Trion layoffs?

But it’s all directly connected. Game design isn’t a concept you can abstract from the market you’re in, the budget and the workforce.

This is something really wrong in the way the industry is organized, thinking that everyone does his job in a compartmentalized way. What you set out to do depends on what you have in your hands.

I remember I criticized Rift right at the start because I was skeptical it could hold even in the mid term, and I think the answer was that they tried to plan so the company would be healthy, because they didn’t need a big number of subscribers in order to be successful and keep going. That they kept the budget in check. Yet it didn’t help.

The big mistake here is the same every AAA mmorpg REPEATS. If you aren’t at the bottom of the food chain, and I don’t consider an executive producer at the bottom, then you’re job is not repeating the mistakes EVERYONE keeps repeating and has kept repeating in the last eight years. Even if you have AAA money, you don’t go compete against all other AAA MMOs out there. Unless you have a genius-level team, and have more money than everyone else.

The MMO market is an insane one where everyone fights savagely for the same crumbs. Thinking of joining it is totally insane. So the only way to compete here is to flip the table. You make a game so profoundly different that it finds its space simply because WoW, or Guild Wars 2 or whatever other MMO can’t offer (Planetside 2, for example, could be a way, if they didn’t commit the suicidal mistake of making it so hugely hardware dependent that they lost about 90% of their potential playerbase just through that choice).

The fact is that Rift, Guild Wars 2 and everything else only offer very subtle gimmicks and modest improvements over a stale model. AAA budgets WASTED on a insane number of titles all competing in the same narrowly self-determined market space. All (or at least the majority) ending in shame and losing money.

So a PRODUCER has the responsibility to deal with all this. Instead of planning short term and just cross fingers with the religious certainty that, somehow, your own project will be more successful than all other identical projects out there, instead you should plan long term and be absolutely certain to REWRITE THE RULES of the game. Because the rules as they are now are suicidal. And if one year later things go as it was plausible they went, then you have to take that responsibility on yourself. Without blaming the “market”.

You need a “vision” about what you are doing. And the absolute, and MOTIVATED certainty, that what you’re building is both unique and indispensable. Otherwise you simply agree to play to lose.

Instead if you simply agree to add your name to the list, then you share the responsibilities and don’t get to complain about it.