I want you to think back to when you were a kid. If you grew up in a neighborhood like mine, you will be plenty familiar with that one kid who owned “the ball.” The ball was great for any activity; dodgeball, kickball, etc, but instead of being content with the games everyone wanted to play, this kid also happened to try and propose the most inane rules and games, the kind that could only be thought up in the mind of a child with a thirst for power, and of course when his ideas were shot down as “stupid,” he would pick up his ball and go home in a huff, ruining the game for everyone.
THQ has stated that there isn’t much of a future to the Red Faction franchise thanks to the poor sales of recently released sequel, Armageddon. All of this occurred while myself and the rest of the core Red Faction fans have been screaming from behind the fence: “That’s because you gutted the core gameplay!” I don’t know what THQ was thinking, but somewhere along the line of development they said “let’s take this sandbox-style, open world destruction-oriented shooter and turn it into a linear, underground shooter with destruction merely being a gimmick.” Red Faction: Armageddon wasn’t a terrible game, it was just a mediocre third person shooter with destructible environments. I understand the cost in developing games, but it takes a special kind of company to gut the core features of its game, and then throw a temper tantrum when the community doesn’t respond positively.
And this exists in the MMO realm, to bring full circle. Cities XL is a great example of a service I suggested should have been provided for free, as any other company would have been able to set up. Instead, Monte Crisco set up the multiplayer so that when a very low number of buyers subscribed, they picked up their ball, gave the players a big middle finger, and waltzed home. Of course, like their childhood pissant equivalent, Monte Crisco walked right into traffic, being hit by a fast moving automobile, and went out of business just a couple months after to the sympathy of probably very few.
And since I’m already gaining the ire of the Mortal Online group, I’ll add that to the list as well. In an earlier article, I talked about how Henrik Nystrom is not against selling the game if it doesn’t start pulling in more customers, but he added in an almost taunting fashion the “well when we do sell it, the company we sell it to will probably gut most of the hardcore features.” That goes even further, rather than just picking up the ball and leaving, it turns Star Vault into the guy standing in the middle of a public library with a can of kerosene and a pack of matches shouting “you cheap bastards better start donating more or I’m going to burn this goddamn building to the ground!” Throwing your company’s lack of success out into the open does not lead to its intended outcome, in this case being more people purchasing. Rather, in the case of the library, less people are going to walk in as the librarian starts soaking the carpet, for fear of getting caught at the wrong time, and burned to death inside the building.
“Well a lot of the MMO market is this very test and react place, where for better or worst many people throw as much rough but playable content at their customers to see what they will respond to – then just give them more of what they seem to like.”
-Stephen Calender
Stephen Calender is correct. Not all decisions a company makes will be winners, but as I’ve said in the past, their response is what will ensure the company’s viability in the years to come.
MMO Fallout 