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Wish Cancelled
Shockeye writes "According to Mutable Realms' website, the Wish project has been cancelled after 'careful consideration of all the facts and analyzing all the data which we have gathered from the Wish Beta 2.0 test.' The beta test for the Wish project will close at 6pm EST. According to the message it also seems Mutable Realms will be closing as well. You can view the short message here, and over at f13.net we are discussing the latest casualty to the MMOG scene."
Maybe they should open source it since they are just going to scrap it anyways??
What is the exact reason for cancellation? Is it financial or what? Does it make sense to continue this project under e.g. the GPL model?
It's a waste to let all the hard work just be for nothing.
see a Text Widget
The reason you don't see companies going along with reasoning like yours is because in the IP business code is like buildings and machinery.
If you had a manufacturing business and closed your doors today you probably wouldn't give everything away the very next day (especially if the cost of storing was as minimal as code is). You'd hang onto or try to find a buyer to re-coop some of your costs (developing code costs money too).
Maybe after a long time you'd be willing to give it away, but you probably put a lot of your own money into this stuff and you'd like to get something back out of it.
Quack, quack.
Not at all.
After the success of everquest a large number of mmos were announced. Most of them were not going to be able to succed. This is why:
1. MMOs take much more time to develop than any other game. You have to create a world thats large enough to keep players playing for at least several months while you are creating new content to keep players playing. Most other games are linear or have limited paths a player can take.
2. Time commitment to one game makes player reluctant to dedicate time to other mmo games. Though that doesnt stop some players, just most.
3. The MMO audience is smaller than the general gamer audience. Not everyone wants to or can subscribe to a game.
4. To break even on operating costs, you need a certain number of players to keep the game running. This number is ussually in the thousands, but it depends ont he game.
So, we have a limited audience, gamers who can generally dedicate themselves to just one game, and you need a chunk of that audience to keep running. How many games can the MMO audience sustain? Not many.
World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 will the big players. They also need at least 100,000 players to stay profitiable. Other games can survive if they plan and develop for smaller audiences. Aiming for a large audence without being able to compete with the big players is just a recipie for disaster.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
There are dozens of MMORPG titles being developed right now, but hardly any players to play them. With the recent releases of World of Warcraft and Everquest II the market has become even more competative. I am betting this will be the year we will see a massive cancelation in MMORPG development. Wish going down not even 10 days into the new year is a bad omen for developers.
There are far too many MMORPGs these days because every small startup game company and their publishers and investors were rushing to jump on the bandwagon. The trouble with these types of games is that they put such demands upon a player's time that he or she rarely has time for more than one MMORPG addiction. That combined with the fact that MMORPGs are not yet and probably never will be (due to the aforementioned time constraints) part of the mainstream. The end result of all of this is too many MMORPGs chasing too few players and therefore too few dollars. What do investors do when a company is hemorrhaging money like an arterial bleeder? They pull the plug and it appears that that is exactly what happened here.