RobbyZ]

Thanks for the nice comments :)

Regarding the megamap, it's still up and running, just not actively updated. So all the old stuff should be preserved