In the midst of a fairly heated argument on Scott Miller’s blog about Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, an interesting question arose: Is Worlds of Warcraft one of the largest marketing blunders in gaming history? Continue reading
Category: Industry Musings (Page 6 of 7)
WoW’s launch day approaches and EQ’s has passed. There’s endless debate about both products, and a lot of talk about how ready the two projects are, and how those launch days reflect their companies. I don’t buy it. Both are first-class studios with talent I respect greatly. Both will ship products that are quality, but will have launch issues. Saying there will be launch issues is kind of like saying that there will be a new car smell when you buy a car. The question is not whether there are issues, but how a team reacts to those issues.
All that being said, I thought I’d lift the hood and show what’s going on – from a developer’s viewpoint. I personally advocate that any design team for an MMO write a design doc for their launch day, because launch day has a set of concerns that are unusual.Here are some lessons I would impart about product launches, having been present for launches of both Meridian and Shadowbane.
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For all those people who like to talk about alternative billing solutions, it’s remarkable how little people are talking about the Neverwinter Nights Online Store. Pretty much, only the guys at CorpNews are talking about it, and it took another game’s dev to point it out. That’s somewhat shocking, given that just two years ago NWN was the golden child of the fans and academia. Continue reading
Between the initial EA Spouse blog post, the lawsuits, the academic studies and the calls to unionize, almost everyone has felt the urge to dogpile on EA. For some, the takeaway is that crunch is evil, and that it should never, ever happen. It’s not an uncommon takeaway – I’ve interviewed with several companies that have said, “We don’t believe in crunch, and we will never force you to.”
I always turn those companies down.
I’d like to welcome Blizzard to the fraternity of studios that have actually managed to get an MMO all the way to ship. Congratulations. I… uh… hope you weren’t planning on spending Thanksgiving with your families. Or, for that matter, Christmas
Speaks to me as a game designer looking for too many niches. Why are so many other people trying to reinvent mustard, while accepting that we all just want Heinz ketchup?
Too much politics. Let’s talk games. The eggheads at Terranova (Hi, Guys!) have been discussing this Forbes article about City of Heroes, which Forbes terms an ‘out of nowhere hit’. Fair enough. The most interesting part of the article, at least to me, was this:
Lewis spent $2.5 million of his own money, plus loans of $4.5 million from his distributor, the U.S. arm of South Korea game company NCsoft, to create City of Heroes. NCsoft is spending another $18 million a year to market and operate the game and provide customer support.
Well, the chatter all over the place is about the failure of the Sims online. Analysts are disappointed by sales thus far, and it’s not even in the top ten for the week it came out!
Every now and then, you find something out there that totally rocks. I present, the first Indie Game Jam
It always warms my heard to see game companies helping their competitors out.
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