About the Metropolis Project

The Metropolis Project is a community-controlled non-profit organization dedicated to creating an open-source urban simulation game called Metropolis. We are hoping to create a next-generation successor to the ground-breaking Sim City series.

Unlike many open source projects you might be familiar with, the Metropolis Project is based on a community funding approach: Instead of relying solely on volunteer development, we aim to collect funding for a full-time, professional development team from community contributions. We believe that the collaboration of this team with the wider community is the most efficient way to build a AAA-quality game title, while still keeping the source code open. A similar combination of full-time and volunteer developers has been successful with other well-known Open Source projects such as Firefox, Ubuntu, and OpenOffice, and we hope to apply the same formula to game development.

Financing for Metropolis is being collected through an assurance contract, or, as it is more commonly known, a pledge drive. This approach is based on individual contributions from members of the project, but no funds are collected at first; a person simply pledges to make a contribution at a later time, when there are enough total pledges to adequately fund the game's development. In this way, you can support the project without risking a "wasted" donation if the funding goals aren't met.

You can check out our Background page to find out more about city sim games  in general and how we got started; if you're already familiar with the genre, this article will give you a general overview of the project.  Alternatively, to learn more about our goals and organization, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions section. If you'd like to become a member, you can register on the site here (registration is, of course, free.) Lastly, if you think you'd like to contribute to the Project, you can find out about some different ways to support us here. Thanks for visiting!