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.

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.

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.