Here’s the thing about the games industry: more ideas/games/etc. fail than succeed. So the trick is, if you predict everything is doomed to failure, you’re going to be right most of the time.
So, to all of you who take satisfaction in the fact that you have successfully predicted the failure of something, stop. It’s no big deal. Nobody is impressed that you said a year ago that Wish would fail, or that Sims Online would fail, or that Phantom would fail.
What is much more rare is predicting something will succeed. That’s the hard part and why we’re not all billionaires (at least those of us who DON’T work at Blizzard! :) ).
Is this self-deprecating humor?[/quote]
No, truth :)
I also predicted DAoC to loose up to 20% subscribers and EQ2 to fail. I’m not sure I was that right in this last case.[/quote]
OK, but predicting WoW to succeed is only a little less risky than saying that 1+1 will indeed be 2. :)
That’s also my point. This reasoning about who predicts what is a silly way to portray me as ridiculous (which isn’t hard). It’s silly because it’s superficial and being superficial is far from what I am, in general. But it’s easy to be superficial on the internet and this is the only part that everyone will see.
I predicted Wish to fail but the point worth attention (maybe) isn’t who predicted what, but why. Why I said Wish wasn’t going anywhere? For a bunch of reason that were listed in my letter. Because the managment was clueless, because they were aiming too high (100k subs), because lost a lead designer they thought that they didn’t need another, because that they thought that “live content” could be commercially doable… And so on.
The whole letter I wrote was about my reactions to these points. It basically asked: how you can expect to aim at 100k of players when you really have anything new to offer that can really stand out and compete?
My letter is simply a repetition of what both Lum, Ubiq and Walt repeated: you can build an healthy niche market but you need to aim for something different.
Wish was completely off track. I saw that it was off track and I expected it to wreck when the devs didn’t understand all this.
In January, when Dave left, all of us took this news as a big surprise. The situation became way more clear when they said that the focus wasn’t anymore PvP but it was going to be PvE.
You see? The managment did simply repeat the mistake: “Look! There’s a bunch of money to make there, let’s go”. Without ideas, without passion and without being able to observe with a critic point of view.
Let me help you out, HRose, because it seems like you really care about your topics and I’d like to believe you are not intentionally being an annoying know-it-all-who-really-doesn’t.
Rather than saying “I predicted this would happen, bow down before my prognosticating prowess” why didn’t you create a post in which you said something along the lines of (based on your post here):
It’s too bad Wish had to die, but I think its demise was inevitable because it was a niche game that did not do anything to differentiate itself from its better funded competitors.
Then somebody could disagree with you without thinking that Koontz had somehow become obsessed with MMORPG’s and you could engage in an interesting discussion.
Or you could just proclaim yourself the most respected MMORPG thinker on this board. By far.
Also Darniaq wrote it better than me, but the point is still the same:
I am not at all surprised. I’m not even really that disappointed. In my opinion, this project completely lost direction after Dave Rickey left in late 2003. Shortly thereafter, I quit the Alpha and have watched from afar since as Mutable Realms tried to develop some relevance to the experience.
The game itself was interesting, but not nearly enough to go head-to-head with the 25+ other competing time sinks. In short, there was really no “hook” to Wish, no way for it to draw neither new crowds of newbies to the genre nor really capture the attention of the veterans.
It’s getting tougher to just pull together a few million and find some new way to deliver fantasy into a virtual world.
The problem with HRose is that is he such an awful writer - and being Italian isn’t a free pass forever. Also his fanatacism often makes him come off as a loon.
Sometimes his points are actually useful and interesting to read, but slogging through poorly edited paragraph after paragraph makes it more trouble than it is worth to get at whatever insights may exist. HRose, strive to be as succinct as possible and think about the audience you are writing for when deciding how to structure and phrase your argument.
At some point, HRose my old friend, your rubber must meet the road. As it is right now the only thing you’re good for is the mythical MMO studies department at Nerd Fantasy University.
I didn’t get your point.[/quote]
I think he’s suggesting that you act upon your ideas rather than just hypothesize. Anyone can sit back and say “I told you so,” especially with the wisdom granted by hindsight. A little less self-aggrandization might also make your posts more palatable.
