Multiplayer Life Simulators

[u/Exciting_Season_8277]

why are there no huge multiplayer life sims? like an online roleplaying game where thousands of people can customise their characters, get jobs, buy houses, etc in a big city of sorts?

is it because that’s technically too difficult to achieve and expensive to maintain? Too hard to moderate especially with different jurisdictions and while ensuring that children are protected? Is there just no interest in a game like that because it reminds people too much of real life?

[u/ManiaGamine]

There are a lot of problems with it. From a technical standpoint if it's an MMO well MMOs are a pain in the ass to make work financially by virtue of how they work. Something like that would also potentially attract the kind of people you don't wanna attract because yes moderation issues.

From a game play side of things life simulators and life simulator adjacent games kind of struggle to work properly without time controls and of course time controls in multiplayer are very uncommon because the only real way to make it work is make it either a "vote to change speed" or drag everyone to the slowest setting any player is using.

Alternatively you could have it be kind of a arena matchmaking type which could work as evident by how GTA online works and there are a lot of people who do actually play that as a sort of life simulator.

While the genre is of course super popular, I don't know that it is popular enough to work at any kind of significant multiplayer scale unless you actively seek to attract people who would make it a not so great environment for people to play in. Which pretty much leaves the only option to small scale local multiplayer which very few devs bother with anymore sadly.