Once Human has undoubtedly been one of the breakout hits of 2024, with the free-to-play open-world survival MMO smashing the traditional summer lull and attracting hundreds of thousands of concurrent players from across the globe.
But there’s a conundrum at its core: in a multiplayer survival game, how do you keep devoted regulars from achieving world domination over a constant stream of new players, while still honouring their time investment with a game that’s consistently fun to play?
Once Human’s controversial, but interesting, solution to this is short-term seasons based around different gameplay scenarios with different story elements, survival mechanics and combat parameters, after which the slate is wiped clean for a new round.
At the moment, Once Human is available on PC, with iOS and Android on the way, but developer Starry Studio wants to open that up to consoles in the future as well.
“The long term goal is that we want to make sure our game can be operated for decades”, Derek Qui, head of operations at Starry Studio, told VG247 at Gamescom 2024.
“On the way we have to provide adequate content for the players, so our game has to be innovative and attractive to the players. Either from the narrative or the gameplay itself, it has to be very creative which is the difficult part for us and a topic we’re currently dealing with.
“On the other side, we want to bring the game to more users. Currently the development plan we are working on is to provide more platforms to the players. We will go mobile and we will go console but we will announce with our official announcement in the future - but we will do that. All the data will be cross-platform transferred.”
But it’s not always easy to design for a large audience, particularly when it’s a bigger one than you ever anticipated. Throughout its lifecycle so far, Once Human has struggled to keep up with server demand and, in recent times in particular, hard difficulty servers specifically.
“It’s super hard for open world [games],” Qui explained. “The threshold is really high because the content will be consumed very fast and the players will complain like ‘well we just consumed all of the content’ or ‘there is no new content and we don’t want to play any longer’. So we are trying to deal with this with new content and new gameplay features that we can implement into the open world. To not become a very empty world for them but full of content and joy in this world.”
To satisfy some of this demand, Starry Studio has its sights set on producing a hardcore mode for its most invested players, but is mindful of keeping Once Human accessible and open to a variety of tastes.
“For us, when we were designing the game it was quite hardcore but we adjusted it to embrace more players,” Qui said. “So we sacrificed some persistence on it, because we had a very hard time debating if we wanted to insist on developing a very hard core game for a smaller group of players or if we wanted to expand it to a mass audience with a relatively easier mode.
“It comes to the end that we want to become a bigger [game] because it’s the only way our voice can be heard by the players, if we go small we can never go big. We aim to go big and we changed our development direction to embrace more users. The current players think that the game is relatively easy because we adjusted and we underestimated our players capability when playing our game.
He continued: “We will definitely have more complicated hardcore mode for hardcore players in the future but we will still provide a relatively easier game mode for players who don’t have a lot of time to play it because when we are hearing a lot of voices from players saying we need a hardcore mode but we cant make light of the fact that there are a lot of players that don’t have enough time and they are not good at shooting and they're not good at MMO game genre we have to take care of them as well. It’s like a balance.
“For us we want to take care of all of our players, as much as possible so we will definitely add a hard mode for the hardcore players but at the same time we will remain with a base in the leisure mode for the less competitive pliers. It’s very dynamic and very tricky.”
However, underpinning Once Human’s ambition to provide a steady stream of new features is a free-to-play model that emphasizes accessibility. And in this sense, Once Human sits in an interesting place in the market.
It’s a new game from a new studio, but it’s not an independent game. Starry Studio is a subsidiary of NetEase, so while Once Human is free-to-play, it’s gained a reputation among fans as one that’s relatively less aggressively monetised. Because of this big-budget backing, Starry Studio can effectively afford to position the game as an innovator in the market to attract more players to its platform, while also committing to sticking to its current model without business pressure.
“Firstly, I want to emphasise that this will become a long term operated game without pay to win elements and will always be free to play,” Qui explained.
“Secondly, we will continuously provide rich content as much as we can to attract and retain our players. It might take some time, so we would appreciate our players being patient, because it takes time to provide content and to become very systematic and to be a productive team.
“Once Human is a game that we intended to design to become an innovator in the market, so business is not a top priority in our game from the very start. So that’s the reason why we stick to free to play, not pay to win, while designing the monetisation model.
“We expected our game to be small at the beginning because we foresaw that the monetisation model wouldn't help us to profit a lot because we had to grow our reputation and user base to become bigger and then this monetisation model would work. It’s beyond our imagination that people are actually very passionate about our game and they are very supportive of our monetisation model - last week we reached the global top 2 in the most revenue. So that’s something that’s beyond my personal imagination.
“We will never change our intention and in the long run it will always be what we are currently doing: no play to win, always free-to-play.”
Once Human is available on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. It's expected to drop on iOS and Android in 2025.
Starry Studio also distributes Once Human codes which offer free Starchrom and Energy Links for all players.