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."

Comments

Wish in one hand, spit in the other

[stratjakt]

and just see which fills up first.

That's all I have to say about it.

Open it then?

[Squareball]

Maybe they should open source it since they are just going to scrap it anyways??

Perhapps a good thing

[PktLoss]

This may be a blessing in disguise for productivity in the world. World of Warcraft has destroyed me, missed deadlines, angry phonecalls from editors etc. I ended up emailing the .exe to a friend, gave the CDs to another and begged them both not to give them back for at least a fortnight. Then wasted 2 hrs trying to crack her gmail password.

The lack of another MMORPG out there may just mean I get this book out on time :).

Re:Perhapps a good thing

[pHatidic]

If you are that addicted to world of warcraft, imagine how fucked up your life would get if you tried a good game...like nethack.

Re:Perhapps a good thing

[SilentChris]

"Funny" indeed. Who are all these old fogies that push Nethack everytime someone mentions Wow on Slashdot? :P

Releasing code?

[moz25]

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.

Re:Releasing code?

[Minwee]

I don't know the inside details, but they opened up their beta test to something like 10,000 people on January 1st while promising 58,000 more that they would get in as the week progressed.

Eight days later the project is cancelled.

Sounds like somebody got their first bandwidth bill.

In the gaming world today almost nobody actually owns the code they work with so pipe dreams like GPLing failed projects just won't happen. The $100,000 that you paid to license somebody else's middleware only give you the right to use it for a year, not to give away the source code for free. Ripping out all the proprietary, licensed bits means a lot of hard work for absolutely no return on the investment.

The people who pay for this kind of development really hate footing the bill for that kind of thing.

Well

[FiReaNGeL]

Judging from this screenshot, I think I can see why. Sure, graphics ain't everything... but competing with WoW and EverCrack2 (to a lesser level) isn't easy... I hope they had a GREAT gameplay to compensate for such... graphics.

From their FAQ : "No decisions have yet been made on the specific pricing, but you should not expect Wish to be on the cheap side. We want to compete..."

Re:Well

[Cecil]

Uh, hate to break it to you, but those trees are much better than anything you'll see in World of Warcraft. In fact, most of the graphics in World of Warcraft wouldn't be any good at all if they hadn't slapped a slick-looking specular highlight shader onto most of the textures. That's basically the only difference graphically between WoW and Wish, and it's why Wish graphics look so flat in comparison.

WoW is blowing away everything else because the gameplay kicks fucking ass, not because of its graphics.

Why do the assets always go to waste?

[MiceHead]

I'd like to see more instances where the teams of cancelled projects either release their assets into the public domain or license them via a system like Turbosquid. This may not be appropriate for all projects -- for example, in many instances, there is no single owner of all of a game's IP -- but I've seen too many cases where gorgeous art assets, (take a look at Wish's, for example) go essentially wasted.

As an independent games developer, this strikes me the same way as a bakery tossing away perfectly good bread one one side of town while someone's hungry on the other side. Remember when Crack-Dot-Com went out of business and released its content to the public?

Around July, Crack first missed payroll. August came and we moved out of the office. September offered no new news, so we decided to call it quits. Rather than letting all that hard work sit around and rot, we released it to the public domain.

There's a special place in Indie Valhalla for the Jonathan Clark and those like him. Why don't we see more of this?
________________________________
Inago Rage - Create and fight in first-person arenas of your own design.

Re:Was anyone involved in the beta? Excited about

[laiquendi]

I was, briefly, a Wish beta tester. Everything about the game was highly derivative; there were no compelling features to be seen. It was Progress Quest with a GUI.

Their called assets...

[msimm]

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.

Re:Their called assets...

[Jeremi]

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.

That's a fair point. If people really want to see the code open-sourced, why not have everyone contribute to a pool of cash and offer to buy the code from them? If their "orphaned" code is really so difficult to to re-sell, they might be willing to part with it for relatively little money.

Re:Their called assets...

[Tlosk]

Any money that comes from the sale of the IP is money they don't have in their pocket right now.

Just because they don't have the money to finish it doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth something to someone else who does have the money to finish it/resolve the code or design problems.

This is the reason I'd say about half of all new businesses fail that could have ultimately been profitable. They just didn't start out with enough money to get the concern going.

Now I'm not saying that's the case with Wish, they might have tanked even had they finished it and made it to retail.

One of my neigbhors does this for a living, going in and purchasing the assets of business that go bust for pennies on the dollar. You still have to have an eye for the potential worth of the assets to get a good deal though.

Nucleus of a good idea

[earthforce_1]

An open source MMORPG would be a very worthwhile project, however the cost of bandwidth would have to be dealt with. I wonder if it is possible that the "world" database could be stored in distributed fashion, like a freenet node, eliminating the need for a central server.

Suprised?

[Datasage]

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.

"Ultra"-MMORPG

[LakeSolon]

WISH made some noises about being the first "ultra" massively multiplayer online game, where "ultra massive" was defined as "over 10,000 players online at once in a single game world".

EVE: Online (a space based mmorpg) did this back in April of '04.

It's not impossible, but it is difficult. I guess they weren't up to it.

~Lake

P.S. Aside from just the user record, EVE is a pretty cool game and worth checking out. Very different than other MMORPGs out there. Kind've a modern mmorpg of Elite or Escape Velocity.