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Hazeron Forever - Vectorus - 12-17-2018
The day I made my happy daily visit to Hazeron.com, to find a "thank you and goodbye" instead of the usual tantalizing slides of a world far away, the bottom fell out of my stomach. That was the day I realized how much Shores of Hazeron really meant to me - I was far from alone. It is a game, a universe and a work of art which feels somehow benevolent and familiar even at its most urgent and frightening moments, because of the unique stamp of Haxus' mind on it. That is something which could never be recaptured. When the game went down in 2015, I felt that even if I'd waited till 2215, nothing could truly have replaced it. I'm grateful to all the people who fought for its return - I was too young to get involved - and of course to Haxus himself, above all, for being persuaded. A subtle, deep-down sense of not quite believing it, of having things to good to be true, has pervaded all my playtime since then, like someone living on borrowed time. I understand we all owe the French players substantially for that.
Now that we've been talking about Steam, resets, critics, sustainability and all the rest of it, it seems like the right time to ask how we, as a community, can make sure that sad day never comes again. I hope Haxus is much more aware now than he was then how much his creation means to us, how much we care and what lengths we will go to to keep it alive: and that he will not be shy of asking of us whatever is needed. He must have felt very alone in this project, back then.
While believing in the fundamental appeal of the game and taking all the practical steps we can to make Hazeron a continuing success - pitching in with every community effort, the wiki, the design exchange, orientation and recruitment of players - should we also start to make our Plan B (or Plan Z)? Let's say that, after the Steam launch, Hazeron's server costs cannot be met by the number of subscriptions, and Haxus is sitting on the tarmac scratching his chin, preparing to fly down to the server room for the last time. What offers, what commitments, what opportunities would he need to be aware of, on such a day, to have options beyond just pulling the plug?
The main things I'm currently aware of are: servers hosted, at least partially, by the community. Lots of games have this and some of those also have official servers, alongside. A graceful decline and transition of players from official to community servers, in the case that they cannot continue, would be one of the least rupturing ways to continue. Cloud hosting options and rented server power, together with more advanced tech solutions, are something that we often hear about from knowledgeable players. Selling the code and the database to the community or its chosen technical leaders would also be a way of keeping it alive if Haxus can no longer justify the commitment to himself. What offer would we need to make, if it came to it? There is also the question of finding a worthy inheritor to continue the game into the next generation, once Haxus' great grandchildren come along and his jam-making business explodes, and he is so busy with them he has less time left for us - so these questions will face us even if Hazeron is the success we all so earnestly desire it to be. It is better to talk now, when there are no clouds on the horizon, even while we work to ensure they never come.
While last time we shut down Haxus contemplated resurrecting Hazeron in the future, and was thus unwilling to let go of it, our suggestions here should be aimed at a situation where Haxus does not imagine a comeback. In such a situation, I hope he would believe that the game deserved to survive - as a monument to his skill and cosmological poetry - even if he felt it was time for him to become its grandfather rather than its father.
I invite the technically minded to repost here some of the ideas they've had on the Discord and the galactic chat over the years. Tackeart, will you get the ball rolling? Haxus, are you willing to give us some figures, in a private subforum if necessary, on how the logistics and economics of the game actually work? And again, let's hope this topic becomes so irrelevant so quickly that it can simply be deleted a few months from now...
LATER:
I am not a computer-minded person, but I will offer one thing to talk about, for a start.
Haxus mentioned that someone wanted to buy Gravity Well's code. If the crunch came and Hazeron were against the wall, let's say we offered to buy the code and database. We would put money into a pot, part of which would be used to purchase the game up front. The rest would constitute an endowment to run and maintain the game, as well as paying for its development, ideally by Haxus himself, if possible. We could then legally constitute Hazeron's supporting funds as a trust. I would like to answer:
1) What ballpark figure would Haxus accept? Obviously we do not expect him to tip his hand, but some community research on what code sells for these days would be welcome. While the financial success of the game would obviously affect is value as a going concern, we are here considering a situation where the game, as a business, is worth only its liquidation value.
2) Running the servers on endowment: assuming negligible subscriptions, what would it cost for us, as partners owning the game, to host or rent servers as a community? A sensible financial manager should be able to achieve a modest 3-5% return on an endowment without difficulty - what principal would we then be aiming for, assuming a small degree of re-investment to grow the fund in line with inflation? Would $300,000 cover the cloud servers that have been proposed? $500,000? Let's find some figures.
3) In raising the principal, I and I'm sure some other loyal players would willingly front what money we could. Would we be able to raise funds on other platforms like GoFundMe; does anyone have knowledge of these areas? Would having an already finished product to fund help or hinder such an appeal? Are the figures we get from the answer to (2) achiveable?
An advantage of an endowment model is that the majority of the funds would be capable of easy liquidation and return to their contributors, if the experiment were not deemed a success - except for those funds spent on the up-front purchase of the game, which I imagine(?) would be a fairly small proportion. In the meantime they would be sensibly invested. The tax situation would be quite favourable - more so than attempting to keep a subscription model as a community company. One difficulty I foresee is that if people like Deantwo, Tackeart or I were trustees with a controlling or veto vote, the trust would be classified as a foreign trust for US income purposes. Trusteeship would therefore have to be managed quite carefully.
Another advantage is that unlike most crowd-funded things, Hazeron has already been developed. The principal raised does not need to be spent on anything, only conserved. I put in $10,000 USD to the fund. 4.5% of the fund's return is spent on running the servers. 1.5% is reinvested. After five years, we decide it isn't working. The fund is liquidated and all the contributors are given $10,772 in return. People are more likely to make large pledges when the pledges are not being dissipated - possibly an advantage for crowd fundraising?
EDIT: I have just realized that this proposal technically would mean...Hazeron would become a SYNDICATE!! Was this the plan all along?
RE: Hazeron Forever - expert700 - 12-17-2018
I don't agree with Vectorus's Trust idea, I'm just piggybacking off this thread.
Here are my estimates for whether or not Haxus would get cost savings from moving to the cloud:
Current Servers:
1x 2U PowerEdge 2950
- 2x 4-Core Xeon E5310/20/35/45 OR X5355/65 (He probably wouldn't use the low TDP L line.)
- 16GB RAM
- 6x 120GB SSD in RAID (Assume 600GB usable at the most)
12x 1U PowerEdge 1950
- 1x 4-Core Xeon E5310/20/35/45 OR X5355/65
- 8GB RAM
- Some sort of SAS HDD, probably between 73 and 750 GB.
4x 2U PowerEdge R815
- 4x 16-Core Opteron 6168/72/74/76/76 SE/80 SE
- 128GB RAM
AWS Alternatives:
1x RDS db.m5.xlarge ($159.943 Monthly / $1,791 Upfront, both for 1-Year Term)
- 4x vCPU (Probably at least 2x as fast as x5365 cores though)
- 16GB RAM
- 10 Gbps Network
1x EBS gp2 for DB ($0.10 / GB Monthly)
- 600GB of SSD Storage
12x EC2 t3.large ($38.11 Monthly / $426.00 Upfront, both for 1-Year Term)
- 2x vCPU (Probably Xeon Platinum 8180, has single-thread performance roughly 2x that of X5365)
- 8GB RAM
- 10 Gbps Network
4x EC2 r5.4xlarge ($463.55 Monthly / $5,192 Upfront, both for 1-Year Term)
- 16x vCPU (Xeon Platinum 8000 Series, probably ~2.5x-3x as powerful as the Opterons.)
- 128GB RAM
- 10 Gbps Network
16x EBS st1 for EC2 Instances ($0.045 / GB Monthly)
- 150GB HDD Storage
AWS Cost (This does NOT include AWS bandwidth usage costs):
Monthly: $2640 / Month, $31,680 / Year
Upfront: $29,687 / Year
$ / U for AWS to be an Improvement: $120 / Month
A few notes:
- Some similar r4.4xlarge instances could be gotten through AWS's GameLift thing for much cheaper, but I don't really understand enough about how that works and there is probably some sort of catch.
- Instances with very high amounts of RAM are the biggest price sinks, I don't know specifically what those run but if that could be cut down it would lead to further cost savings.
- I also obviously don't know what kind of rate Haxus is currently paying. If it's above $120 a month, though, moving to the cloud would provide him with significant savings.
- Some other cloud provider, like Microsoft's or IBM's, might be cheaper. I don't have the time to price things out for all of them.
EDIT: Data transfer rates for EC2 instances. As aforementioned, I have no real way of knowing how much bandwidth Haxus uses per month.
![[Image: 69oUfeP.png]](https://i.imgur.com/69oUfeP.png)
RE: Hazeron Forever - Vectorus - 12-17-2018
You're not piggybacking, it's fine. The thread is for all cost-saving and contingency ideas. The trust was just one contigency idea.
RE: Hazeron Forever - Minty - 12-18-2018
Really, we should probably wait until Haxus weighs in, because obviously he's the one who this all goes down to. But real quick:
In the far future, I'd say Hazeron's best bet, like most games, would be going open-source. That means anyone would be able to run their servers, accepting donations or trying to find new monetization options, without having to worry about copyright laws and ownership. I don't think handing it off or selling it to anyone in particular, or even a group of people, would be a good idea at all, especially to any of us bastards. Hazeron has always been incredible in part because Haxus staunchly refuses to become a sell-out or compromise his dream. Were the code to fall solely into the wrong hands, it would be an enormous loss.
RE: Hazeron Forever - Vectorus - 12-18-2018
I was reluctant to bring up this subject at all, but since Haxus said that he considers the Steam release his 'make or break', I felt it was time. I hope he is not insulted by the discussion, and of course his opinion will put an end to it one way or another. I hope he knows that we are here as curators rather than as vultures...
I agree with minty that going open-source would help the genius of Hazeron to survive without fear of rotting unused in a hoarder company's basement. It would also allow different groups to emphasize their favourite parts: some would probably resurrect the old designer code, just as Star Wars Galaxies emulators emulate different eras of the game.
But would it ever be fair to Haxus to ask him to just give us the result of so much work? In my view, a club of players could reasonably band together to purchase the code with the express and legally guaranteed purpose of making it open-source. That way the benefits could be achieved while Haxus could continue to run a business rather than a charity.
RE: Hazeron Forever - Minty - 12-18-2018
Preservation is always an important topic, especially for video games. Despite the industry already being around for nearly half a century, very few game developers actually take it into account.
Some systems like the NES have pretty much everything but prototypes found, whereas other systems/games, like online or DOS games, have a lot of lost ones. The lost media wiki has a bunch listed, and although a lot are unfinished/prototype games, plenty are full titles people created and released to the public that have been lost to time.