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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Wish Cancelled 238

Posted by timothy from the candle-failure dept.
Shockeye writes "According to Mutable Realms' website, the Wish project has been cancelled after 'careful consideration of all the facts and analyzing all the data which we have gathered from the Wish Beta 2.0 test.' The beta test for the Wish project will close at 6pm EST. According to the message it also seems Mutable Realms will be closing as well. You can view the short message here, and over at f13.net we are discussing the latest casualty to the MMOG scene."
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Wish Cancelled More

Wish Cancelled

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  • Wish in one hand, spit in the other (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @06:55PM (#11306439) Journal
    and just see which fills up first.

    That's all I have to say about it.

  • Open it then? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Squareball ( 523165 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @06:57PM (#11306448)
    Maybe they should open source it since they are just going to scrap it anyways??

    • Their called assets... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by msimm ( 580077 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:38PM (#11306646) Homepage
      The reason you don't see companies going along with reasoning like yours is because in the IP business code is like buildings and machinery.

      If you had a manufacturing business and closed your doors today you probably wouldn't give everything away the very next day (especially if the cost of storing was as minimal as code is). You'd hang onto or try to find a buyer to re-coop some of your costs (developing code costs money too).

      Maybe after a long time you'd be willing to give it away, but you probably put a lot of your own money into this stuff and you'd like to get something back out of it.

      • Ok, so while we are talking about the way companies reason we should also point out that very very few companies that close their doors actually end up selling their IP to another company or to a company that ends up doing something besides looking at their stuff and throwing it away.

        What a waste.
      • Well after reading the article and the forum posts linked it doesn't look like they'll be selling the software. It looks like (from my outsider's view) that they were only creating Wish so that they could sell the underlying tech to 3rd parties to create their own games. After doing beta testing it looks like it would take more work to get it to that stage and they don't have the resources to do it. Chances are, they won't end up selling off the code and it will just go to the waste bin.

        • Re:Their called assets... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Tlosk ( 761023 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @08:26PM (#11306862)
          Any money that comes from the sale of the IP is money they don't have in their pocket right now.

          Just because they don't have the money to finish it doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth something to someone else who does have the money to finish it/resolve the code or design problems.

          This is the reason I'd say about half of all new businesses fail that could have ultimately been profitable. They just didn't start out with enough money to get the concern going.

          Now I'm not saying that's the case with Wish, they might have tanked even had they finished it and made it to retail.

          One of my neigbhors does this for a living, going in and purchasing the assets of business that go bust for pennies on the dollar. You still have to have an eye for the potential worth of the assets to get a good deal though.
      • I'll bet that nothing suffers from bit-rot faster than unreleased game code. As soon as the team starts wandering away, the code starts dying. Eventually the company is left with some code on disks in a drawer, and years later someone tosses the disks. It might have a huge value for accounting purposes, but when no one is using it, it's value is zero. (Maybe even negative if someone tried to re-animate the dead code without a knowledge transfer.)

        At some point it's worth writing off the investment and cashi

        • You mean bit-rot like Pac-Man or Doom bit-rot? There are cases where old code can find a financial lease on life. Nintendo would be miserable if they'd released all their old carts and someone else started making a fortune re-releasing them (like for cell phones or those game-in-a-joystick).

          And the company *just* announced it was closing down. Real money went into developing that code (unless their programers work for free!) and I bet *someone* is scrambling around trying to figure out how to come out of
      • it's like buildings in the middle of the sahara in most cases.

        in other words, sure, they're valuable to someone maybe, but not to anyone you would get any cash out of.
        • except if another company wants to buy you out, or bankrupcy it becomes a point of leverage.
          EA wants to buy us out? Well they have to pay for this code too, that'll be an extra million
          • well, even then the real value of it is worthless, the imaginary value that you might hope someone to pay you though might be something else.

            the thing is, nobody's going to use it to make a consumer product.
            • It depends, somebody somewhere may have an idea for a game and decide that licensing this engine would be cheaper and easier than starting from scratch. There also have been instances where programmers who worked on a cancelled project leave company and buy the license to finish the game.

      • Re:Their called assets... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @08:11PM (#11306800) Homepage
        The reason you don't see companies going along with reasoning like yours is because in the IP business code is like buildings and machinery.


        That's a fair point. If people really want to see the code open-sourced, why not have everyone contribute to a pool of cash and offer to buy the code from them? If their "orphaned" code is really so difficult to to re-sell, they might be willing to part with it for relatively little money.

        • Can I just second this. Didn't this happen with Blender? Would someone more organised than myself, ideally someone involved with open sourcing Blender, please arrange this? I'd contribute.
          • ...when you offer to take it off their hands, many people that sit on the BOD of the company in question start saying "Someone's interested in buying it, surely there's someone else out there that'll pay more for it...". They're tasked with trying to maximize profits and minimize losses as much as is possible. So when they're closing doors, the minimize losses part kicks in with a vengeance and more often than not, they just simply will not achieve a compromise on the price in question and the code drops
        • Exactly. Thats what happened with the Blender [wikipedia.org] project.

          Free is great, but sometimes freedom costs (someone) real money. I think thats fair too.
        • The other reason that it's not feasible with Wish is that it relied heavily on licensed libraries/code from third-parties. Those companies certainly aren't going to want their code to be tossed into the wild, so it's not just code that's owned by Mutable Realms that's at issue. Just take a look at the list of Partners on their About [mutablerealms.com] page for an idea of how many other people's technology they were using.
        • So who runs the server, then? Wish was intended to support 10,000 simultaneous players per world. That sort of bandwidth is not cheap.
      • Yeah part of the reason why this company didn't make any money to cover their costs, was because they gave the product away for free.

        They had an "Underpants Gnome" business plan.

        #1 Make online 3D Video game.

        #2 ?

        #3 Profit

        Chances are the domain name, source code, artwork, etc will be sold off to an underwriter (accountant or bean counter that is a Corporate Undertaker) who sells the IP to another company that will bring it back as a commercial product. This, for example, happened a lot to the Amiga and C
        • I'm sorry, as funny as this is their step 2 was clearly more than ?. Specially it was: change players $x a month to connect to the server just like every other MMORPG that actually intends to make money. There's no reason to suggest that this model is going anywhere. Even with the free-to-connect MMORPGs that are becoming available there's still more than enough of a market to support development of subscription based MMORPGs. How can that be? Because when the server goes down players want someone ther

        • part of the reason why this company didn't make any money to cover their costs, was because they gave the product away for free.

          I beg your pardon? The reason they didn't make any money to cover their costs was that they hadn't finished and released the game! They didn't give anything away for free - they conducted several limited (both in number of participants, and in duration) beta tests of the unfinished game, but they in no way provided the means for people to sit on their asses enjoying the game for

    • Re:Open it then? (Score:3, Informative)

      by ArmpitMan ( 741950 )
      From the FAQ [mutablerealms.com]:

      1.3 - What is the "Wish Engine"?

      The Wish Engine is the software that powers the ultra-massive world of Wish. It is based on ZeroC's Ice technology. Mutable Realms licenses this engine to other online games. Sui Tang Online, developed by Shanghai Cartoon and Shanghai Animation Studio is the first title besides Wish that also uses the Wish Engine. See our press release [mutablerealms.com] for more details.

      Income from licensing the engine would be a pretty good reason to not give it away, hmm?

  • Perhapps a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PktLoss ( 647983 ) * on Sunday January 09, 2005 @06:58PM (#11306458) Homepage Journal
    This may be a blessing in disguise for productivity in the world. World of Warcraft has destroyed me, missed deadlines, angry phonecalls from editors etc. I ended up emailing the .exe to a friend, gave the CDs to another and begged them both not to give them back for at least a fortnight. Then wasted 2 hrs trying to crack her gmail password.

    The lack of another MMORPG out there may just mean I get this book out on time :).
    • I just want you to know that Anarchy Online has a free 1-year trial
      *evil grin*

    • Re:Perhapps a good thing (Score:5, Funny)

      by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:16PM (#11306555)
      If you are that addicted to world of warcraft, imagine how fucked up your life would get if you tried a good game...like nethack [nethack.org].
    • And that illustrates pretty well why I don't want to play these games anymore. I learnt my lesson with MUDs. BTL is a dangerous game...

      Daniel

    • Re:Perhapps a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bob65 ( 590395 )
      Um - if this is really true, then I think you have much bigger problems than World of Warcraft. There are lots of other things you can get addicted to in this world - you can't avoid all of them forever. Sooner or later, the same situation will occur again, but maybe with a different subject other than a MMORPG. Personally I'd go see a psychiatrist or something.
    • "My name is Dave and I'm a computer games addict. It's been 52 days since I deleted every last one and threw out the CDs."

      As a hypnotherapist, I think that nicotine addiction is taken too seriously. It's plainly not addictive in my client's experience - most withdrawal symptoms are due to the nocebo effect & behavioural adjustment.

      But computer game addiction should be taken more seriously. I never grew out of my childhood excitement for a new game.

      Damn, now I want a fix... ;)
    • You too? I just decided to go cold turkey.

      After a couple days of breaking my "no more than 2 hours a day" resolution, I gave everything my character owned to a friend. Amazing game, but it really is too addictive (not blaming anyone but myself of course, just saying). Playing a game you can't win but are rewarded for spending time doing even mundane things in sucks up your life!

  • Releasing code? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moz25 ( 262020 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:00PM (#11306465) Homepage
    What is the exact reason for cancellation? Is it financial or what? Does it make sense to continue this project under e.g. the GPL model?

    It's a waste to let all the hard work just be for nothing.

    • Re:Releasing code? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Minwee ( 522556 ) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:22PM (#11306579) Homepage
      I don't know the inside details, but they opened up their beta test to something like 10,000 people on January 1st while promising 58,000 more that they would get in as the week progressed.

      Eight days later the project is cancelled.

      Sounds like somebody got their first bandwidth bill.

      In the gaming world today almost nobody actually owns the code they work with so pipe dreams like GPLing failed projects just won't happen. The $100,000 that you paid to license somebody else's middleware only give you the right to use it for a year, not to give away the source code for free. Ripping out all the proprietary, licensed bits means a lot of hard work for absolutely no return on the investment.

      The people who pay for this kind of development really hate footing the bill for that kind of thing.
    • If the vendor had planned it, from the outset, to be able to live past their ability or desire to support the product, then perhaps the world could live on. Per my Virtual World Bylaws [christian.net] page, this is one of the primary rules which must be followed if an author's dream world is to be realized. I don't propose a solution, only that without solving this fundamental, doom is certain. The additional point above is well made by mentioning that the graphics engine is a big deal.

      1. The world must be able to

  • Well (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <fireang3l.hotmail@com> on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:03PM (#11306485) Homepage
    Judging from this screenshot [mutablerealms.com], I think I can see why. Sure, graphics ain't everything... but competing with WoW and EverCrack2 (to a lesser level) isn't easy... I hope they had a GREAT gameplay to compensate for such... graphics.

    From their FAQ : "No decisions have yet been made on the specific pricing, but you should not expect Wish to be on the cheap side. We want to compete..."

    • Re:Well (Score:2)

      by KDan ( 90353 )
      As one who spent countless hours playing on MUDs back in the days, I can assure you that yes, when it comes to MUDs (graphical or not), gameplay is everything.

      Daniel
    • It would seem that was just a really ugly screenshot. Some of their other stuff -- particularly trees and grass [mutablerealms.com] -- look pretty good to me. Oh well. I don't play these games anyway. But I have been trying to add trees and grass to a game I'm writing and have found it isn't easy...
    • " Judging from this screenshot, I think I can see why. Sure, graphics ain't everything..."

      You picked the shittiest SS out of the bunch. You must remember, this is an early early beta. Should have seen the FIRST screenshots released from wOw they were all boxy and stuff 100x worse than this.

      If people want to see how the game really looked check out here http://www.mutablerealms.com/screenshots.php

    • Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 )
      I was just going to post the same. There's more to a game than graphics, but decent graphics is pretty much a requirement today to attract the large masses of gamers, which is probably required to fund a MMORPG as well. With screenshots as abysmal as this [mutablerealms.com], it being a beta is not really an excuse. These [guildwars.com] screenshots [guildwars.com] are for example from Guild Wars, which had a beta weekend event end today.

      Come on, it's a game for 2005...
      • With screenshots as abysmal as this , it being a beta is not really an excuse.


        I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but all the linked screenshots looked perfectly fine to me. I guess my sense of game aesthetics is hopelessly outdated....

        • And these are character graphics. Chances are they were generated from a set of various choices... so perhaps those particular characters just look cruddy because the eyes/hair or something similar look bad together?

          This one isn't [mutablerealms.com] too bad, except for the hands:

      • I've played the beta. Wish's graphics are actually pretty good. Nothing too exciting, but on par with other mmporgs. Certainly good enough that people who liked the game play would have had no difficulty tolerating them. Remember, for a long time EQ was the most successful US mmporg despite having very outdated graphics.

      • I was actually going to post the same thing, but those screenshots don't really show what's wrong with Wish. I found the in-game graphics to be OK (not good, but OK), but the UI was just flat out abominable. Seriously, it was like playing something from the late 90's. Totally plain, ugly borders around windows, chunky non-antialiased fonts, no translucency or transparency on windows, so you couldn't have your chat window open, for example, without totally blocking a huge chunk of the game.

        I know it was bet

    • Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @08:14PM (#11306814) Homepage
      Uh, hate to break it to you, but those trees are much better than anything you'll see in World of Warcraft. In fact, most of the graphics in World of Warcraft wouldn't be any good at all if they hadn't slapped a slick-looking specular highlight shader onto most of the textures. That's basically the only difference graphically between WoW and Wish, and it's why Wish graphics look so flat in comparison.

      WoW is blowing away everything else because the gameplay kicks fucking ass, not because of its graphics.
      • I disagree on the graphics slam. Blizzard has some extremely talented artists that have put hundreds of thousands of man-hours (if not millions) into their game's artwork. The book that comes with the collector's edition clearly shows that. Even on a system without the highlight shaders, the textures are crisp, beautiful and quite organic.
      • The fact is the Wow looks MUCH better. How they do it doesn't matter. What 'could' have been means Jack to what 'is'.
    • What're you talkin' about? The model details are pretty high quality. It does need some help with textures and lighting though.

      More screens. [mutablerealms.com] The environments seem to be on par with SWG.

      Technically speaking the engine seems to be very competent.

  • Themis and Mutable Realms (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bruha ( 412869 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:13PM (#11306535) Homepage Journal
    Once again it seems that Themis http://www.themis-group.com is involved with a failing or failed business.

    Some of their happy partners include.

    Anarchy Online
    Jumpgate
    Wish
    Saga of Ryzom

    And several niche MMO's that have vanished over the years. And lets not forget their heavy influence at Turbine Entertainment and that peice of crap they call Asheron's Call 2 that refuses to die. (Note they were not involved in AC2 being crappy but one can wonder why it has not been axed yet).
    • Themis handles press and sometimes support.

      They have nothing to do with the failure of a crappy game. Name dropping a company that has little recognition in the industry as a whole, does good work (afaik) and doesn't actually develop the product just so you can bash them is just poor judgement.
      • Of the clients that I know themis to be involved with currently only one is succeeding and questionably so. The facts are that Themis is a advisor to some of these garage mmo's and in 2 years time one has shut down and 2 have gone belly up either in development or shortly after launch. This is not bashing this is facts.

        If mutable realms was a public company they would be in trouble for all the glowing announcements since the new year with "#1 download on FilePlanet", "68,000 Registered beta testers", and

  • Why do the assets always go to waste? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MiceHead ( 723398 ) * on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:13PM (#11306536) Homepage
    I'd like to see more instances where the teams of cancelled projects either release their assets into the public domain or license them via a system like Turbosquid [turbosquid.com]. This may not be appropriate for all projects -- for example, in many instances, there is no single owner of all of a game's IP -- but I've seen too many cases where gorgeous art assets, (take a look at Wish's [mutablerealms.com], for example) go essentially wasted.

    As an independent games developer, this strikes me the same way as a bakery tossing away perfectly good bread one one side of town while someone's hungry on the other side. Remember when Crack-Dot-Com went out of business and released its content to the public [jonathanclark.com]?
    Around July, Crack first missed payroll. August came and we moved out of the office. September offered no new news, so we decided to call it quits. Rather than letting all that hard work sit around and rot, we released it to the public domain.
    There's a special place in Indie Valhalla for the Jonathan Clark and those like him. Why don't we see more of this?
    ________________________________
    Inago Rage [inagorage.com] - Create and fight in first-person arenas of your own design.
    • Isn't it obvious? Go to Turbosquid, click on 'free 3d models', click on one of the many free chairs available, now look at the polycount. Wow, 800 polys for a plain straight backed chair. Yep, that's gunna be great for my FPS or MMORPG. You will have similar problems with fitting these models together to get an overall feel for your game. Artwork is the life of a game, if you're not producing it from scratch with a specific intention in mind you're going to get bad performance and poor consistancy and
      • Isn't it obvious? ...if you're not producing it from scratch with a specific intention in mind you're going to get bad performance and poor consistancy and the players will notice it.

        Well, if you're saying that bad content will diminish my game, and that not all content is appropriate for all games, I agree with you. Still, people sell texture packs [marlinstudios.com] or music libraries [musicbakery.com] or sound effects libraries [musicbakery.com] which aren't specifically created for a particular production, but are used in artwork, film, and games, to goo
        • I agree, texture packs and sound effects are certainly reusable. I don't know about music though, I'd put that in the same category as 3d models. But hey, if it's worthless and we're mostly sure that it is, then why not release it right? If you can't make any money from it by keeping it secret then you might as well give it away. Unfortunately I think there's something else at work here. If I was a 3d modeller for a games company that cancelled the project I'd be pretty pissed off. If that company the
          • Assume for a small moment that you're in the shoes of one of the 3D modelers for this hypothetical company that decided to release all the assets for relicensing or for free.

            Yes, it sucks that they might be giving it all away.

            Did they pay you for your efforts?

            Yes?

            Then all of those assets are a work for hire and you don't own them and shouldn't be bitching about them giving them away. Can't be pissed about it, you traded the work for money and it's theirs now no matter how you slice it and it's theirs
            • "and it's theirs to do with as you please." /s/you/they

              (Must proofread things more often... Grumble...)
            • Well I'm not a 3d modeller so I can't really speak for them, but honestly I don't think any of them sign up to have their work released wholesale into the public domain. It's different for us coders, we'd love nothing more than for our employers to give the code away so everyone can use it. They see modelling as a more personal thing I think. To them it is offensive to even have their models edited after they've finished them. Even when modellers work in teams there's a fairly specific division of labou
              • Unless there's a clause in their agreement/contract for the ownership of the assets they worked on in the event of closing shop, then they've got no room to complain- period, end of story. Doesn't matter if it's a modeler, musician, level designer, or code developer. I have to deal with that all the time and there's nothing I can do about it. If it's a problem, I suggest a different line of work or get so good that you're not selling but leasing it out to the studios (There ARE people in that position, y
                • I don't know if you're just being persistent or what, but you're ignoring what I'm saying. It doesn't matter what the law says you can do as the copyright holder, if you piss off the community of people you depend on to make money you're in for a lot of pain.

                  When you buy a comic book you're legally allowed to do anything you want with it. But if you walk into a comic book shop and buy that limited edition copy of superman #1 and say to the clerk "no need for a bag, I'll eat it here" you can be sure that

                  • Sadly... (Score:3, Insightful)

                    by Svartalf ( 2997 )
                    You miss what I'm on about. There will always be more people wanting to get in on the modeling, etc. and saying that a company's going to be ostracised is only fooling yourself.

                    Why do I say this?

                    Well, EA's still quite in business isn't it?
                    The RIAA labels are still going quite strong in spite of all the crap they pull on the artists.
                    Ditto the MPAA studios.

                    The reality is you're a sharecropper unless you go up quite a ways on the food chain- no matter what industry you work in. They're just not going to g

            • Funny, I think it would go the other way. If I put a lot of hard work into something, I'd be more pissed off if it got buried. I'd MUCH rather it be released either into Public Domain, or under a GPL-like license. Either way, I get it back and can build on it. I just don't see what there would be to be pissed about it being released, unless I had some sort of royalty agreement in place, and even then I STILL don't get anything out of it if it is buried.

  • Was anyone involved in the beta? Excited about it (Score:3)

    by labradore ( 26729 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:18PM (#11306564)
    It looks to me, from the remnants of the website, that the developers wanted the game to be fairly immersive and involve a fair bit of actual role playing , as opposed to modified hack-n-slash with a quest system bolted on. Did anyone here play in beta? What were the compelling features? What went wrong?

  • Nucleus of a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by earthforce_1 ( 454968 ) <earthforce_1@y a h oo.com> on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:49PM (#11306704) Journal

    An open source MMORPG would be a very worthwhile project, however the cost of bandwidth would have to be dealt with. I wonder if it is possible that the "world" database could be stored in distributed fashion, like a freenet node, eliminating the need for a central server.

    • I've wondered about that too, but I don't think I'd use Freenet as an example -- unless you want to measure seconds-per-frame instead of frames-per-second, that is...
      • Freenet's the wrong thing to use as a base for the thing. Differing goals for P2P modalities. Anonymous operation's most definitely NOT something you want for this. However, I believe the parent poster was using it as an example more because it's the only definitive thing that most people know about, This fact is actually amazing, considering that there's a MUCH better solution, that's mature, runs under Java , Ruby, Perl, Python, and C/C++ right at the moment- better yet, it's under a decent enough Ope

    • Already has one in progress.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @09:56PM (#11307306) Homepage
      Planeshift's the very thing we're talking about here. As for the world database, it'd take a little more than that- you need something along the lines of the database AND shared notifications of everything that each user was doing along with authentication of some sort to verify that all clients were telling the truth about what they're doing, etc.

      Simply put, it's a rough thing to accomplish so nobody's attempted it- YET. :-)

      Me, I've got my plate full trying to push two startups to major success AND trying to help LGP get several games out the door, so I doubt it'll be me (though I've an idea or two on how to go about it all...). But it's definitely not an unsurmountable problem and a P2P MMOG might not be a bad idea as it'd distribute the server horsepower over all the peers and the bandwidth as well. Just going to have to come up with framework, and that's the rough part more than anything else.
      • Planeshift wont be doing that. They don't even permit players to share the artwork with each other let alone writing a distributed peer-to-peer network into their client. This was one of the many ideas I had for Planeshift which was shot down when I suggested I was interested in working on it. Unlike other open source projects Planeshift demands that their contributors only work on the things that the Planeshift team finds relevant to their specific vision. If you want to contribute something which they
        • Good. Lord. In. Heaven... You need to try to draw attention to this and do it in as many forums as is possible. I was under the understanding that Planeshift was working as an Open Source MMOG, It's readily apparent if the veracity of your claims on that link can be confirmed that they're claiming one thing and doing something completely different and as such that would be a BAD THING.

          Seems to me, it's time to reveal them for who they really are and salvage anything that we can from their project (It
          • Umm, no. I don't want to give the wrong impression. They've always been very upfront about the fact that their art is not free. The problem with the copyright assignment for code is a different matter. I think the reason they're not upfront about this is simply that they havn't gotten around to updating the web page (or they think it is more appropriate to inform each individual person of the requirement as they ask to contribute to the project but that's just plain misleading in my opinion). Also they

  • 2005 Vaporware Awards (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rasty ( 212471 )
    Looks like we've got the first candidate for 2005's Vaporware Games Awards...!

    In a rash of magnanimity, I'll also spare you all the possible "wish" puns...

  • Always the same... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ajaf ( 672235 )
    Companies and owners sometimes do the same, they hire you, you work a lot, and then they decide that they'll end the proyect.
    It's hard if you see it from the worker/programmer perspective.
    I was working for my company for over one year in a really interesting proyect, suddenly the owner of the company woke up one day and said that the proyect was end. Why? if the proyect is great and is working perfectly in the company? I don't know What I know is that still today, we are using what we'd developed in the c
    • I was working for my company for over one year in a really interesting proyect, suddenly the owner of the company woke up one day and said that the proyect was end. Why? if the proyect is great and is working perfectly in the company? I don't know What I know is that still today, we are using what we'd developed in the company, we didn't sell it doh.

      It appears that even a script that replaces "j"s with "y"s in selected words could have gotten millions of IPO money in the dot-com boom.

      And yes we can s

  • Suprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Datasage ( 214357 ) * <.moc.yergsidlroweht. .ta. .egasataD.> on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:59PM (#11306751) Homepage Journal
    Not at all.

    After the success of everquest a large number of mmos were announced. Most of them were not going to be able to succed. This is why:

    1. MMOs take much more time to develop than any other game. You have to create a world thats large enough to keep players playing for at least several months while you are creating new content to keep players playing. Most other games are linear or have limited paths a player can take.

    2. Time commitment to one game makes player reluctant to dedicate time to other mmo games. Though that doesnt stop some players, just most.

    3. The MMO audience is smaller than the general gamer audience. Not everyone wants to or can subscribe to a game.

    4. To break even on operating costs, you need a certain number of players to keep the game running. This number is ussually in the thousands, but it depends ont he game.

    So, we have a limited audience, gamers who can generally dedicate themselves to just one game, and you need a chunk of that audience to keep running. How many games can the MMO audience sustain? Not many.

    World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 will the big players. They also need at least 100,000 players to stay profitiable. Other games can survive if they plan and develop for smaller audiences. Aiming for a large audence without being able to compete with the big players is just a recipie for disaster.

  • 2005 - The Year the MMORPG Bubble Bursts (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BondGamer ( 724662 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @07:59PM (#11306752) Journal
    There are dozens of MMORPG titles being developed right now, but hardly any players to play them. With the recent releases of World of Warcraft and Everquest II the market has become even more competative. I am betting this will be the year we will see a massive cancelation in MMORPG development. Wish going down not even 10 days into the new year is a bad omen for developers.

  • Developer Comments (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We decided that we would focus our efforts on getting our characters up to level 60 in WoW
  • ...you can't cancel a wish!

  • "Ultra"-MMORPG (Score:4, Informative)

    by LakeSolon ( 699033 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @08:49PM (#11306975) Homepage
    WISH made some noises about being the first "ultra" massively multiplayer online game, where "ultra massive" was defined as "over 10,000 players online at once in a single game world".

    EVE: Online [eve-online.com] (a space based mmorpg) did this back in April of '04 [eve-online.com].

    It's not impossible, but it is difficult. I guess they weren't up to it.

    ~Lake

    P.S. Aside from just the user record, EVE is a pretty cool game and worth checking out. Very different than other MMORPGs out there. Kind've a modern mmorpg of Elite or Escape Velocity.
    • Wow, I can imagine how many people would just be pissing me off every minute of gameplay. When I play MUDs I turn off all the channels, go find a nice quiet area of the world and fight some mobs. When I'm forced to go into the city to sell my loot, train with my guild master, or deposit gold in my bank account, I almost always cast an invisibility spell on myself. That way the newbies wont be asking me where to find stuff or if I'll take them hunting. Why bother playing a multiplayer game then? Cause o
      • A 'MUD'? You use a teletype with that? What model teletype?

        • You do know there's more MUD players in the world than there are MMORPG players right? That won't change until your average geek can run his own MMORPG server. In terms of gameplay there's no difference between the two what-so-ever anyway.

          • You do know there's more MUD players in the world than there are MMORPG players right?

            Really? Are you sure? Do you have any figures to back that up? Because with the top MMORPGs all boasting subscriber numbers in the hundreds of thousands, I find it unlikely that there enough people participating in what you must surely agree is a rather niche hobby for MUD players to number in the vicinity of a million or more.

          • "You do know there's more MUD players in the world than there are MMORPG players right?"

            That's a lot of teletypes.

            "That won't change until your average geek can run his own MMORPG server."

            That's a lot of teletypes to upgrade.

            "In terms of gameplay there's no difference between the two what-so-ever anyway."

            Perhaps, but teletypes make more noise. That noise must echo pretty loudly off of the walls in your parents basement.

  • HA (Score:2, Informative)

    by Fall into This ( 847574 )
    This is funny; my sister's boyfriend got to beta test Wish, but went home for the holidays and had no PC (only Macs) so my sister ended up playing it for him, so it wouldn't go to waste.

    If I told my sister of this, she'd probably laugh or rejoice. The game seriously sucked, though I could be a little harsh, as I don't tend to like RPGs. Still, the ONE enemy she was supposed to fight (the Mord after meeting the man we came to refer to as "Losey McWhat's-his-face") never showed up, except for once when sh

  • wish (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Flunitrazepam ( 664690 )
    Thousands of sources converge to say: "Hey guys, the players are pissed. Is there any chance that we can rip out the mouse based movement system and go back to WASD?"

    Programmers: "We quit."

    And with that, the age of MMORPGs which try to host more than about 3,000 players per world comes to a close... at least for a decade or two.

    I seem to recall that Wish was first announced back in the age when the Everquest clones were really starting to manifest. Anarchy Online was released (trainwreck that was) and Ho

  • Market Saturation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CodeBuster ( 516420 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @10:12PM (#11307370)
    There are far too many MMORPGs these days because every small startup game company and their publishers and investors were rushing to jump on the bandwagon. The trouble with these types of games is that they put such demands upon a player's time that he or she rarely has time for more than one MMORPG addiction. That combined with the fact that MMORPGs are not yet and probably never will be (due to the aforementioned time constraints) part of the mainstream. The end result of all of this is too many MMORPGs chasing too few players and therefore too few dollars. What do investors do when a company is hemorrhaging money like an arterial bleeder? They pull the plug and it appears that that is exactly what happened here.
  • There's quite a few multiplayer games in the works, and this one is just a statistic now. On a fluke I did a yahoo search for a star trek mmorpg. Looks like one is in the works, but the release date is sometime in 2007. It will become a statistic also, and will fall under the "too sucky too late" category. Star Wars Galaxies barely scraped by that category although it's just kinda sucky.

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