Hero's Song by John Smedley - ARPG/MMO Lite

wilkxus

wilkxus

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Kharzette said:
The world creation stuff is cool, but yea the numbers don't add up.

I can do a side gig here in my small town and have enough money to live for a year. Small remote teams working from home in low cost of living areas is the way to go these days. Especially if you have people that can wear lots of hats.
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....*cough*...... kinda like..... ummm.....the.... shhhh..... P a n t h e o n team!
Seriously, from the outside this looks like a business plan full of too much wishfull thinking, perhaps it is Smeds first time going independant without big Corp backing (spending someone elses money). Just guessing, dunno what Smeds background is before SoE & EQ. Hope they can salvage & reuse some of the fresh ideas for a better second try in a different game.

Looking at VRs roster now (compared to last year), with more funding after succesfull demos & streams, they seem a little better fleshed out and healthy: a few more senior IT managers, engineers and devs to ballance out the young new blood. Probably making seeds & peanuts.... but gotta keep things slim @ start & grow as patiently and slowly as you can afford.

If you want "innovative" bigger (expensive) games (non Mickey mouse stuff) that means essentialy risky R&D and R&D is ruthless that way: unless you have public funding for a safe crucible around the risky efforts, it is increadibly difficult to BOTH fund the base research testing & development AND have an extremely solid business plan, with pinches of luck to boot, for investors to give a crap. Tough business trying to make fun games heh.
 
Khane

Khane

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Well why come up with a real business plan when you can just do whatever the fuck you want with the public's money? Developers aren't gonna give a shit if they fail when it's free money to just play around with.
 
zzeris

zzeris

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Mughal said:
It was already over in November. They had ran out of money then and now people are getting jobs elsewhere. No idea why Smed waited so long to come clean about the fact that they blew millions on something that is not playable. Unclear with those sales and the current status of the game if it can be turned around or if at this point it's like just throwing more money into a dumpster fire.

EDIT: just to be clear, it's not that money is "tight" - the money is over. Instead of building a playable release with 25% of their funding and see if it was fun they used 100% of their funding to make 25% of a game
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In the end, this was just a part-time gig until they found better work. Smed hasn't had to do anything lean maybe ever and it shows. I'd like to know just how much was wasted in the end.
 
Identikit

Identikit

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smedley doesnt know shit about making games, hes the middle man for the bank and not much more. He doesnt even enjoy rpgs. I wonder how much investor money he pocketed.
 
Mughal

Mughal

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zzeris said:
In the end, this was just a part-time gig until they found better work. Smed hasn't had to do anything lean maybe ever and it shows. I'd like to know just how much was wasted in the end.
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About $3m give or take. Which is an insane amount of money considering the results. Smed ran a company for 10 years that was selling a quarter for a dollar with Sony covering the losses. Until the very end they refused to scale down the project, instead hoping that once people would be able to see and experience the game they would start buying it. And this was said while completely ignoring all the data they had on the Kickstarter campaign and social media sharing (i.e. there are about only 2,000 people willing to pay to try this game).
 
zzeris

zzeris

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Mughal said:
About $3m give or take. Which is an insane amount of money considering the results. Smed ran a company for 10 years that was selling a quarter for a dollar with Sony covering the losses. Until the very end they refused to scale down the project, instead hoping that once people would be able to see and experience the game they would start buying it. And this was said while completely ignoring all the data they had on the Kickstarter campaign and social media sharing (i.e. there are about only 2,000 people willing to pay to try this game).
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Yep, that confirms my opinion. This asshole is just like Brad was a few years ago. He thinks his shitty skillset is worth something. That people will buy his garbage off name alone. That wasting $3 million is just an investment. I see him floating around trying to get some idiot company to reinvest in him at some point. I'm sure they will. I don't think he has the drive that Brad does though which is hilariously telling. As Ut always says, it's time for some new talent to take their places.
 
V

Vinjin

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zzeris said:
Yep, that confirms my opinion. This asshole is just like Brad was a few years ago. He thinks his shitty skillset is worth something. That people will buy his garbage off name alone.
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No doubt that both have been pretty shitty at running companies to this point in time. I think there is a big fundamental difference between the two though. Brad always seemed like a designer at heart with a focus on making games that he himself wanted to play. Smed, on the other hand, is more of a businessman, focused on managing people to make games with good launch sales before moving on. Period.
 
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Identikit

Identikit

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brad i think has some understanding of shit, I mean there seems to be a similar feel among games he has been a part of ( eq, VG, some of eq2)

Cant say the same about smed
 
Mughal

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Identikit said:
brad i think has some understanding of shit, I mean there seems to be a similar feel among games he has been a part of ( eq, VG, some of eq2)

Cant say the same about smed
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Neither have an understanding about the economics of game manufacturing and distribution. They are stuck in the early 2000 which is where they had their career-defining success and they keep trying to replicate that while the rest of the world moved on.
 
zzeris

zzeris

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I agree with all of that. I don't think Smed can do what Brad can but both would rather just waste a shit load of money on themselves than do the work. One has realised this is no longer an option. The other may not ever realise it.
 
Kuro

Kuro

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If this goes under will he bring a peace offering of mozzarella stix to Brad?
 
Big_w_powah

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...Brad fails on his own endeavors...Smed fails on his own endeavors...Together they created a genre....Mozz Stix and Valium are a potent combination, apparently.
 
yamikazo

yamikazo

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Really is a shame, 30% of their dev work was top-notch stuff and the sort of backend that, at the very least, make excellent IP to license to other developers. Storybricks that works!(tm)
 
Palum

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Yes the 30% that required no actual effort was top notch. Amazing marketing, celebrity endorsements by young GRRM himself and dreams put to concept art.
 
TrollfaceDeux

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yamikazo said:
Really is a shame, 30% of their dev work was top-notch stuff and the sort of backend that, at the very least, make excellent IP to license to other developers. Storybricks that works!(tm)
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Palum said:
Yes the 30% that required no actual effort was top notch. Amazing marketing, celebrity endorsements by young GRRM himself and dreams put to concept art.
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Sounds like...


Pantheon
 
yamikazo

yamikazo

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consensus said:
Sounds like...


Pantheon
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Pantheon, after all this time, doesn't have anything that you couldn't do in a weekend. Maybe their original concept art if you aren't an artist. But that was just old repurposed work that was never commercially used, not done for the project.

Smed's team was laying the foundation for a much grander scheme - grab some money, get some interest, and put out a playable Diablo II-ish game in 2016, with Storybricks-That-Work(tm).
 
infidel

infidel

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perhaps im a semi mongoloid for thinking this (and a complete one for saying it here) but i think Braddy Mac honestly wants to make his vision of the 'perfect' game real, of course he wants to make money as well, but as said before he has an idea of what he wants to do. whether or not anyone else cares is another matter. with dJ Smed it seems more just 'whatever i can cash in on'. he doesnt care. 90's pixels all the rage? survival/private servers/procedurally generated bs the new thing? do it. Smedley-san will abandon this tripe, whereas at least the pill popper has trudged on. so he has that going for him, which is good.
 
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2002User

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infidel said:
perhaps im a semi mongoloid for thinking this (and a complete one for saying it here) but i think Braddy Mac honestly wants to make his vision of the 'perfect' game real, of course he wants to make money as well, but as said before he has an idea of what he wants to do. whether or not anyone else cares is another matter. with dJ Smed it seems more just 'whatever i can cash in on'. he doesnt care. 90's pixels all the rage? survival/private servers/procedurally generated bs the new thing? do it. Smedley-san will abandon this tripe, whereas at least the pill popper has trudged on. so he has that going for him, which is good.
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Exactly. That's why he made PlanetSide 2 like Battlefield. That's why EQ Next was going to be like Minecraft. That's why he made H1Z1 to cash in on the Zombie/Survival/Battle Royal craze. That's what Smed has been doing for the last 5 years. He also likes to throw technology at his products hard as fuck. That's what his contribution to EverQuest was anyways -- throw technology at MUDs. Except the games are rushed and optimized like complete shit. PlanetSide 2 has some of the worst performance out there. For a one of a kind free to play Battlefield clone, it's runs like complete crap and is dead as a door nail.

Brad definitely cares about what hes making. Furthermore, he's even contributing to the project. He's programmed tools and other stuff for Pantheon. So yeah, he actually works on the project, cares about it. Smedley the Lord of Lies is just out to make a quick buck.

This isn't to say Brad is infallible, but he's a saint compared to Jew Smedley.
 
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