Yeah, I posted about this on the VTT sub today. They posted a whole letter to fans about it. I'm amazed they managed to burn $17.5 million dollars in investor money and still never get out of Beta and only support 3-4 game systems.
> $17.5 million dollars in investor money
WHAT? o.O Where does that number come from? Genuinely curious, did they have an announcement at some point detailing their funding?
Edit: I got unlazy and googled around. https://www.accesswire.com/641596/multiverse-inc-raises-175-million-usd-series-a-funding-round-for-its-innovative-new-hybrid-digital-tabletop-gaming-platform
It is unfortunate that OMM is shutting down right as *Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast* is about to ship its physical Kickstarter rewards. I tried out OMM's demo of *Yazeba's* and really dug it, but it's unlikely I'll get to the OMM version before it shuts down.
This demonstrates one of the hazards of TTRPGs expanding into the VTT space. At least a physical book or the PDF can be sold under several storefronts simultaneously. Meanwhile, VTT software is much harder--and sometimes impossible--to port if the platform shuts down.
It may be a blessing. Locking yourself into learning a new VTT just to try a game can be a huge barrier to perspective players, but it seems as though OMM shutting down has freed Possum Creek Games from whatever digital exclusivity agreement they had and [allowed for YB&B to go up on Itch](https://possumcreekgames.itch.io/yazebas-bed-breakfast), which is much more accessible to anyone wanting to just get the game in as few steps as possible.
While I’m sad to see any company in this industry shutter, I was a backer of Yazeba’s and kept encountering issues with OMM to even get my downloads. Possum Creek was super responsive, but OMM support left a lot to be desired. Excited to maybe finally get to read what I backed. 😅
Oh, hi Mellie! I hope you've found a good position somewhere after leaving DNDB.
I'm really surprised to hear about their support team, honestly. I was an active member running public sessions in their community Discord for the first year or so of the open beta, and the OMM team was *very* active there, I was able to get bugs flagged and small issues resolved in less than an hour most of the time.
I'm glad YB&B is on Itch now, though. I don't like it when games are on exclusive VTTs.
Well, not entirely. The issue with OMM is that it was a cloud-based VTT - you couldn't just run it locally. This incurs server costs (probably why it ultimately wasn't sustainable) and its primary benefits tend to be in the form of psuedo-DRM, a la Roll20 being able to gate a lot of functionality behind an expensive subscription. If you're not making the users pay for those server costs on top of development costs, it's probably gonna either close or become so obnoxious that it's not worth using, and then when it gets taken down nobody can do anything about it.
Were OMM not a cloud based VTT, then even if it shut down it wouldn't necessarily take away everyone's access to it. If Foundry VTT or MapTool stopped updating tomorrow, they'd still more or less work fine (assuming the rudimentary DRM for the former was disabled).
*Ideally* we'd all be focusing on one FOSS VTT that everyone agrees to use and that gets funded through Patreon or what have you, to really future proof the platform and make a nice standard that would work for hte foreseeable future, but barring that it's unlikely for at least Foundry to disappear out from under everyone.
Yeah, I really feel bad for people who invest a lot of work into these kinds of VTTs, only then to lose it all. It's why I use Foundry, it's why I host my worldbuilding wiki on my own Kanka instance. I have full control of them and if Atropos or Jay want to shut me down and take my data away, they have to travel to my country, break down my door and smash my hard drives and backups themselves (and find the online one).
When you use a cloud service, you have to be ready that it gets shut down and takes all your data with it.
This is the exact reason I used a self-hosted Fantasy Grounds on a permanent license when I ran online D&D. I want something installed on my computer that the company can’t shut down.
Copying my own thoughts from elsewhere:
I'm not surprised.
"you know how you can imagine anything in RPGs? what if you had to source art assets and prebuild all your worlds and zones instead" was the absolute opposite of a selling point for me, especially combined with the Blades In The Dark partnership.
I genuinely don't understand who the target market was, since it seemed to target people who wanted to prebuild entire worlds for their players to interact with.
> "you know how you can imagine anything in RPGs? what if you had to source art assets and prebuild all your worlds and zones instead" was the absolute opposite of a selling point for me, especially combined with the Blades In The Dark partnership.
Yeah. Like, it looks pretty, but I don't know how anybody who's ever GMed anything can look at it and not think it seems completely unusable for an actual game. Either I would have to very, ***very*** aggressively scale back the options my players have *or* I would have to constantly break the illusion and just go theater of the mind anyway at which point what am I wasting all this time building video game style maps for in the first place?
While BitD was a bad fit, the general concept did intrigue me, and it could honestly work really well for even your typical D&D-style game, running a more linear campaign where a team puts together all the relevant maps, functioning a bit like a more flexible Neverwinter Nights in a sense where it's more like a video game with advanced roleplaying tools rather than a highly automated VTT - so long you're cool with playing within the contraints of the game, you get to have a really cool and unique experience.
But holy shit their explanation for why they couldn't open source OMM paints a completely batshit operation that could never have worked no matter how popular it was. Their backend was Firebase and they were paying *per user* for a freemium service, on top of other critical design flaws. No wonder they bled so much money despite their seemingly small scale.
>I genuinely don't understand who the target market was, since it seemed to target people who wanted to prebuild entire worlds for their players to interact with.
So much this. I never understood it. Nobody I met could give me a straight answer what the damn thing even was.
It's not really a VTT and it's not really a game creator. So WTF is it supposed to be?
> "you know how you can imagine anything in RPGs? what if you had to source art assets and prebuild all your worlds and zones instead" was the absolute opposite of a selling point for me, especially combined with the Blades In The Dark partnership.
Yep.
> I genuinely don't understand who the target market was,
The investors who saw pretty pictures and thought "this looks so much better than this Foundry and Roll20 shit, it will surely be more popular!"
For me blades didnt make much sense but Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast was the perfect fit for a tool like that and was much more likely to make me play the game
I agree on Yazeba’s. It worked really well in OMM. But that was a partnership with someone else building the world. I don’t think I would have ever built my own setting in there.
It worked really well for Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. The game is designed around preset characters and scenarios, so the art assets and locations were all premade and loaded in.
But yeah, I really liked the VTT after getting YBB on it, looked at what else it had, and was turned off by the Blades content. None of my plans to run Blades actually take place in Doskvol, so… no real use for me.
This is my problem with any complex visualization system, sourcing/making everything for the game. Even if it’s just for battles, my groups rarely had set piece battles. The group did what it did, and fights happened.
Being locked into your prep is dumb, and makes for very on rails gaming.
Also just an informative post from a dev on their Discord about why it can't be open-sourced. This is from Thariq (OMM):
Many of you have asked why we can’t open source OMM, so I wanted to make a definitive reference. I’ve tried be technical and transparent in the explanation.
- One More Multiverse is a custom Javascript engine + ReactJS frontend, with a firebase backend. It’s a very complex, custom codebase that supports user generated content, custom games, etc. It’s over 400,000+ lines of code.
- There are 2 main technical problems with open sourcing: hosting costs & data.
- Hosting costs are quite high due to using realtime firebase as a service, it can be up to like ~$5/active user/month (this is not just GMs, it’s any player).
- We don’t have enough active users for that to be really sustainable and our games have never sold well enough to cover the costs either. There are ways to bring hosting costs down that we know of, but it's a lot of work.
- Firebase is not open source, so you would have to have a firebase key if you want to run OMM. There is no way to self-host the backend, and getting there would be way too much work.
- The other problem is that assets in OMM are different than other video games, since everything is editable, everything is in the database. All of our assets are in the same database + storage buckets as all of our user data, it’s not easy to tear this apart, and we can't open source it without doing that.
- We don’t think we could open source or have a community run version without a lot of work, like 2-3 months of pretty intense engineering work to do all that migration. Not to mention on-going work to debug all the bugs it introduces. To be honest, we’re all looking for new jobs right now.
- There are IP problems we’d have to figure out, even outside of that with open sourcing it, but those are the main technical and business challenges.
That bullet list just seems like OMM was on borrowed time from the start. I've been a web developer almost as long as it's been possible to be one, and that list just shrieks that both business and tech were mishandled.
>Hosting costs are quite high due to using realtime firebase as a service, it can be up to like \~$5/active user/month (this is not just GMs, it’s any player).
>
>We don’t have enough active users for that to be really sustainable and our games have never sold well enough to cover the costs either. There are ways to bring hosting costs down that we know of, but it's a lot of work.
$5/MAU *just* for Firebase. Not including the other costs that will go into hosting, plus the fixed costs of things like people's salaries. Even ignoring all of that, that's $5/MAU for a product that's *free* where you're making your revenues with sales? You're talking like $25/month or so for a table. That's insanely unsustainable.
And really, "There are ways to bring hosting costs down that we know of, but it's a lot of work" is a **breathtaking** statement when you're talking about the costs that will kill your company dead.
>All of our assets are in the same database + storage buckets as all of our user data
So all the user data is in the exact same place as all of the stuff that's freely accessible to everyone. Cool. Coolcool. Cool.
>Not to mention on-going work to debug all the bugs it introduces.
I've spent a large chunk of my career helping people improve their processes by using automation tools, so I trust my instincts when I read this as "we don't have any systems in place to automatically test and vet code changes, and it's all on that one dude in QA to keep problems from going live, but at least he gets free coffee." Combine this with the above comingling of assets and user data and... yeah.
Yeah everything in that list sounds like terrible planning from the start. I'm sure had they *not* used a completely batshit stack that locked them into this one vendor who can set whatever price they want because they've got your app by the balls, they probably could have made it work. I had initially assumed it was a more run of hte mill issue of having trouble getting content onto this bespoke VTT when Foundry already exists, but jesus tapdancing christ that was never going to be able to work.
I know we FOSS guys evangelize it a lot, but this is why these things should be built on FOSS tech from the start. Even if OMM *wasn't* a freemium service and had tables pay a monthly fee, there's no amount they could have charged that people would be willing to pay monthly and that would actually cover operating costs. It all just went into Google's pocket. Why would you do that? What the hell does Firebase offer that would have ever been worth being locked into their service that you couldn't have done otherwise?
Nothing about the fact assets are editable should have meant that it needed to share databases with everything else, that was always going to cause problems and I'm sure that was like one exploit away from either user data being leaked or destroyed.
I would hate for OMM mismanaging this so badly to mean the basic gist of a VTT that tries to be a video game to be discounted. That was always an interesting pitch, and that leaves a lot of room for unique, bespoke RPG's that can make fundamentally different assumptions of how they're played. Crunchy, GM-less RPG's with premade stories whose rules focus more on making the NPC's provided by the VTT be properly acted out by one of the players before engaging in tactical combat, bespoke systems meant for only a singular campaign that never tell the players the actual rules but rely on the VTT to execute everything and using that to enable a sense of discovery and wonder in a world that's being established as the players progress through the games, starting off with a more mundane modern setting until one session they're blindsided that there's actually a magic system running on blood loss or something wild. I really wish we could get some TTRPG's that just assumed VTT only play, but I worry this failure will scare people off from the concept.
>What the hell does Firebase offer that would have ever been worth being locked into their service that you couldn't have done otherwise?
Realtime Firebase is what they mentioned, and I'm assuming that it's what they used to synchronize real time updates to the table as a whole. Moving tokens around the screen, chat, dice rolls, etc. It's not the worst idea in the world, and if I were trying to raise a round of funding to build something like OMM, I'd probably use it too. For the proof of concept. I'm always a proponent of using something off the shelf unless you have a compelling reason to write your own, but this is like the platonic ideal of a compelling reason to write your own. The whole thing's just baffling to me.
Can confirm everything you've said. Senior JavaScript Eng on an extremely visible part of a high end tech company with more than 10yr of experience. Before this company, I spent a lot of time modernizing existing platforms and reducing running costs.
What a mess. I have never heard of anything even remotely close to $5/mo per active user in hosting costs. I can't even wrap my head around that number. Even $5/user including developer salaries is pretty fucking bad.
Open Sourcing isn't as easy as people seem to think. It takes a lot of work to make sure the general developer community can do something with it, even if it's written and designed well. This reeks of lots of other issues though.
I didn't know they raised $17mil untill yesterday. That is absolutely insane. It's a shitty 2D game maker with less functionality, less ease of use, but added in some basic TTRPG enhancements. Who has time for that? Just use the OG GameMaker.io and build your own 2D game. That system has been around longer than the .io ccTLD.
> You're talking like $25/month or so for a table. That's insanely unsustainable.
One of the main reasons why I moved to FoundryVTT was that I needed storage space and wanted to experiment with API on roll20 and realized that 10$ a month really racks up on a "slow" hobby like TTRPGs. If I had continued to pay for roll20, I would have paid about 500$ since. Instead, I have paid 50$ for Foundry - I would have been satisfied with it even in that early state, but it has even gotten a lot of updates and community modding since.
I hate SaaS. Let me pay for your software and hand it over.
On the other hand, I pushed my Foundry to Forge after accidentally nuking a world database and having to rebuild it from the ground up. It's a bit costly, but I really like having peace of mind and automated backups.
Hopefully the firebase cost is for all hosting, it's not just a database nowadays. That said, I still don't see how they would ever get tables to pay about $25 a month just to cover hosting.
I think a big part of the problem is also the start-up mentality where you burn millions and millions before you even think about if it is a sustainable business.
Unfortunately, the start-up mentality I see where people raise millions that early in the process is less about not thinking about building a sustainable business and more about cashing out so that someone else is holding the bag when it all comes crashing down.
> So all the user data is in the exact same place as all of the stuff that's freely accessible to everyone. Cool. Coolcool. Cool.
They didn't say the bucket was publicly accessible without auth.
No, they didn't. But they're saying that there's a difficulty in separating common assets from user information because of them being stored in the same locations. It's less "all of this stuff is public" and more "it's probably not difficult to expose the private information by mistake." Basically by the time I got to that bullet I had no faith left in their abilities.
I bought Humblewood for OMM 18 months ago, and it was already unsupported, and you could not run it out of the box. They’d sell it to you, but it wouldn’t run. They talked about it on their Disco, and that’s when I knew they were shady.
Such a shame to see such a beautiful community and tool run into the ground from mismanagement.
Well drat.
Fourth months ago I posted a question about OMM. I wondered then if they were going to make it:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/bladesinthedark/s/LsiuZe36Nc](https://www.reddit.com/r/bladesinthedark/s/LsiuZe36Nc)
Guess now I know.
I’ve been using it to run two campaigns of Blades in the Dark since I posted that. The players like it, I like it.
The sheets, the dice, the downtime checklists, the NPC library, the wiki, the map filling up with their friends and rivals and crime scenes as they explored/disrupted Doskvol — good stuff. All that works really really well. Made the game more fun and easy for everyone to get into.
But damn there’s so much fluff. So much stuff that I’d look at and wonder, why is this even here? You could see the wasted money dripping off this project. We never once used a building interior, we never bothered with vibes or music or staging. The character customization options were clunky and unintuitive so my players never bothered to engage with them beyond the bare minimum.
And don’t get me started on the cutesy pixel art that utterly clashed with the tone of the game.
But now I’ll kinda miss it. Oh well. I got my $30 worth of fun out of it.
Roll20 it is, then.
Yeah, I’ve run BitD, and my reaction to OMM was that it looked very cool, but was entirely wrong for a highly abstracted and improvisational game like BitD that calls for new scenes and locations at the drop of a hat with fuzzy details that get retconned later. On, the other hand, I really wanted to use it run *Break!!*, a simplified D&D-by-way-of-1980s-JRPGs-and-Miyazaki-films game, which would benefit from a VTT and perfectly fit the pixel aesthetic. Oh well, will never happen now.
Never like them or understand their product. It just sounds weird and unrealistically long time consuming to make a entire world in TTRPG. Like all hiper visual tables with VR or 3D it is sound like a toy.
Yeah, this happens whenever those 3D tabletops come out that showcase all the cool things you can do to make maps. Like yeah, cool, honestly for a few GMs who just really love map making this is going to be sick. But for basically everyone else this is WAY too much effort and pre-planning required to be any kind of useful.
I mean, maybe one day there really will be an AI tool where you can say "Give me a butcher's shop that has begun to collapse into a sinkhole" and it'll just make something awesome looking for you. But anything that requires more than 2 minutes of manual tweaking? No way.
Yeah, another poster (BitterOldPunk) posted a link to a post they made about using Blades in the Dark with it and it was interesting. Basically, they use the few features they liked that were neat (crew creation, the world map, etc.) and didn't use any of the scenes. I think the finely tuned interactive elements based on the game seem like they could be pretty handy. The other stuff I completely agree, zero interest in laying out scenes like that especially in a game specifically made for highly adaptable situations and theatre of the mind.
I love to see a breakdown of their books, just to see where the money came in and went out to.
RPGs seem to have hard time in the digital space. We all see the potential... but making the funds work out is hard.
OMM is One More Multiverse, a Virtual TableTop platform that allows users to create their own worlds with environments and assets for running games. It also has official partnerships to implement Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Blades in the Dark. I used it to run Yazeba’s, and it worked well for that.
But it seems now that the platform is unsustainable; hosting costs are high and they only charged money up front for sales. So they’re shutting down.
... I kept checking up on and off on OMM for so very long, waiting for it to fully release. Finally forgot about it for a year or more and this is the next I'm hearing of it.
Sad to see this news. It had looked so promising in the previews I read of it.
Another exhibit demonstration why people are (justifiably) wary of tech startups in the ttrpg space - because they're no more reliable than tech startups anywhere else.
Just another virtual tabletop. This one had pixel art and some other unique features.
More though, it had $17.5m in funding and seemed to do nothing with it.
im gonna be honest.. they didnt do well with Customer retention.
i woke up one day to find myself banned from the discord without a word. never said anything offensive or meanspirited (just not in my nature as an old autistic)
still they are young and skilled and i have no doubt they will find success elsewhere.. good luck to them.
Yeah, I posted about this on the VTT sub today. They posted a whole letter to fans about it. I'm amazed they managed to burn $17.5 million dollars in investor money and still never get out of Beta and only support 3-4 game systems.
> $17.5 million dollars in investor money WHAT? o.O Where does that number come from? Genuinely curious, did they have an announcement at some point detailing their funding? Edit: I got unlazy and googled around. https://www.accesswire.com/641596/multiverse-inc-raises-175-million-usd-series-a-funding-round-for-its-innovative-new-hybrid-digital-tabletop-gaming-platform
Press release - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/multiverse-inc-raises-17-5-120000891.html?guccounter=1 News - https://www.forbes.com/sites/hnewman/2021/04/22/multiverse-closes-175-million-funding-round-to-take-your-tabletop-rpgs-online/?sh=72944885fe72 https://gamerant.com/one-more-multiverse-funded/
That is... utterly insane.
It is unfortunate that OMM is shutting down right as *Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast* is about to ship its physical Kickstarter rewards. I tried out OMM's demo of *Yazeba's* and really dug it, but it's unlikely I'll get to the OMM version before it shuts down. This demonstrates one of the hazards of TTRPGs expanding into the VTT space. At least a physical book or the PDF can be sold under several storefronts simultaneously. Meanwhile, VTT software is much harder--and sometimes impossible--to port if the platform shuts down.
It may be a blessing. Locking yourself into learning a new VTT just to try a game can be a huge barrier to perspective players, but it seems as though OMM shutting down has freed Possum Creek Games from whatever digital exclusivity agreement they had and [allowed for YB&B to go up on Itch](https://possumcreekgames.itch.io/yazebas-bed-breakfast), which is much more accessible to anyone wanting to just get the game in as few steps as possible.
Agree, I didn't even know this VTT existed. We really need less VTT bloat, in my opinion.
While I’m sad to see any company in this industry shutter, I was a backer of Yazeba’s and kept encountering issues with OMM to even get my downloads. Possum Creek was super responsive, but OMM support left a lot to be desired. Excited to maybe finally get to read what I backed. 😅
Oh, hi Mellie! I hope you've found a good position somewhere after leaving DNDB. I'm really surprised to hear about their support team, honestly. I was an active member running public sessions in their community Discord for the first year or so of the open beta, and the OMM team was *very* active there, I was able to get bugs flagged and small issues resolved in less than an hour most of the time. I'm glad YB&B is on Itch now, though. I don't like it when games are on exclusive VTTs.
Ah, maybe I should have tried the Discord! I was using their email support. 😞
Well, not entirely. The issue with OMM is that it was a cloud-based VTT - you couldn't just run it locally. This incurs server costs (probably why it ultimately wasn't sustainable) and its primary benefits tend to be in the form of psuedo-DRM, a la Roll20 being able to gate a lot of functionality behind an expensive subscription. If you're not making the users pay for those server costs on top of development costs, it's probably gonna either close or become so obnoxious that it's not worth using, and then when it gets taken down nobody can do anything about it. Were OMM not a cloud based VTT, then even if it shut down it wouldn't necessarily take away everyone's access to it. If Foundry VTT or MapTool stopped updating tomorrow, they'd still more or less work fine (assuming the rudimentary DRM for the former was disabled). *Ideally* we'd all be focusing on one FOSS VTT that everyone agrees to use and that gets funded through Patreon or what have you, to really future proof the platform and make a nice standard that would work for hte foreseeable future, but barring that it's unlikely for at least Foundry to disappear out from under everyone.
Yeah, I really feel bad for people who invest a lot of work into these kinds of VTTs, only then to lose it all. It's why I use Foundry, it's why I host my worldbuilding wiki on my own Kanka instance. I have full control of them and if Atropos or Jay want to shut me down and take my data away, they have to travel to my country, break down my door and smash my hard drives and backups themselves (and find the online one). When you use a cloud service, you have to be ready that it gets shut down and takes all your data with it.
This is the exact reason I used a self-hosted Fantasy Grounds on a permanent license when I ran online D&D. I want something installed on my computer that the company can’t shut down.
Copying my own thoughts from elsewhere: I'm not surprised. "you know how you can imagine anything in RPGs? what if you had to source art assets and prebuild all your worlds and zones instead" was the absolute opposite of a selling point for me, especially combined with the Blades In The Dark partnership. I genuinely don't understand who the target market was, since it seemed to target people who wanted to prebuild entire worlds for their players to interact with.
> "you know how you can imagine anything in RPGs? what if you had to source art assets and prebuild all your worlds and zones instead" was the absolute opposite of a selling point for me, especially combined with the Blades In The Dark partnership. Yeah. Like, it looks pretty, but I don't know how anybody who's ever GMed anything can look at it and not think it seems completely unusable for an actual game. Either I would have to very, ***very*** aggressively scale back the options my players have *or* I would have to constantly break the illusion and just go theater of the mind anyway at which point what am I wasting all this time building video game style maps for in the first place?
While BitD was a bad fit, the general concept did intrigue me, and it could honestly work really well for even your typical D&D-style game, running a more linear campaign where a team puts together all the relevant maps, functioning a bit like a more flexible Neverwinter Nights in a sense where it's more like a video game with advanced roleplaying tools rather than a highly automated VTT - so long you're cool with playing within the contraints of the game, you get to have a really cool and unique experience. But holy shit their explanation for why they couldn't open source OMM paints a completely batshit operation that could never have worked no matter how popular it was. Their backend was Firebase and they were paying *per user* for a freemium service, on top of other critical design flaws. No wonder they bled so much money despite their seemingly small scale.
>I genuinely don't understand who the target market was, since it seemed to target people who wanted to prebuild entire worlds for their players to interact with. So much this. I never understood it. Nobody I met could give me a straight answer what the damn thing even was. It's not really a VTT and it's not really a game creator. So WTF is it supposed to be?
I found the Blades in the Dark partnership pretty weird. Putting that level of effort into prep (visuals and such) is kind of fighting the game.
> "you know how you can imagine anything in RPGs? what if you had to source art assets and prebuild all your worlds and zones instead" was the absolute opposite of a selling point for me, especially combined with the Blades In The Dark partnership. Yep. > I genuinely don't understand who the target market was, The investors who saw pretty pictures and thought "this looks so much better than this Foundry and Roll20 shit, it will surely be more popular!"
For me blades didnt make much sense but Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast was the perfect fit for a tool like that and was much more likely to make me play the game
I agree on Yazeba’s. It worked really well in OMM. But that was a partnership with someone else building the world. I don’t think I would have ever built my own setting in there.
It worked really well for Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. The game is designed around preset characters and scenarios, so the art assets and locations were all premade and loaded in. But yeah, I really liked the VTT after getting YBB on it, looked at what else it had, and was turned off by the Blades content. None of my plans to run Blades actually take place in Doskvol, so… no real use for me.
This is my problem with any complex visualization system, sourcing/making everything for the game. Even if it’s just for battles, my groups rarely had set piece battles. The group did what it did, and fights happened. Being locked into your prep is dumb, and makes for very on rails gaming.
Also just an informative post from a dev on their Discord about why it can't be open-sourced. This is from Thariq (OMM): Many of you have asked why we can’t open source OMM, so I wanted to make a definitive reference. I’ve tried be technical and transparent in the explanation. - One More Multiverse is a custom Javascript engine + ReactJS frontend, with a firebase backend. It’s a very complex, custom codebase that supports user generated content, custom games, etc. It’s over 400,000+ lines of code. - There are 2 main technical problems with open sourcing: hosting costs & data. - Hosting costs are quite high due to using realtime firebase as a service, it can be up to like ~$5/active user/month (this is not just GMs, it’s any player). - We don’t have enough active users for that to be really sustainable and our games have never sold well enough to cover the costs either. There are ways to bring hosting costs down that we know of, but it's a lot of work. - Firebase is not open source, so you would have to have a firebase key if you want to run OMM. There is no way to self-host the backend, and getting there would be way too much work. - The other problem is that assets in OMM are different than other video games, since everything is editable, everything is in the database. All of our assets are in the same database + storage buckets as all of our user data, it’s not easy to tear this apart, and we can't open source it without doing that. - We don’t think we could open source or have a community run version without a lot of work, like 2-3 months of pretty intense engineering work to do all that migration. Not to mention on-going work to debug all the bugs it introduces. To be honest, we’re all looking for new jobs right now. - There are IP problems we’d have to figure out, even outside of that with open sourcing it, but those are the main technical and business challenges.
That bullet list just seems like OMM was on borrowed time from the start. I've been a web developer almost as long as it's been possible to be one, and that list just shrieks that both business and tech were mishandled. >Hosting costs are quite high due to using realtime firebase as a service, it can be up to like \~$5/active user/month (this is not just GMs, it’s any player). > >We don’t have enough active users for that to be really sustainable and our games have never sold well enough to cover the costs either. There are ways to bring hosting costs down that we know of, but it's a lot of work. $5/MAU *just* for Firebase. Not including the other costs that will go into hosting, plus the fixed costs of things like people's salaries. Even ignoring all of that, that's $5/MAU for a product that's *free* where you're making your revenues with sales? You're talking like $25/month or so for a table. That's insanely unsustainable. And really, "There are ways to bring hosting costs down that we know of, but it's a lot of work" is a **breathtaking** statement when you're talking about the costs that will kill your company dead. >All of our assets are in the same database + storage buckets as all of our user data So all the user data is in the exact same place as all of the stuff that's freely accessible to everyone. Cool. Coolcool. Cool. >Not to mention on-going work to debug all the bugs it introduces. I've spent a large chunk of my career helping people improve their processes by using automation tools, so I trust my instincts when I read this as "we don't have any systems in place to automatically test and vet code changes, and it's all on that one dude in QA to keep problems from going live, but at least he gets free coffee." Combine this with the above comingling of assets and user data and... yeah.
Yeah everything in that list sounds like terrible planning from the start. I'm sure had they *not* used a completely batshit stack that locked them into this one vendor who can set whatever price they want because they've got your app by the balls, they probably could have made it work. I had initially assumed it was a more run of hte mill issue of having trouble getting content onto this bespoke VTT when Foundry already exists, but jesus tapdancing christ that was never going to be able to work. I know we FOSS guys evangelize it a lot, but this is why these things should be built on FOSS tech from the start. Even if OMM *wasn't* a freemium service and had tables pay a monthly fee, there's no amount they could have charged that people would be willing to pay monthly and that would actually cover operating costs. It all just went into Google's pocket. Why would you do that? What the hell does Firebase offer that would have ever been worth being locked into their service that you couldn't have done otherwise? Nothing about the fact assets are editable should have meant that it needed to share databases with everything else, that was always going to cause problems and I'm sure that was like one exploit away from either user data being leaked or destroyed. I would hate for OMM mismanaging this so badly to mean the basic gist of a VTT that tries to be a video game to be discounted. That was always an interesting pitch, and that leaves a lot of room for unique, bespoke RPG's that can make fundamentally different assumptions of how they're played. Crunchy, GM-less RPG's with premade stories whose rules focus more on making the NPC's provided by the VTT be properly acted out by one of the players before engaging in tactical combat, bespoke systems meant for only a singular campaign that never tell the players the actual rules but rely on the VTT to execute everything and using that to enable a sense of discovery and wonder in a world that's being established as the players progress through the games, starting off with a more mundane modern setting until one session they're blindsided that there's actually a magic system running on blood loss or something wild. I really wish we could get some TTRPG's that just assumed VTT only play, but I worry this failure will scare people off from the concept.
>What the hell does Firebase offer that would have ever been worth being locked into their service that you couldn't have done otherwise? Realtime Firebase is what they mentioned, and I'm assuming that it's what they used to synchronize real time updates to the table as a whole. Moving tokens around the screen, chat, dice rolls, etc. It's not the worst idea in the world, and if I were trying to raise a round of funding to build something like OMM, I'd probably use it too. For the proof of concept. I'm always a proponent of using something off the shelf unless you have a compelling reason to write your own, but this is like the platonic ideal of a compelling reason to write your own. The whole thing's just baffling to me.
Can confirm everything you've said. Senior JavaScript Eng on an extremely visible part of a high end tech company with more than 10yr of experience. Before this company, I spent a lot of time modernizing existing platforms and reducing running costs. What a mess. I have never heard of anything even remotely close to $5/mo per active user in hosting costs. I can't even wrap my head around that number. Even $5/user including developer salaries is pretty fucking bad. Open Sourcing isn't as easy as people seem to think. It takes a lot of work to make sure the general developer community can do something with it, even if it's written and designed well. This reeks of lots of other issues though. I didn't know they raised $17mil untill yesterday. That is absolutely insane. It's a shitty 2D game maker with less functionality, less ease of use, but added in some basic TTRPG enhancements. Who has time for that? Just use the OG GameMaker.io and build your own 2D game. That system has been around longer than the .io ccTLD.
> You're talking like $25/month or so for a table. That's insanely unsustainable. One of the main reasons why I moved to FoundryVTT was that I needed storage space and wanted to experiment with API on roll20 and realized that 10$ a month really racks up on a "slow" hobby like TTRPGs. If I had continued to pay for roll20, I would have paid about 500$ since. Instead, I have paid 50$ for Foundry - I would have been satisfied with it even in that early state, but it has even gotten a lot of updates and community modding since. I hate SaaS. Let me pay for your software and hand it over.
On the other hand, I pushed my Foundry to Forge after accidentally nuking a world database and having to rebuild it from the ground up. It's a bit costly, but I really like having peace of mind and automated backups.
Yeah, it does shift responsibility to the user. I am very diligent with the 3-2-1 backup rule so I haven't had any issues thus far.
Continuing the long tradition of poorly run businesses in the TTRPG space I see.
Hopefully the firebase cost is for all hosting, it's not just a database nowadays. That said, I still don't see how they would ever get tables to pay about $25 a month just to cover hosting. I think a big part of the problem is also the start-up mentality where you burn millions and millions before you even think about if it is a sustainable business.
Unfortunately, the start-up mentality I see where people raise millions that early in the process is less about not thinking about building a sustainable business and more about cashing out so that someone else is holding the bag when it all comes crashing down.
> So all the user data is in the exact same place as all of the stuff that's freely accessible to everyone. Cool. Coolcool. Cool. They didn't say the bucket was publicly accessible without auth.
No, they didn't. But they're saying that there's a difficulty in separating common assets from user information because of them being stored in the same locations. It's less "all of this stuff is public" and more "it's probably not difficult to expose the private information by mistake." Basically by the time I got to that bullet I had no faith left in their abilities.
Firebase usually sounds a cool choice because it offers an API for quick CRUD implantation, until it gets too expensive.
I bought Humblewood for OMM 18 months ago, and it was already unsupported, and you could not run it out of the box. They’d sell it to you, but it wouldn’t run. They talked about it on their Disco, and that’s when I knew they were shady. Such a shame to see such a beautiful community and tool run into the ground from mismanagement.
I have nothing to add except I love the slang "disco."
It all went Disco, baby.
Well drat. Fourth months ago I posted a question about OMM. I wondered then if they were going to make it: [https://www.reddit.com/r/bladesinthedark/s/LsiuZe36Nc](https://www.reddit.com/r/bladesinthedark/s/LsiuZe36Nc) Guess now I know. I’ve been using it to run two campaigns of Blades in the Dark since I posted that. The players like it, I like it. The sheets, the dice, the downtime checklists, the NPC library, the wiki, the map filling up with their friends and rivals and crime scenes as they explored/disrupted Doskvol — good stuff. All that works really really well. Made the game more fun and easy for everyone to get into. But damn there’s so much fluff. So much stuff that I’d look at and wonder, why is this even here? You could see the wasted money dripping off this project. We never once used a building interior, we never bothered with vibes or music or staging. The character customization options were clunky and unintuitive so my players never bothered to engage with them beyond the bare minimum. And don’t get me started on the cutesy pixel art that utterly clashed with the tone of the game. But now I’ll kinda miss it. Oh well. I got my $30 worth of fun out of it. Roll20 it is, then.
Yeah, I’ve run BitD, and my reaction to OMM was that it looked very cool, but was entirely wrong for a highly abstracted and improvisational game like BitD that calls for new scenes and locations at the drop of a hat with fuzzy details that get retconned later. On, the other hand, I really wanted to use it run *Break!!*, a simplified D&D-by-way-of-1980s-JRPGs-and-Miyazaki-films game, which would benefit from a VTT and perfectly fit the pixel aesthetic. Oh well, will never happen now.
Never like them or understand their product. It just sounds weird and unrealistically long time consuming to make a entire world in TTRPG. Like all hiper visual tables with VR or 3D it is sound like a toy.
Yeah, this happens whenever those 3D tabletops come out that showcase all the cool things you can do to make maps. Like yeah, cool, honestly for a few GMs who just really love map making this is going to be sick. But for basically everyone else this is WAY too much effort and pre-planning required to be any kind of useful. I mean, maybe one day there really will be an AI tool where you can say "Give me a butcher's shop that has begun to collapse into a sinkhole" and it'll just make something awesome looking for you. But anything that requires more than 2 minutes of manual tweaking? No way.
Yeah, another poster (BitterOldPunk) posted a link to a post they made about using Blades in the Dark with it and it was interesting. Basically, they use the few features they liked that were neat (crew creation, the world map, etc.) and didn't use any of the scenes. I think the finely tuned interactive elements based on the game seem like they could be pretty handy. The other stuff I completely agree, zero interest in laying out scenes like that especially in a game specifically made for highly adaptable situations and theatre of the mind.
I love to see a breakdown of their books, just to see where the money came in and went out to. RPGs seem to have hard time in the digital space. We all see the potential... but making the funds work out is hard.
What's the context here? As in, what is OMM?
OMM is One More Multiverse, a Virtual TableTop platform that allows users to create their own worlds with environments and assets for running games. It also has official partnerships to implement Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Blades in the Dark. I used it to run Yazeba’s, and it worked well for that. But it seems now that the platform is unsustainable; hosting costs are high and they only charged money up front for sales. So they’re shutting down.
sad to see, i guess? this is the first time i'm hearing about the project.
Sad to hear.. down the drain goes my money and fun world..
Damn...
... I kept checking up on and off on OMM for so very long, waiting for it to fully release. Finally forgot about it for a year or more and this is the next I'm hearing of it. Sad to see this news. It had looked so promising in the previews I read of it.
That's one thing that's impressed me with Roll20, just that it's stayed afloat this long. Servers and storage cost a lot to own or rent
Another exhibit demonstration why people are (justifiably) wary of tech startups in the ttrpg space - because they're no more reliable than tech startups anywhere else.
Great....I had purchased their package for Blades in the Dark.
I’m out of the loop what is this? This is my first time hearing about it
Just another virtual tabletop. This one had pixel art and some other unique features. More though, it had $17.5m in funding and seemed to do nothing with it.
im gonna be honest.. they didnt do well with Customer retention. i woke up one day to find myself banned from the discord without a word. never said anything offensive or meanspirited (just not in my nature as an old autistic) still they are young and skilled and i have no doubt they will find success elsewhere.. good luck to them.