So many people ask about a multiplayer version of Outpost that I thought I should write up some thoughts about it.

Firstly, we'd love to do it. It'd rock.

Why don't we just do it then, so many people want it and we want it ourselves ?

Firstly it'd mean a total rewrite of the engine. We use the Nape physics engine for so much in the game, not just the obvious stuff like the crates, but all the walls, baddies, bullets etc. It handles all the collisions, so nearly all the code base we've got would need to be thrown away and we'd have to start from scratch.
Ok, that's not the end of the world, reusing an engine from game to game is quite a luxury anyway.

Next up, and this is the big one, the cost. To do it right I think it would take 4/6 months. That's a long time in development and I'd have to do client work during that to pay the bills, delaying it even more.
Lets pretend that's not an issue, say I win the lottery and still want to make it instead of killing myself with drugs and hookers, we still have to pay for the servers for it to run on.

That means at least one server running in the US, one in Europe and possibly one to cover Asia. That's every month, and good servers don't come cheap, it's not like hosting a website.
That monthly cost means one thing, in-app purchases. If we went the usual sponsor route we'd get a one off lump sum payment ( Hurray ) but that would slowly be eaten away as we pay the server costs. We'd actually lose money every month.

Ok, so we're now looking at making it f2p to fund it. That means we want your lovely money, and lots of it please. What's that ? You've spent money on it and you expect to connect to the server first time, every time ? You expect your details to be secure ? You don't want other players cheating 'cause you've spent your hard earned money and what a turd it would be if you're losing to some one who hasn't invested a penny but instead is just cheating ?
That all means we have to use an authoritative server approach, basically all the game logic runs on the server, the client ( ie the swf of the game you've just loaded on NG ) just passes keyboard / mouse clicks to it. More expense, and a longer development time.
Also a lot of portals really live by the "Free" games boast they put on their layout, which means they don't want in-app purchases in games, which means the game won't spread as much as a normal Flash game would. Poo.

Where are we ? A lot of cost, a long development time and we don't earn a penny until its launched, and depending on how we handle the transactions it could be up to a month after launch before all the lovely cash comes in. Now there's no way on earth that a multiplayer game is going to come out bug free and without balancing issues. It's quite possible that during that month after launch when we're still waiting to earn a single penny from it we'll be working on it just as hard as ever. Working for free isn't the greatest motivator in the world.

What are the alternatives to get it done ? Ad revenue isn't really an option, whilst NG and Kong give devs a share, other sites don't, so we just get the pre-roll ad. The value of that fluctuates, before Christmas ad rev is fantastic, in January it's barely worth bothering with, and yet the server costs are still there.
Maybe we could pitch the idea to a large portal who can handle the server costs, and maybe we could get some money on launch, but it would still need micro transactions as the portal needs to pay for the servers plus claw back any money they may have paid us. We may get a percentage of those, but it really wouldn't be the lions share, and we'd still need to provide support and fresh content.

To finish off ( Finally ), yes we'd love to do it, but it's scary as fuck. It's a huge risk and we don't have the safety net of that lottery win to fall back on. If we can come up with a way to do it ( And not Kickstarter, I'd rather bank on the lottery ) then we will.