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Why Bill Roper Left Blizzard
Last week Gamasutra put up an interview with Bill Roper all about Flagship Studios' projects and history. Along with some details on their Massive game Mythos and a reiteration of the Hellgate pricing scheme, Roper talks about the reasons he left Blizzard in the first place: "Our original intention back in 2003 was not to leave Blizzard. We wanted some level of participation and direct communication with Vivendi's home office in order to offer our insight, knowledge and desires as to their plans at the time in terms of a possible sale or IPO of the games unit. The level of uncertainty back then made it extremely difficult to plan for our futures, as well as the futures of our team members. And with no long-term compensation or employment contracts in place, we wanted to be able to interact directly with the people making the key decisions that could drastically affect our lives and workplace. In the end, Vivendi chose not to make that opportunity available and accepted our resignations over the matter. The next day, David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer and I started Flagship Studios."
...wanted more money, did not get it.
Really the problem was they weren't bargaining from a position of strength... Diablo 3 wasn't screaming right a long or anything.
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I haven't been following the development of Hellgate all that closely, aside from playing the Mythos alpha a bit, but I can't help but think that the "elite" pricing is a terrible idea. $10/month for updates and a few small bonuses is crazy. The pricing model that Guild Wars uses would have made a lot more sense, and given them an excuse to announce a new expansion every few months, rather than a vague promise to add new content. Not to mention that people who join up a year after release will presumably get all the same content as those who have been paying for a year ($120). When you give people who have paid for the game second-class status, it's bound to cause resentment.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
The masses don't read mmorpg.com, they're reading worldofwarcraft.com.
In fact, the chart at mmorpg.com exists soely for the purpose of ballot box stuffing by various smaller game communities. It means even less then your typical Internet poll (which means nothing).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
As far as I know, every game you mention or refer to is Windows-only. Which is, I suspect, a big part of why they're all less successful than WoW.
There are somewhere around 20-30 million mac users with machines recent enough to run WoW well, and no good access to all of the games that you tout as being superior. It seems very likely that the semi-gamer subset of those 20-30 million people makes up a big part of WoW's 8 million subscribers.
This is the big thing that all of the Blizzard émigrés failed to take with them, and an important part of why none of their more recent ventures have been a real challenge to Blizzard's offerings.
And Diablo II wasn't a timesink? You blow through it once, kill Baal, the end, right?
Wrong. Then begins the leveling grind, and the item grind, and the gem grind, and the rune grind.
The only difference is a persistent world, better bosses, and 15 bucks a month.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.