Ngruk said:
Ok let me ask you this then.
Let"s put on our "realism" hats a second.
Say you got to open a gaming company.
Next say you had around 50-60 million dollars budgeted to produce a game.
It"s pretty much a one shot deal. If you make this work you do something unprecedented, if not you"ve spent 50-60 million dollars and you"re pretty much SOL.
Eve-Online may be an interesting model.
I"m very skeptical about a new studios being able to produce a huge MMO from the get go and become a major player in this market. But I think it"s possible to build something "focused" and then letting it grow.
You start small and focused, then you move from there. Making the right moves. Depending on how you "play", you may be able to go very high. You don"t go challenge WoW in the open, but you can work to get there when the time is mature.
Eve-Online at release was a major failure. It was in a state so poor that it was just destined to last a year and then be forgotten. But instead of leaving it in that state the devs have continued to work on it constantly. Not with marginal updates as it happens with all the commercial MMO out there today, but with significant changes at the core, so that they could progressively move toward the original goals, and then move from there to build something truly unique, with an incredible depth.
And the game very slowly started to grow from there and it is still growing today.
Compare the trajectory of CCP with the trajectory of Mythic. They are exactly INVERTED. CCP is growing way past the most optimistic expectations, while Mythic surrendered to EA"s acquisition after they canceled an entire game late in production (Imperator) and let die their major potential (DAoC). And this not because of "technical competence" but because of management and decisions at the high levels.
DAoC started really high for a game coming from a basically brand new studios. Mythic was able to achieve something impressive. But from there they drove it to the ground. Instead CCP started from the ground, with a terrible launch and financial losses (their major investor "quit" shortly after launch) and are slowly becoming a major player.
Now when assembling that team is your focus on people who are cool, creative, and innovative but have no experience at actually launching a game?
That"s a mistake, it"s obvious.
But it would be interesting coupling experience with inexperience. It"s not a choice between one or the other. It"s about taking something out of both so that one feeds the other. A game project for a brand new studios is also a constant learning process.
In the longer term it is also essential that you don"t just have experienced old guys on the same chairs, but also that you
TRAIN new talent. So that you don"t just "leech" big names and "worth" from nearby companies (only to be leeched when at the worst time by someone else) but also produce that talent. Become a stimulus for other people, introduce new faces in the industry. A laboratory of ideas that keeps things alive.
As I wrote
somewhere else: a company that pushes the evolution of the genre instead of being victim of it.
I think that good game companies should become academies when you build a culture and produce talent instead of just "stealing" it from somewhere else and using it up.
Basically launching a game is a billion times more work than you think it is when it"s 6 friends sitting around saying "How cool would it be if....".
That"s why 6 friends don"t sit anymore around a table to make a game. But, hey, Blizzard wasn"t much different than that, at the beginning.
As it takes a lot of time to make a game, especially an ambitious one, it also takes time to build a game company, and a solid one, from zero.
I can totally see why people in my position, at this point, would turn to people within the industry that have been there and done that. It"s a HUGE amount of money and ENORMOUS risk. Getting people to work for/with you that have shipped games, regardless of how good the game was, seems to be what a lot of people do to mitigate risk.
And in fact it isn"t "worth it". We have seen some excellent failures as a proof of this.
Actually I think that it is much more efficient to "mitigate risk" by working on something focused and with something concretely innovative and valid, more than just hiring people with big names. MANY, many MMO are launching today already STALE. And many of those ARE coming exactly from the BIGGEST names in the industry. It"s almost like the "importance" of the name is becoming proportional to the failure. Look at all that money that Sigil is going to waste with Vanguard.
That"s a perfect example of a team filled with huge names, with huge budget. In your theory of "risk mitigation" Vanguard is going to be the most successful game ever.
Sure. Let"s talk about this in a year. And you know what? Its bigger problem won"t even be the game design, but the technical execution because they totally screwed their priorities from the very beginning.
So, sure, experience is a risk mitigation, but surely not less important than what you focus for working on. Technical execution is one thing, and today it is still something very hard to achieve, as a MMO is still a very complex project. But the real core remains what you are trying to do.
A WoW clone won"t go anywhere even with the best technical execution. There will be PLENTY in the next years and there will be plenty of spectacular failures, believe me. But they won"t come from the smaller studios, but from the bigger ones that went suiciding.
You cannot copycat the bigger player in the hope to get a slice of their pie. And this is exactly where "management" matters more. Where you decide to put your money on. Because there are MANY projects that are going to fail miserably no matter how much money was thrown at them. And no matter how big are the names working on those AAA failures.
Instead a good, ambitious but still focused and relatively "modest" project (and focused on delivering a different "feel", not the same derivative crap) could do wonders. It could have better chances to achieve its goals and "surprise". It could work much better with "risk mitigation". It could become a positive model that everyone will try to copy later on. And even if you don"t reach ALL your goals, you"ll always have in your hands something valid, to be proud of, and on which you can continue to work to get closer to those goals.
Instead of exploding in a spectacular cloud of fireworks (or fade into irrelevancy).
By the way, try to find time to read
this. It"s from another guy at SOE who knows what he is talking about and comments indirectly some of the things we are commenting here.
