Once Human was undoubtedly one of the breakout hits of 2024, with the free-to-play open-world survival MMO breaking the traditional summer doldrums to attract hundreds of thousands of concurrent players worldwide.
But at its core, there’s a conundrum: How do you reward their time investment by providing a consistently fun game while keeping a steady influx of new players from taking over your dedicated regulars’ world?
There is some human debate about this, but an interesting solution would be short seasons based on different gameplay scenarios with different story elements, survival mechanics, and combat parameters, after which everything would be wiped clean for a new round.
Currently Once Human is only available on PC, with iOS and Android coming soon, but developer Starry Studio hopes to bring the game to consoles in the future.
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“Our long-term goal is to make sure our games can run for decades,” Starry Studios operations director Derek Qui told VG247 at Gamescom 2024.
“We need to provide relevant content to our players, so our games need to be innovative and engaging for them. We need to be very creative in the narrative and the gameplay itself, which is a challenge for us and something we’re currently working on.
“On the other hand, we want to provide the game to more users. The development plan that we are working on now is to provide more platforms to the players. We will go to mobile, we will go to consoles, but we will announce it in the future through an official announcement. But we will do it. All data will be transferred cross-platform.”
But designing for a large audience isn’t always easy, especially when it’s larger than you might expect. Once Human has struggled to keep up with server demand throughout its lifespan, and has struggled recently, especially on hard difficulty servers.
“Open worlds are really hard,” explains Qui. “The bar is really high. You run out of content very quickly, and players are like, ‘Oh, I just ran out of content,’ or ‘I don’t want to play anymore because there’s no more content.’ So we’re trying to address that with new content and new gameplay features that we can implement in open worlds, so that it’s not an empty world for them, but a world full of content and fun.”
To meet this demand, Starry Studios has set its sights on creating a hardcore mode for the most invested players, but is also careful to keep Once Human accessible and open to a wide range of tastes.
“We designed the game to be pretty hardcore, but we adjusted it to accommodate a wider audience,” Qui said. “So we sacrificed a bit of persistence, because we had a very hard time debating whether to make a very hardcore game for a small group of players, or to expand it to the masses with a relatively easy mode.
“We want to be bigger (game), because that’s the only way we can let the players hear our voice. If we go small, we’ll never be big. We’re aiming to be big, and we’ve changed our development direction to accommodate more users. Right now, players think the game is relatively easy because we underestimated and adjusted the player’s ability when we played the game.
He continued, “We will definitely have more complex hardcore modes for hardcore players in the future, but we will also have easier game modes for players who don’t have a lot of time to play. When we hear a lot of players saying they need a hardcore mode, it’s because we can’t take lightly the fact that there are a lot of players who don’t have a lot of time, who aren’t good at shooting, who aren’t good at the MMO genre. It’s a balance.
“We want to take care of all players as much as possible, so we will add a Hard Mode for hardcore players, but we will also continue to offer a Leisure Mode for less competitive flyers. It will be very dynamic and challenging.”
But what underpins Once Human’s ambition to consistently deliver new features is its free-to-play model that emphasizes accessibility. And in this sense, Once Human is in an interesting position 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 has a reputation among fans as a relatively less aggressively monetized game. With such a large budget, Starry Studio can effectively position the game as an innovator in the market, attracting more players to the platform, and committing to sticking to its current model without any business pressure.
“Firstly, I want to emphasize that this is a long-running game with no pay-to-win elements and will always be free to play,” Qui explained.
“Second, we will continue to provide as much rich content as possible to attract and retain players. This may take time, so we appreciate players’ patience. It takes time to provide content and become a very organized and productive team.
“Once Human is a game that we designed to be an innovator in the market. So business has never been our top priority from the beginning. That’s why when we designed our monetization model, we stuck to a free-to-play model, rather than a pay-to-win model.
“We initially expected our game to be small because we didn’t think the monetization model would help us make a lot of money. In order to get bigger, we had to grow our reputation and our user base, and then the monetization model would work. It’s been beyond our imagination that people are actually so passionate about our game and so supportive of our monetization model. Last week, we were ranked second in the world for most revenue. So it’s beyond my personal imagination.
“We will never change our intentions, and in the long run, we will always be the same as we are now. We do not play to win, we always play freely.”
Once Human is available on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. It will be released on iOS and Android in 2025.
Starry Studios is also giving away Once Human codes that grant free Starchrom and Energy Links to all players.
