Max

Redundant content is usually cheaper to make ... because it's based on stuff/frameworks that already exist and have been tested. So this makes no sense at all.

Not only do I not understand why anyone would be "angry" about the original trailer (which is clearly not a real trailer, nor a real game, because the Wii doesn't work that way), I double don't understand why either of the above are supposed to be funny. They're just soundtrack edits. Who gives a shit?

Maybe if the dudes who did the Dead Island "themed" "remake" had actually bothered to make things run backwards, or had spliced in some zombie footage, it would be a worthwhile spoof ... but these don't say anything about anything. Satire fail.

@Lethality I agree that the mistakes begin with the publishers and developers who mistakenly view this as a great way to market their games. As usual, it's about money. Not making money on the product, but vying for capital to produce a product before that product is providing returns. And that means it's a game of one monkey trying to convince another monkey to give him more bananas. A market is relatively rational and predictable compared to the game of internal politics and funding that plagues publishers and developers, respectively.

From the developer's perspective, having a very active community can help to secure funding -- beta tests and "tell us what you want!" threads are great ways to get registrations and posts. But it's a lazy tactic, and that's why it ultimately brings more woe upon a game than it does good, I believe.

From the publisher's perspective, getting early marketing out there and measuring the response is a good way to justify long term investments by their comptrollers (by different teams within the company, all vying for budget and staff, say, or from VC that keeps a smaller publisher afloat while waiting for a game to release).

It boils down to this, IMHO: MMO development cycles take too long and cost too much money. Unlike, say, a console game, one good MMO can dominate a market for years and years; the content doesn't run out. WoW is, of course, the best-known example of this. So there is no need for imitators; anyone who wants to make money will need to innovate immediately, pre-launch. That's a very costly market to be in. Unlike, say, cars, where you can have three companies making almost identical engines, but with very different body shapes -- that's relatively cheap to iterate on and differentiate on. Gameplay is the core product in the case of MMOs, however, and this is still a complex task for humans to iterate and improve upon continuously.

So game designers all sit down to design their "own" game, and ultimately wind up watering it down and creating WoW again, but from scratch, so as to completely overspend on a product that doesn't differentiate in any way, shape, or form from its primary competitor. F2P is the only way to get away with this tactic, because you differentiate on price.

Anyway, it's all a big catch 22. I understand why the game-makers do what they do, and I know that a commoditized version of satisfying games is probably a far piece off (they are art, you can't commoditize good art ... without AI assistance), and I doubt any of this will change any time soon. But one can dream that a studio like Funcom might come up with something novel based on their now-existing WoW-clone engines without having to spend so much money as to beggar a half-baked extended beta phase rife with player input and outrage. Secret World? We'll see. My understanding is that it has been constructed in relative darkness, which makes me hopeful. I feel the same way about World of Darkness.

@Daverator I don't necessary agree with the premise that users need that sense of influence in order to feel justified in spending that kind of dough.

I've been playing games since the old-school Pong game for UHF TVs from Radio Shack, and this is a relatively new phenomenon, this crowdsourcing of game development.

I can understand why developers and publishers would want to test those waters early on, as the MMO industry was being invented, but the experiment has run amok. You cannot have consumers directing works of art as complex as a game; design by committee leaves everyone unhappy, because the feedback given is usually emotionally-driven and inaccurate, even internally inconsistent. It's madness to build to that spec.

When games were simply released and taken at face value, people still bought shit loads of games. Ask Nintendo how that works out for them now. Ask Sony. MMOs are not fundamentally different from all other video games -- they do not require a crowd's ridiculously unqualified input in order to be popular at launch, they only need to be good (and marketed appropriately, as with any other product, of course).

I wish people treated games like movies: if you can find out some stuff about a movie before it releases: bully for you! But if you can't, it doesn't diminish your excitement for seeing the film when it releases. Consumers bluff when they claim they won't try something if they aren't sold ahead of time; developers should learn to call that bluff.

Developers are stuck in a rut with MMORPGs. This is what happens when you have a business model based on pleasing as many people as possible across broad demographics -- you get bad art, like with TV and Hollywood: mediocre concepts hung on tried-and-true frameworks. It works because the lowest common denominator loves familiarity.

It's expensive to make games, and people who pay for said games (aka investors/publishers, NOT developers) want their money back and they want it back ASAP. That means: don't take risks, do what you know will sell not what you *hope* will sell. And, as any artist can tell you, this is not the spirit in which good stuff is created. Ever.

This is why it is so important to support games like Mortal Online and Darkfall, even when they're not perfect at launch. Much like indie/art-house movies, these are the places where real art is being attempted. So what if it fails at X, Y, or Z ... at least those titles are ambitious. There is nothing interesting or laudable about an effort like Rift; they should have saved everyone the trouble and not bothered, honestly.

Good riddance. This game wasn't fun.

Anyway, the point is: I don't know how many people appreciate the incredible financial strain that game developers are under in 2009; Champions Online and ST:O literally could not afford to be delayed any longer, is my guess. Despite this fact, there are quite a few posts here which imply something along the lines of "if Cryptic wasn't so stupid, they would fix this game before launching it." I'm sure that they aren't stupid; they know that their game isn't all that it could be. For the sake of argument, let's say that there's another year's worth of development necessary before it could be considered "great." So, no matter what they do, they'll be developing this game for another twelve months. Do the math. They may as well get paid a little something in the process, ride out the storm of criticism by ignoring their forums completely, and then hope to get a lot of new subs (and re-subs from cancelled pre-orders and early adopters) when they put out the first huge expansion, which comes along with a ton of patches, new features, etc. It beats hemorrhaging money while taking in none whatsoever.

And it will work. This is the new business model for MMO publishers.

MMORPGs are dead until a developer gets enough money to stop cutting cookies and to begin innovating again, potentially side-stepping publishers altogether (like CCP or even Blizzard, back in the day). Alternatively, the situation could improve when any number of interface technologies take a big step forward and become consumer-market friendly (like holographic displays or 3D monitors/wrap-arounds, motion-detection, etc), which will fuel a new Gold Rush in gaming by the big companies with the big bucks who are currently waxing miserly with their dwindling hoards.

Why would something need to be said for Chris Chung? Isn't he the *new* president of the company? This is a profit report reflecting upon his predecessor, not him.

Half of the time, this site only just barely passes for journalism.

In several dev videos they have stated that the reason you cannot play girls in beta is that they are still working on animations for the girls and didn't see any need to rush just to have it in early since they play exactly like male characters.

I believe they cited a figure near 3,000 when talking about the number of animations per gender.