I almost missed it because he refuses to get a working RSS feed, but not long ago, Claus Grovdal, producer-designer of Darkfall, poked his head out of his hole, saw his shadow, declared two more months of crunch, and scurried back into his rabbit hole.

But before he did, he boldly asked the question, “Why Shadowbane didn’t make billions”, and then went on to say, and I quote:

Shadowbane was a great concept and a great game, and the only reason it wasn’t a massive success, was buggy and outdated technology… If Shadowbane had released without all the client crashes, with a better server solution and with a graphical engine that could compete with other games released at the time, it would have been a HUGE hit.

As someone who worked on the game and who loves the vision behind it deeply, I’m of two minds on this one. There was a huge – HUGE – market appetite for the game when we launched. A week before ship, there were more ‘Shadowbane’ google hits than ‘Star Wars Galaxies” ones (the two games launched in the same time window). Our sell-through was – well, it was pretty hefty. People loved the IDEA of Shadowbane. They just didn’t stick around.

Of course, loving the idea of a hostile PvP world and not sticking around isn’t exactly an original problem, nor limited to the little guys – most people are not as hardcore as they think they are, and most MMO designs account for this very poorly.

In Shadowbane’s case, though, Claus is right – and wrong. Shadowbane’s technical challenges are well-documented, and took nearly all of our resources to tackle, but even if we had fixed them fast enough, there were huge design challenges waiting in the wings. Chief of those being the wholesale butchery of new players and the utter inability for vanquished guilds to get back into the risk game. Dear future PvP games: please try to at least make different mistakes.

Anyway, better tech and graphics would have helped quite a bit. The game was very well-balanced for a PvP experience, and had a deep and interesting character building system. It was fun – despite its flaws. But ‘billions’ seems… a bit much.