Once Human is undoubtedly one of the hottest games of 2024. This free open-world survival MMO game broke the traditional summer slow season and attracted hundreds of thousands of players from all over the world to play online simultaneously.
But the core dilemma is this: In a multiplayer survival game, how do you prevent loyal old players from taking over the world as new players continue to pour in, while also respecting their investment of time by providing a consistently fun game?
Once Human has a controversial but interesting solution to this by creating short seasons based on different game scenarios with different story elements, survival mechanics, and combat parameters, after which everything starts over again.
Once Human is currently available on PC, with iOS and Android versions coming soon, but developer Starry Studio hopes to open the game to consoles in the future as well.
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“Our long-term goal is to make sure our games last for decades,” Starry Studio operations head Derek Qui told iGamesNews at Gamescom 2024.
“During the development process, we have to provide enough content for players, so our game must be innovative and attractive to players. It must be very creative both in terms of narrative and the game itself, which is the difficult part for us and a theme we are currently dealing with.
“On the other hand, we want to bring the game to more users. At the moment, our development plan is to provide more platforms for players. We will go to mobile, and we will go to consoles, but we will announce this in the official announcement in the future – but we will do it. All data will be transferred across platforms.”
But designing for a large audience isn’t always easy, especially when the audience is larger than you expected. Throughout Once Human’s life so far, it has struggled to keep up with server demand, especially in recent times with high-difficulty servers.
“Open World [games]”The bar is really high because content gets consumed very quickly and players will complain ‘we just consumed all the content’ or ‘there’s no new content and we don’t want to play anymore’. So we’re trying to address that with new content and new gameplay features that we can implement into the open world. Not to make the world empty, but to make the world full of content and joy.”
To satisfy some of that demand, Starry Studio looked at creating a hardcore mode for the most dedicated players, but was also careful to keep Once Human accessible and appealing to a wide range of tastes.
“For us, when we designed the game, it was pretty hardcore, but we tweaked it to appeal to a wider audience,” Qui said. “So we sacrificed some persistence because it was hard to decide whether to stick with a very hardcore game for a smaller group of players or to scale it to a mass audience with a relatively simple model.
“Ultimately we want to be a bigger [game] Because this is the only way our voices can be heard by players, if we are too small, we will never be able to grow. Our goal is to grow, and we have changed the direction of development to attract more users. Current players think the game is relatively simple because we made adjustments and underestimated the players’ abilities when playing the game.
He continued: “In the future we will definitely provide a more complex hardcore mode for hardcore players, but we will still provide a relatively simple game mode for players who don’t have much time to play the game, because we hear a lot of players say we need a hardcore mode, but we can’t ignore the fact that many players don’t have enough time, they are not good at shooting, and they are not good at MMO game types, and we must also take care of them. It’s like a balance.
“We want to cater to all players as much as possible, so we’ll definitely be adding hard modes for hardcore players, but at the same time we’ll still have casual modes as a foundation for less competitive players. It’s very dynamic and very tricky.”
However, behind Once Human’s ambition to offer a steady stream of new features is a free-to-play model that emphasizes ease of use. In this sense, Once Human occupies an interesting position in the market.
This is a new game from a new studio, but it’s not an indie game. Starry Studio is a subsidiary of NetEase, so even though Once Human is free to play, fans see it as a relatively low-profit game. With a big budget behind it, Starry Studio can effectively position the game as a market innovator to attract more players to its platform, while promising to stick with the existing model without the pressure of business.
“First, I want to stress that this will be a long-term game with no pay-to-win elements and will always be free to play,” Qui explained.
“Secondly, we will continue to provide rich content as much as possible to attract and retain our players. This may take some time, so we hope our players can be patient because it takes time to provide content, become very systematic, and become an efficient team.
“We designed Once Human to be a market innovator, so business was not the top priority for our game from the beginning. That’s why we insisted on free-to-play rather than pay-to-win when designing the monetization model.
“We expected our game to be small in the beginning because we foresaw that the monetization model would not help us make a lot of money because we had to grow our reputation and user base before the monetization model would work. We couldn’t imagine that people would be so passionate about our game and they were so supportive of our monetization model – last week we were top 2 in the world in terms of revenue. So this is beyond my personal imagination.
“We will never change our original intentions, and in the long run, we will always do what we are doing now: not playing to win, and always playing for free.”
Once Human is available now on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. It’s expected to be released on iOS and Android in 2025.
Starry Studio also distributes Once Human codes, which provide free Starchrom and Energy Links to all players.
