In the rush to blame Laurent Wainwright for destroying game “journalism” forever, there seems to be a large issue overlooked: Rob Florence could have written the entire article and not ever mention Wainwright. Or if he mentioned her, he could have said, “And here’s the kind of gaming press attitude I’m talking about, the one that can’t even see the problem”. He didn’t need to mention his suspicions and doubts based purely on a single other tweet. Continue reading
A big issue to remember here is that a successful Kickstarter doesn’t mean a successful project – it just means that the studio raised some money from a crowd of people. Delivery of what has been promised is a whole separate issue. Continue reading
NCsoft issued a statement about the future of City of Heroes / Villains (CoH/V). The TL;DR version is “It’s still shutting down”. The full statement says: “City of Heroes®Players and Fans, We wanted to let you know that your voices have been heard and your concerns have been taken into serious consideration. We appreciate the … Continue reading
I was very amused recently to see that Julia Schramm, a national executive committee member of Germany’s anti-IP Pirate Party, was being slammed with criticism for releasing a book and then having her publisher go after unapproved online copies. Continue reading
With the news that BioWare founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzkya both announced their retirement from that company, it’s only fair to do a before and after. Continue reading
I’m aware that for a lot of CoH/V players “Blame Jack Emmert / Cryptic Studios” is the default position when anything goes wrong, but I don’t see this rumour really being backed by the truth. Continue reading
I was surprised to see a large spike in my site traffic today, especially to older posts about how many players CoH/V had. Then I looked further and saw that NCsoft announced its intentions to shut down CoH/V and Paragon Studios. This has taken a lot of people by surprise, given that it seemed that … Continue reading
Here’s a fun fact: it looks like Funcom’s last profitable quarter (by EBIDTA, anyway) was Q4 2010. The company has spent around a year and a half eating into its cash reserves. Continue reading
Having spent a bit of time looking at some infamous AAA MMO failures, it’s worth trying to see what lessons can be learned from them. Continue reading
So, what’s the take-out here? Obviously the market conditions that 38 Studios launched with in 2006 were very different to those it expired under in 2012, with investors no longer interested in pouring tens of millions of dollars into MMO development. But it’s not like 38 Studios should have been strapped for cash – as identified, they had at least US$135m put into the studio. Yes, they got a single player title out, but it fell a long way short of the initial “broad media” dreams, or even releasing the promised MMO, while burning a lot of cash. Continue reading
World Class Villains 