Hi Product Hunt 👋 I'm the developer. Crime City is a text-based mafia MMO — the genre Torn and Omerta come from. It's a corner of the web that is quietly still alive and still mostly built the way it was in 2005. The problem I kept hitting as a player: persistent worlds in this genre become unwinnable. An account from 2011 has a decade of compounding stats and no new player is ever catching it. People work that out within an hour, which is why these games struggle to keep anyone new. So Crime City runs in seasons instead. The city wipes on the 26th of each month and reopens on the 1st, everyone restarts at level 1, and the final leaderboard decides a payout. Die during a season and that character is gone for good — that is what keeps the wipe from being a formality and makes the risky plays actually risky. The thing that surprised me while building it: permadeath changed the social layer far more than the combat. People negotiate, form gangs and hold grudges completely differently when a mistake is permanent. Season 2 opened this week, so everyone is on level ground right now — an unusually fair moment to try it. Happy to talk about any of it: the wipe cadence, why permadeath rather than soft resets, balancing the economy, or the stack (Next.js and Postgres, fully server-authoritative, because anything left to the client gets cheated within a day).

Crime City

Mafia MMO in the browser. Permadeath, monthly city wipe.

Mafia MMO in the browser. Permadeath, monthly city wipe.