A slim minority of the people who get so far as to actually buy and try these games stick around and pay to play them. It seems pretty obvious that something about the core design is alienating [i]most[/i] of the potential market.
The corporates are risk averse, and they keep churning out design knockoffs, rather than trying to take the next legitimate step in advancing the genre.
In NY state the split is actually 38% of felons are in jail on drug charges, and almost 30% of those have also been convicted of a violent crime. So you've got about ~25% of felons in there because of mandatory minimums.
I think joining WoW with a mid-to-high level character would be self-defeating. Levelling isn't a chore at all, and most of the quests are exceptional.
Skipping that content wouldn't seem like much of a fair trade to me.
A computer controlled car that can talk to the cars around it to negotiate leeway has a much better chance of reacting in time, stopping in time, not locking up the brakes, swerving the right direction to miss the collision, not sliding off the road and hitting a tree, etc. Similarly with adjusting for weather conditions.
The old vehicles would coexist as they faded away, the way circa 1980s machines are still puttering around on the internet. Eventually they'll raise registration taxes on such vehicles and place restrictions on them, much as we do with classic cars. It'll go away.
And the adoption rate for a car that gives you back your commuting time, makes travel safer, and lowers the average stress rate dramatically?
I'm thinking people will snap them up like hotcakes. HDTV is going slow because there's little upside to buying one right now -- not alot of HD content out there for the common man. But the upside to having your commute time back? Everyone can realize and appreciate that benefit immediately.
The EQ box sold something around a couple million units, give or take. only ~500k of those people who got as far as actually buying the game, stayed -- not to mention those who just found the genre since then. So that means there's a huge potential audience for something that is a fantasy MMORPG, but isn't EQ.
Except that most people won't pay more. Not on a console anyway. Why pay $5 for a mutliplayer map pack that no-one else has?
If this concept is going to work, the 'buyable' content has to be usable with/against those who have not yet bought it.
Sure, the network effect will make an online game obsolete if a particular pack takes off - but the same effect makes for a substantial barrier to initial adoption. Why should I pay more for content I can almost never use?
Yeah, there needs to be a jackass-ometer big time. A level of feedback that doesn't necessarily lead to being kicked off xbox live (which the current 'feedback' system is geared toward). But instead just focuses on communicating who's immature.
In the short term though, XBL just needs 'leagues', so to speak.
Allow gamers to segregate themselves based on their self-perceived proficiency or intent, and the remaining smaller groups can police the abberant jerks with the existing 'ignore' and 'feedback' options. Let the jackasses battle it out on 'ranked' or '1337' servers, and if they intentionally join an 'over 40' or 'casual' game to heckle people, that's justifiably harassment, and ignore/feedback as appropriate.
And to stave off the inevitable: it shouldn't allow any player rankings to be visible from one league to another. killcount in a casual game should have no bearing or effect on your '1337' league-standing.
Back on topic: I think it's more telling that XBL is approaching 1 million paying customers. Considering that no-one has ever paid specifically for the privilege of playing non-persistent games online before, it's quite an achievement that they presented an experience that 700k+ console gamers think is worth paying for.
Dean Takahashi's book Opening the XBox has been around since April 2002. It's the first I'd heard about Microsoft's intentions and attempt to buy Nintendo back in the day.
You didn't know that, because it's completely false.
So long as the original inventor has a product, its design, etc stored somewhere with a verifiable creat-date, it's prior art.
The only way a second-round 'inventor' could patent it and charge the original inventor fees, is if the original inventor hadn't invented his product yet, or shown it to anyone on a verifiable prior date.
Things like the described hypothetical in the GP Post do not happen. Software patents are a Bad Idea, but they're not that bad.
Or you just have them precharge their tokens upfront, and cut them off when they run out. It's really no different than the game card you get at any of these neuvo-arcades like GameWorks. Each game you play there is essentially a micropayment, and unlike physical tokens, there isn't a real cost to processing the transactions. There's nothing to move back and forth -- just an account to debit.
That way your actual CC/paypal/gamecard processing transactions aren't any more frequent, aren't made after the user has experienced X-tokens worth of content (which incentivizes them to decline charges, not pay, etc), and you gain the 'gift card' benefit. (people who pay $20 for 1000 tokens, but only ever use 500)
I'd recommend daily, weekly, and monthly caps as well - because you need to ensure you're not punishing your hardcore gamers. But there you go: Micropayments that work.
Now you just need a single game good enough to justify consumers paying to play it by itself (E.g. a massmog), or a suite of games that can all share the same account processing (E.g. popcap games, steam)
Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Semi-serious? That's just an artifact of the youth of the medium and the lack of a real artistic indie segment.
There's nothing about the gaming medium itself that is semi-serious. It's perfectly capable of tackling any topic just as well as narrative fiction on celluloid or page.
Calling the medium semi-serious as of now is an unfortunate but true overview, but implying the medium is incapable of more is shortsighted and wrong.
Over-rated as they may be, slick graphics are a real necessity in today's commercial games. Sure, I go back to UFO Defense about once a year, and I just recently spent quite a few hours trying to get Syndicate Wars running under XP (my machine is not quite fast enough to handle it under DosBox).
But the sad truth is that we are the extreme minority. Many gamers actually do make purchasing decisions based on what they see visually -- and shortsighted megalithic publishers don't seem to care what gamers think about the gameplay once the game has been purchased. At the same time, great games with less-than-stellar graphics are routinely overlooked by the market.
Although some games will always aim for the photorealistic, I agree that's going to increasingly cost more for increasingly less benefit. Stylized graphics are likely the way to go in no small part due the Uncanny Valley, but also pure economic motivations.
But at the moment Cel Shading (done reasonably well) is one of the more intensive graphic styles. It's a fairly computationally expensive process, and takes comparably high-poly models to get the look right. (though you can save a bit if you're not aiming for crisp black outlines; but are going with a more Tartakovsky/Samurai Jack style)
Proper styling in general can make fewer resources go a helluva lot further (see: WoW vs EQ2). But cel shading itself is not one of those low resource techniques.
No home console before the PS2 had backwards compatibility.
Is it really such a requirement? Sure, I'd prefer to have it than not -- but who has ever looked at a next-gen system and said: "no backwards compatibility, never mind"?
No nintendo fan. No-one who bought the PS1 or the XBox. I mean, you already own the last generation console right? What do you really need another for?
It's nice, it's not necessary. It might cost someone a few sales, but it isn't make or break.
How is EQ2 a different animal, besides its high system requirements?
And I'd save that whole 'the engine will scale down for people with shitty hardware' marketing line. SOE claimed the same thing with SW:G, and with a min res of 1024x768, you can turn all the options down and still get a terrible experience trying to run with its minimum system requirements.
The context of that quote was at the strategic or tactical level.
No-one suggested these games educate their players on the grotesqueries of war.
It was the author's assumption that military video games provide a reasonable facsimile to actual military endeavors on the tactical levels. The US Armed Forces agrees with that to the tune of repeated lip service and continued funding into game-like tactical training tools, which increasingly find a civilian market.
The games are thereby educating gamers, not to become soliders, but to understand maneuvers, the inevitability of accidents, and the scope of battle beyond typical war reporting.
These games aren't going to prepare people to deal with the emotions of seeing friendly fire or civilian casualties. These games will simply prepare gamers to expect friendly fire and civilian casualties as being an inavoidable byproduct of war, and will allow them to understand how soldiers can make such tragic mistakes in the first place.
The article is talking about wargamers political reactions to actual war reporting here. Not their abilities to personally function during actual war.
You don't think exposure to material invokes a mental adjustment? Do we learn nothing from communication then? Novels, texts, plays, film, music, poetry -- these don't invoke mental adjustment?
I'd agree that exposure to material doesn't invoke a subconscious adjustment (short of brainwashing, subliminal messaging, etc) - but that isn't quite what you said.
The violence argument has always set out to suggest that the behavioral adjustment is subconscious and automatic. The political leaning argument (presented here for the first time that I've read) specifically denotes the necessary step of consciously applying knowledge gained from exposure to material to adjust views and behavior.
The passive/active divide makes them quite distinct imo.
Actually it sounds like this article is suggesting that realistic military games actually educate the gamers on what warfare is like.
The thrust of the article is that political second-guessing of military strategy and reaction would be easily identifiable by such educated gamers. Educated gamers know that sending more troops to Iraq would not necessarily mitigate the dangers of roadside bombs and ambushes -- it'd simply present more targets. Also, they'd be more willing to judge the failure or success of a military engagement on the broader scope, and not just make a gut decision influenced by the most recently reported good or bad news.
I don't know that such education could change a gamer's personal politics but, like any education, it certainly increases the accuracy of their BS detector.
The LinkSys wireless adapter will work with any device that has a 10/100 ethernet port. it'll work with your PC with onboard 10/100(/1000), it'll work with the neXtBox( provided it still has onboard ethernet), it'll work with your 10 year old machine with the ISA 10mbps ethernet card, it'll work with your laptop's 10/100 ethernet port, etc.
I'd strongly expect the official MS branded product to behave the same way. (particularly since their short-lived networking line was pretty solid, all said)
Cheaper than the linksys is tricky. because those products are so versatile and powerful (making any device that has an ethernet port into a wireless-capable device) -- everyone can and does charge a premium.
Ah... and we get back to my favorite Mulligan quote: "would-be game designers take note: Ideas are a dime a dozen and worth what they cost"
People don't tend share their 'solutions' to gameplay problems because they either don't have them, aren't confident in them, or are deluding themselves into thinking that their idea is original, and carries some sort of value locked away in their head. (right up there with everyone's big movie idea, and unwritten great american novel)
The simple truth is that it's easier to point out problems than to fix them. Constructivie criticism takes time and thought. Bitching can be done on the fly.
While I wouldn't expect, for example, Brad McQuaid to bother sharing what he thinks about a thorny design issue (although on more than one occassion, he has joined such discussions), there's no reasonable excuse for unfunded critics to keep quiet.
And you're dead wrong about Koster sharing only after he started getting paid. He was sharing his ideas on Mud-Dev well before he started 'making plenty of money'. The guy honestly cares about sharing information to advance the state of virtual world design... or at least spends a hell of a lot of time and effort into making legitimate contributions as his front. He gets paid, not for thinking of things that other people haven't, but by seeing them through.
An Idea is to an Implmentation as Criticism is to Constructive Criticism.
Here, I beg to differ with you. Sir Bruce's numbers are interesting, but I think your deduction from those numbers is distinct from 'obvious'.
Although I highly doubt the accuracy of Sir Bruce's numbers (through no fault of his own), for arguments sake I will consider his numbers true. Firstly: Correlation does not equal Causation. EQ's subscriptions dropped at most by 40,000. There's no evidence to suggest those 40k went straight from EQ to FFXI. Further, where did FFXI's other 460000 subscriptions come from? It seems this game was going to be a phenomenal success without touch 90% of EQs user base. Even adding up all the other subscription drops for all other games over the same period of time, we come nowhere close to FFXI's increase.
Dropping the numbers and going back to my point: would FFXI have failed if it couldn't have pulled over even part of the EQ crowd? Or is it just a better game (in the opinions of its target audience) that would have been successful even if a divine plague purged the world of EQ players?
Isn't the total number of subscriptions higher today, higher with every major release, than it ever was before? Look at Bruce's numbers. FFXI seems to have created 300k+ persistent world players from thin air. We are nowhere near a possible upper limit on the market.
I would like to add that I think it's simply shameful that Mythica, TFLO, and WHO died the way they did.
When any project is late -- a business decision must be made whether it truly is a project they should continue to support. It is certainly unfortunate that so many talented and creative people pump so much time and energy into something they believe in, only to see it wasted.
However, this is not necessarily a bad mark on anyone involved. This is business, and in business even the best ideas and the noblest of intentions may turn into a money pit. Worse still, it isn't necessarily survivability that matters, it's profitabiliyt. Adding 50% to the dev budget may have well put them in a position where they'd have such a huge debt against their original estimated income, juxtaposed with further risk, the suits feel their money would be better spent elsewhere.
When you're looking at a 36 month project that'll be 18 months overdue... how do you know those 18 months will actually be enough? MS extended the timetable for TFLO several times. If they weren't seeing enough progress to keep them assured that there's an end in sight -- we have to expect them to cut their losses.
The whole point of this recounting is to say, again IMHO, that in fact, many players only play one of these games at a time.
I absolutely agree with that statement. Particularly since publishers clinging to the monthly subscription fees means most people simply can't justify the time nor monetary expense of more than one of these games.
However, my point is simply that statistically insignificant numbers of active subscriptions of existing games are cancelled and moved to A New Game. While anecdotal evidence is sure to exist, it is the rare exception, not the rule.
If there really is a total cap on the audience size, and there may well be, it simply hasn't been met.
No game yet has survived or failed based on its (in)ability to take even disgruntled active accounts from other games. They've succeeded or failed based on the merits of their CS, their launch, and a design that finds a new crowd.
There's no reason to think that anything short of a clone of an existing game would need to actually take subscribers to succeed.
Blizzard and Id have always had the same "It's done when it's done, and not a second earlier" attitude.
3d Realms and Ion Storm (Romero) also have/had such a policy.
It isn't necessarily a mark of quality. Sometimes the attitude just leads to bad games in bad situations lingering in near-perpetuity. IIRC (and I admit it's a foggy memory) Blizzard's ill-fated Adventure game was also in dev limbo shortly before it was cancelled.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that this is a positive development. Particularly not if they're concerned about the game not being fun enough (as was their primary concern with Thrall's quest or whatever it was).
Slashdot Mirror
A slim minority of the people who get so far as to actually buy and try these games stick around and pay to play them.
It seems pretty obvious that something about the core design is alienating [i]most[/i] of the potential market.
The corporates are risk averse, and they keep churning out design knockoffs, rather than trying to take the next legitimate step in advancing the genre.
In NY state the split is actually 38% of felons are in jail on drug charges, and almost 30% of those have also been convicted of a violent crime. So you've got about ~25% of felons in there because of mandatory minimums.
r oc kefellerd/index.cfm
http://www.drugpolicy.org/statebystate/newyork/
Nationally the average is closer to 21%
http://www.enotes.com/americas-prisons/
Granted, these are certainly dramatically increased over the last 20 years -- but they're not nearly the 'majority' you're tossing around.
I think joining WoW with a mid-to-high level character would be self-defeating. Levelling isn't a chore at all, and most of the quests are exceptional.
Skipping that content wouldn't seem like much of a fair trade to me.
A computer controlled car that can talk to the cars around it to negotiate leeway has a much better chance of reacting in time, stopping in time, not locking up the brakes, swerving the right direction to miss the collision, not sliding off the road and hitting a tree, etc. Similarly with adjusting for weather conditions.
The old vehicles would coexist as they faded away, the way circa 1980s machines are still puttering around on the internet. Eventually they'll raise registration taxes on such vehicles and place restrictions on them, much as we do with classic cars. It'll go away.
And the adoption rate for a car that gives you back your commuting time, makes travel safer, and lowers the average stress rate dramatically?
I'm thinking people will snap them up like hotcakes. HDTV is going slow because there's little upside to buying one right now -- not alot of HD content out there for the common man. But the upside to having your commute time back? Everyone can realize and appreciate that benefit immediately.
The EQ box sold something around a couple million units, give or take. only ~500k of those people who got as far as actually buying the game, stayed -- not to mention those who just found the genre since then. So that means there's a huge potential audience for something that is a fantasy MMORPG, but isn't EQ.
'widely accepted' != science
Except that most people won't pay more. Not on a console anyway. Why pay $5 for a mutliplayer map pack that no-one else has?
If this concept is going to work, the 'buyable' content has to be usable with/against those who have not yet bought it.
Sure, the network effect will make an online game obsolete if a particular pack takes off - but the same effect makes for a substantial barrier to initial adoption. Why should I pay more for content I can almost never use?
Yeah, there needs to be a jackass-ometer big time.
A level of feedback that doesn't necessarily lead to being kicked off xbox live (which the current 'feedback' system is geared toward). But instead just focuses on communicating who's immature.
In the short term though, XBL just needs 'leagues', so to speak.
Allow gamers to segregate themselves based on their self-perceived proficiency or intent, and the remaining smaller groups can police the abberant jerks with the existing 'ignore' and 'feedback' options.
Let the jackasses battle it out on 'ranked' or '1337' servers, and if they intentionally join an 'over 40' or 'casual' game to heckle people, that's justifiably harassment, and ignore/feedback as appropriate.
And to stave off the inevitable: it shouldn't allow any player rankings to be visible from one league to another. killcount in a casual game should have no bearing or effect on your '1337' league-standing.
Back on topic: I think it's more telling that XBL is approaching 1 million paying customers. Considering that no-one has ever paid specifically for the privilege of playing non-persistent games online before, it's quite an achievement that they presented an experience that 700k+ console gamers think is worth paying for.
Dean Takahashi's book Opening the XBox has been around since April 2002. It's the first I'd heard about Microsoft's intentions and attempt to buy Nintendo back in the day.
Here's an editor's roundtable from May 2002 that talks about it as well.
You didn't know that, because it's completely false.
So long as the original inventor has a product, its design, etc stored somewhere with a verifiable creat-date, it's prior art.
The only way a second-round 'inventor' could patent it and charge the original inventor fees, is if the original inventor hadn't invented his product yet, or shown it to anyone on a verifiable prior date.
Things like the described hypothetical in the GP Post do not happen.
Software patents are a Bad Idea, but they're not that bad.
Or you just have them precharge their tokens upfront, and cut them off when they run out.
It's really no different than the game card you get at any of these neuvo-arcades like GameWorks. Each game you play there is essentially a micropayment, and unlike physical tokens, there isn't a real cost to processing the transactions. There's nothing to move back and forth -- just an account to debit.
That way your actual CC/paypal/gamecard processing transactions aren't any more frequent, aren't made after the user has experienced X-tokens worth of content (which incentivizes them to decline charges, not pay, etc), and you gain the 'gift card' benefit. (people who pay $20 for 1000 tokens, but only ever use 500)
I'd recommend daily, weekly, and monthly caps as well - because you need to ensure you're not punishing your hardcore gamers.
But there you go: Micropayments that work.
Now you just need a single game good enough to justify consumers paying to play it by itself (E.g. a massmog), or a suite of games that can all share the same account processing (E.g. popcap games, steam)
Semi-serious? That's just an artifact of the youth of the medium and the lack of a real artistic indie segment.
There's nothing about the gaming medium itself that is semi-serious. It's perfectly capable of tackling any topic just as well as narrative fiction on celluloid or page.
Calling the medium semi-serious as of now is an unfortunate but true overview, but implying the medium is incapable of more is shortsighted and wrong.
Over-rated as they may be, slick graphics are a real necessity in today's commercial games. Sure, I go back to UFO Defense about once a year, and I just recently spent quite a few hours trying to get Syndicate Wars running under XP (my machine is not quite fast enough to handle it under DosBox).
But the sad truth is that we are the extreme minority. Many gamers actually do make purchasing decisions based on what they see visually -- and shortsighted megalithic publishers don't seem to care what gamers think about the gameplay once the game has been purchased. At the same time, great games with less-than-stellar graphics are routinely overlooked by the market.
Although some games will always aim for the photorealistic, I agree that's going to increasingly cost more for increasingly less benefit. Stylized graphics are likely the way to go in no small part due the Uncanny Valley, but also pure economic motivations.
But at the moment Cel Shading (done reasonably well) is one of the more intensive graphic styles. It's a fairly computationally expensive process, and takes comparably high-poly models to get the look right. (though you can save a bit if you're not aiming for crisp black outlines; but are going with a more Tartakovsky/Samurai Jack style)
Proper styling in general can make fewer resources go a helluva lot further (see: WoW vs EQ2). But cel shading itself is not one of those low resource techniques.
No home console before the PS2 had backwards compatibility.
Is it really such a requirement? Sure, I'd prefer to have it than not -- but who has ever looked at a next-gen system and said: "no backwards compatibility, never mind"?
No nintendo fan. No-one who bought the PS1 or the XBox. I mean, you already own the last generation console right? What do you really need another for?
It's nice, it's not necessary. It might cost someone a few sales, but it isn't make or break.
How is EQ2 a different animal, besides its high system requirements?
And I'd save that whole 'the engine will scale down for people with shitty hardware' marketing line. SOE claimed the same thing with SW:G, and with a min res of 1024x768, you can turn all the options down and still get a terrible experience trying to run with its minimum system requirements.
The context of that quote was at the strategic or tactical level.
No-one suggested these games educate their players on the grotesqueries of war.
It was the author's assumption that military video games provide a reasonable facsimile to actual military endeavors on the tactical levels. The US Armed Forces agrees with that to the tune of repeated lip service and continued funding into game-like tactical training tools, which increasingly find a civilian market.
The games are thereby educating gamers, not to become soliders, but to understand maneuvers, the inevitability of accidents, and the scope of battle beyond typical war reporting.
These games aren't going to prepare people to deal with the emotions of seeing friendly fire or civilian casualties. These games will simply prepare gamers to expect friendly fire and civilian casualties as being an inavoidable byproduct of war, and will allow them to understand how soldiers can make such tragic mistakes in the first place.
The article is talking about wargamers political reactions to actual war reporting here. Not their abilities to personally function during actual war.
You don't think exposure to material invokes a mental adjustment? Do we learn nothing from communication then? Novels, texts, plays, film, music, poetry -- these don't invoke mental adjustment?
I'd agree that exposure to material doesn't invoke a subconscious adjustment (short of brainwashing, subliminal messaging, etc) - but that isn't quite what you said.
The violence argument has always set out to suggest that the behavioral adjustment is subconscious and automatic. The political leaning argument (presented here for the first time that I've read) specifically denotes the necessary step of consciously applying knowledge gained from exposure to material to adjust views and behavior.
The passive/active divide makes them quite distinct imo.
Actually it sounds like this article is suggesting that realistic military games actually educate the gamers on what warfare is like.
The thrust of the article is that political second-guessing of military strategy and reaction would be easily identifiable by such educated gamers. Educated gamers know that sending more troops to Iraq would not necessarily mitigate the dangers of roadside bombs and ambushes -- it'd simply present more targets. Also, they'd be more willing to judge the failure or success of a military engagement on the broader scope, and not just make a gut decision influenced by the most recently reported good or bad news.
I don't know that such education could change a gamer's personal politics but, like any education, it certainly increases the accuracy of their BS detector.
No that was the 0 job cycle.
crate puzzles
Dont forget its evil cousins: 'jump puzzle' and 'lava board'
The LinkSys wireless adapter will work with any device that has a 10/100 ethernet port.
it'll work with your PC with onboard 10/100(/1000), it'll work with the neXtBox( provided it still has onboard ethernet), it'll work with your 10 year old machine with the ISA 10mbps ethernet card, it'll work with your laptop's 10/100 ethernet port, etc.
I'd strongly expect the official MS branded product to behave the same way. (particularly since their short-lived networking line was pretty solid, all said)
Cheaper than the linksys is tricky. because those products are so versatile and powerful (making any device that has an ethernet port into a wireless-capable device) -- everyone can and does charge a premium.
Ah... and we get back to my favorite Mulligan quote:
... or at least spends a hell of a lot of time and effort into making legitimate contributions as his front. He gets paid, not for thinking of things that other people haven't, but by seeing them through.
"would-be game designers take note: Ideas are a dime a dozen and worth what they cost"
People don't tend share their 'solutions' to gameplay problems because they either don't have them, aren't confident in them, or are deluding themselves into thinking that their idea is original, and carries some sort of value locked away in their head. (right up there with everyone's big movie idea, and unwritten great american novel)
The simple truth is that it's easier to point out problems than to fix them. Constructivie criticism takes time and thought. Bitching can be done on the fly.
While I wouldn't expect, for example, Brad McQuaid to bother sharing what he thinks about a thorny design issue (although on more than one occassion, he has joined such discussions), there's no reasonable excuse for unfunded critics to keep quiet.
And you're dead wrong about Koster sharing only after he started getting paid. He was sharing his ideas on Mud-Dev well before he started 'making plenty of money'. The guy honestly cares about sharing information to advance the state of virtual world design
An Idea is to an Implmentation as Criticism is to Constructive Criticism.
Here, I beg to differ with you. Sir Bruce's numbers are interesting, but I think your deduction from those numbers is distinct from 'obvious'.
Although I highly doubt the accuracy of Sir Bruce's numbers (through no fault of his own), for arguments sake I will consider his numbers true. Firstly: Correlation does not equal Causation. EQ's subscriptions dropped at most by 40,000. There's no evidence to suggest those 40k went straight from EQ to FFXI. Further, where did FFXI's other 460000 subscriptions come from? It seems this game was going to be a phenomenal success without touch 90% of EQs user base. Even adding up all the other subscription drops for all other games over the same period of time, we come nowhere close to FFXI's increase.
Dropping the numbers and going back to my point: would FFXI have failed if it couldn't have pulled over even part of the EQ crowd? Or is it just a better game (in the opinions of its target audience) that would have been successful even if a divine plague purged the world of EQ players?
Isn't the total number of subscriptions higher today, higher with every major release, than it ever was before? Look at Bruce's numbers. FFXI seems to have created 300k+ persistent world players from thin air. We are nowhere near a possible upper limit on the market.
When any project is late -- a business decision must be made whether it truly is a project they should continue to support. It is certainly unfortunate that so many talented and creative people pump so much time and energy into something they believe in, only to see it wasted.
However, this is not necessarily a bad mark on anyone involved. This is business, and in business even the best ideas and the noblest of intentions may turn into a money pit. Worse still, it isn't necessarily survivability that matters, it's profitabiliyt. Adding 50% to the dev budget may have well put them in a position where they'd have such a huge debt against their original estimated income, juxtaposed with further risk, the suits feel their money would be better spent elsewhere.
When you're looking at a 36 month project that'll be 18 months overdue... how do you know those 18 months will actually be enough? MS extended the timetable for TFLO several times. If they weren't seeing enough progress to keep them assured that there's an end in sight -- we have to expect them to cut their losses.
I absolutely agree with that statement. Particularly since publishers clinging to the monthly subscription fees means most people simply can't justify the time nor monetary expense of more than one of these games.
However, my point is simply that statistically insignificant numbers of active subscriptions of existing games are cancelled and moved to A New Game. While anecdotal evidence is sure to exist, it is the rare exception, not the rule.
If there really is a total cap on the audience size, and there may well be, it simply hasn't been met.
No game yet has survived or failed based on its (in)ability to take even disgruntled active accounts from other games. They've succeeded or failed based on the merits of their CS, their launch, and a design that finds a new crowd.
There's no reason to think that anything short of a clone of an existing game would need to actually take subscribers to succeed.
3d Realms and Ion Storm (Romero) also have/had such a policy.
It isn't necessarily a mark of quality. Sometimes the attitude just leads to bad games in bad situations lingering in near-perpetuity. IIRC (and I admit it's a foggy memory) Blizzard's ill-fated Adventure game was also in dev limbo shortly before it was cancelled.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that this is a positive development. Particularly not if they're concerned about the game not being fun enough (as was their primary concern with Thrall's quest or whatever it was).