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I wonder where I've heard this here "We'll ship it when it's finished" rhetoric before?

Oh, from Artifact Entertainment, who shipped a lame duck called Horizons when their last surviving developer left for a higher paying job in the fast food industry. The company promptly burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp before being bought out by... well, lets be generous and say they were bought by someone else.

We heard it again from Sigil Games shortly before they kicked a tech demo of Vanguard to the curb with a resounding plop. When it somehow failed to be a resounding commercial success the company... burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp before being bought out by Sony.

"We will ship when it's ready" is an industry code phrase for "I don't know if we can make this work or not, but we're going to keep shoveling money into it until we either get something good or go broke. You'll find out which one comes first when we do."

My experience is probably colored by the fact that I worked on two online projects.

I was at Fujitsu when they had the WorldsAway virtual chat world in 1997. At the time, it seems like everyone was trying to build a virtual online chat world community. I even got the book, "Avatars!" by Bruce Damer, at a convention that was held at San Francisco State University to showcase the new technologies. Looking through the book now, I don't any of them survived except for a few niche survivors. Fujitsu sold the division since it never made any money after so many years. That was definitely a fad.

The second one was Horizons at Atari in 2004. This online game was picked up by Atari because they wanted an online game to compete with every other gaming company getting into this "next big thing". (This was also the same time the video game industry was rushing into Hollywood licenses.) Horizons wasn't a bad game. It's just another Evercrack clone that may survive with dedicated fan base but won't really change the gaming world.

Whenever the video game industry is stampeding in the same direction, I consider it to be a fad. How many times have we heard that the PC was dead? Or the console is dead? Or Duke Nukem Forever is coming out Really Soon Now (TM)?

A good post. Play it, see how you like it. I love the game, myself. Anyway, if you truely are looking for some information on Horizons, here are a few resources.

http://www.istaria.com/
http://www.tazoon.com/releaseforums/ - Fansite message boards with lots of current information
http://hz.stratics.com/A fansite with some decent current info and message boards.
http://www.dragonspires.org/wiki/ A wiki in the infant stages of development with some information of use.

Horizons has a really good crafting system and one of the best UIs I've seen. It has some major flaws though. Really bad performance on ATI cards and a lack of high level content for example. I hear they are getting better on the content though. It has a 7 day free trial, so if you like crafting or being a dragon give it a go. http://www.istaria.com/

Drop the box or the monthly subscription, either one, and I'd be much more interested.

I think this is starting to happen. Right now, you can buy most Blizzard games, and get free online play with them. Granted, its not an MMORPG, but Diablo 2 is a fun game with friends. On the other side of the coin, I recently got into an MMORPG, mainly because they did offer the client as a free download (with 7 day free trial), and then the standard $13/month subscription. Granted, it was a 1 GB download, so doing it over a modem would be a bad idea, but for DSL subscribers, like me, it was the perfect solution. No cost for the client, just the monthly fee, this is the way MMORPGs should be distributed.

Here's Garriott's take on Tabula Rasa about a year ago.

I believe that the market will force the MMOG industry to abolish the up-front fee within a few years. Some publishers are already doing that (and more), but the majority seem dead-set on requiring me to pay $49.95 to test the waters. This has kept me away from some that I might otherwise enjoy. Those that offer free trials are in the minority, and should do more to tout their low-barrier-to-entry. Horizons, made by the same folks who brought us the excellent Mordor, might be good, but until about ten minutes ago, I had assumed that they, too, required the initial investment to try out.

Commercial and shareware demos exist because there's so much competition there -- consumers can usually overlook a title that doesn't allow them to kick the tires. Given the sheer number of MMORPGs that exist, I think it it won't be long before their publishers follow suit. Guild Wars' model -- free play, with sales generated from expansions -- is a great way to differentiate it from other games. And what better way to hook someone? C'mon, man. The first one's free.
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Amusing trivia: Will Wright on his first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay: "I found that I was having more fun actually creating and editing these islands than I was actually bombing them in the game."

Doom 3 on 4/15/04

Duke Nukem Forever on 11/24/04

Now, I know pre-order dates don't mean much of anything, since a certain other game was pushed back another month just days before the release, but at two months, we should have Doom 3 by the end of the year...

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There are lots of MMORPGs that will be able to compete with WoW, even though they lack its clout.

Presumably, most people here have a fair familiarity with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) phenomenon, but here's a rundown of the major products out there from my bookmarks, for anyone who's interested but not wholly informed. Feel free to correct any of this if my understanding of any of these games is in any way flawed:

Anarchy Online
Asheron's Call
Dark Age of Camelot
Everquest
Shadowbane (just released - very buggy)
A Tale in the Desert
Ultima Online

Horizons
Eve Online (final beta - close to release)
City of Heroes
Dragon Empires (in beta)
Everquest 2 (in development)
Lineage II (in development)
Star Wars Galaxies (closed beta)
Imperator (very early development)
World of Warcraft (very early development)

Most of these games don't release specific subscriber base numbers. However, a series of very good guesses is compiled here.