Non-profit MMOs Do Make Sense
Or, why I'm not making an original MMO
I often hear people proclaim: “If instead of working on Corporate Clash (or Toontown Rewritten), all of the talented people banded together to make an original MMORPG, they would have been done by now!”
I think this take is misguided, albeit with good intent.
This question is something I've pondered about for years, but mainly out of how to finance Toontown projects sustainably; after all, the servers don't pay for themselves (don't worry about us, we're fine). I’ve also had this talk with other team members while we were in VC working on the game. This stems from the unique situation Toontown projects are in: With the murky at-best, illegal at-worst IP situation with Disney, reputable Toontown projects have all adopted the staunchly no-revenue model, in that volunteers that are involved in the project pay for expenses and no public donation is solicited. This means we can’t remunerate our staff for the AAA-studio-quality work they pour into improving this defunct game, even if the IP in question has nothing to do with the base Toontown Online brand (e.g. the 16 new managers in the 1.3 Hires and Heroes update).
So the solution surely is to do as the question says and simply spin up our own studio with an original IP then?
What people don't realise when they say that is how expensive it is to develop an MMO, especially something as captivating as Toontown. Modern MMORPGs have massive worlds, pristine graphics, and content that will keep enough people subscribing for months if not years. All of this takes years to build, and none of it comes cheap. The unfortunate truth is: passion alone doesn’t put bread on the table. We all need money to buy groceries and to keep the light on, and we want to be paid fairly for our labour. To attract top talent, you need to compensate them with top dollars; this makes MMOs one of the most expensive genres to produce.
To do some back-of-the-napkin maths, let's assume we're building an MMO, which will take two years from concept to launch (on the very low end of the spectrum). As an MMO requires many skills to build (as you've probably figured out by reading our applications page), it's hard to pinpoint an exact cost per headcount, so let's say a person costs $50,000/yr. Corporate Clash has ~100 staff right now, so if we were to bring the entire staff over to work on this hypothetical new game, we would need $50,000 x 100 x 2 = $10 million. Even if we reduce the headcount to 1/3ths by asking people to multitask and offer equity in exchange for minimum wage, we would still be looking at ~$1m, and that's not including all of the ancillary costs of running a business plus the server costs. With those wages, we better be making the next Fortnite.
Making an MMORPG requires a lot of capital, which is not something we have or is easy to come by. Crowdfunding isn't as viable an option as you think either: from my cursory search on Kickstarter, out of all ~450 MMO projects listed, six have reached over $1M crowdfunding, with the 1st reeling in $3M and the 7th reaching ~$650k. One example is Ashes of Creation (~$3M raised, Kickstarter campaign in 2017, Alpha 2021), which is largely funded by the CEO who made his money in real estate. He has said the estimated pricetag of the finished game is $30M. Another example, Chamelot Unchained, was started by an industry veteran who built and exited a VC-funded game studio. The Kickstarter campaign raised $2M in 2013 and the studio has crowdfunded another $2.5m since then. It launched an Alpha in 2015, and a “Beta” in 2018 (air quotes because it doesn’t seem very playable), during which the founder injected $5m of his own money along with $22.5m VC funding (He probably managed to secure funding based on his previous Mythic exit - in the new 2023 borrowing-is-not-free normal, I imagine VC funding for an MMO without buzzwords like AI and Web3 on the pitch deck will get you laughed out of the room). The game is marred in controversy and many have asked for backing refunds.
If we still wanted to build this new for-profit game studio, what could be a sustainable way of doing it? I think the most viable option is for some of the volunteers to set up a digital agency and pledge ~20% of the time to work on the game, with ~80% working for other clients to build up a financial runway. But this isn’t something I will propose as a funding model for a few reasons:
we don’t have the money to hire everybody onto the new company, which means we either can hire only a few people, or have a split of volunteer and paid staff, who will both be doing the same thing but only some can get paid.
People signed up to be a Corporate Clash volunteer because they want to, well, work on Corporate Clash, not some other original IP, even if the gameplay style is similar to Toontown’s.
Most of our staff are either still at school or at the early stage of their careers, which means their skills are far from honed in and ready for AAA-work.
It’s entirely possible that after setting up this new studio, we would find client work to be more lucrative and abandon this original IP.
At this point, the common theme is clear: when money enters the conversation, everything gets more complicated.
The beauty of Toontown private server projects is that everybody is in it because they want to make a childhood favourite more fun, not because they want to earn a quick buck over nostalgia. A private server community where absolutely nobody has profits in mind is extremely rare, and many are drawn to this community precisely because of the non-profit nature of all servers involved, something you’d be hard-pressed to find for other private server communities. This mindset is also what led both Corporate Clash and Toontown Rewritten to remove many grindy features from Disney’s days, and build brand new gameplay mechanisms with no profitability intents in mind, not even to support a donation-based pay-for-convenience model. Everybody collaborates more because everybody is equal.
A side effect of the not-for-profit-based model is that Corporate Clash has become a perfect training ground for up-and-coming talent to train and hone their skills in a structured, rigorous setting (or at least as good as we can make it!). Volunteers who work with us get to work with other like-minded people on a real product, enjoyed by thousands, with relatively low risk if things don’t work out or if their work breaks when the game goes live. Many people list their experience with us on their CV and we give out references to team members who ask. In a world where an entry-level job requires 3 years of prior experience, we become a good place to work on something interesting while gaining invaluable experience that would otherwise require you to fight several hundred people for one intern spot. For working professionals, volunteers can try their hands at mentoring newer talent, as well as working on something that’s different from their day-to-day, whether to stretch their brains in a different dimension or to trial-run a career change. Sure, there are many places where you can do and learn these things while getting paid (in some cases handsomely, I might add), but the mindset is much different when you have paying customers banging on your door when things go down for 5 minutes, or when the company is at risk of layoffs if you don’t come up with the next Clash of Clans by the end of the month. At Corporate Clash, it’s OK if things don’t work out perfectly, while at a regular game studio, a flopped game may be a death sentence.
Toontown Online is an excellent game for new talent to build on because Disney has done such a good job setting the foundation, it acts as both a constraint to encourage out-of-the-box thinking, while also as a guardrail to keep people from losing a sense of direction when working on the game. It is a great example of how an "end-game" mature MMO operates, not just in terms of building software that can sustain thousands of concurrent players, but also in other decisions that affect how well the game can attract and maintain a thriving community, like juggling the time spent between bugfixes and shipping new features, running community events and outreach programs, ensuring the game is safe for all; the list goes on. We’re very lucky to even be able to continue the game given the IP status, and we use this blessing for charitable missions: To maintain and improve the game free of charge, to use our original IP to support other charitable works (such as our Makeship Duck Shuffler Plushie campaign, with all proceeds going to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals), and to train the next generation of talent who will go on to make things they own and are proud of. Corporate Clash is a stepping stone for new talent passionate about their craft to prove themselves to the world before they move on to something better, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
So what does that leave us? Corporate Clash is a non-profit game studio that produces a reimagined experience of the defunct Disney MMO Toontown Online. Our focus is the Corporate Clash game, our volunteers, and the community. When people say “The people behind Clash should make their own game”, I’m quite flattered that they consider our work to be professional enough to be worthy of their money. While it’s ultimately not what Corporate Clash is about, if some volunteers split out from Corporate Clash, band together to form a game studio, and publish their original MMO, it means we have done our job right and I would support them in the ways I can.
Passion may not be what puts bread on the table, but I’d much rather live in a world where bread is not the only thing on the table.