I stand corrected, SOE took over marketing, publication, distribution, sub services and maintenance of servers in May of 2006 but acquired all the assets five months after launch.
Vanguard was awesome. And 25 million is a pittance compared to what most MMOs of the time got. The reason that game failed so hard is because MS bailed. They don't care about 25 million, it is nothing to them, that's why they just walked away from it because they found something else to do. If MS didn't renege Vanguard would have been a success for sure. It would have been Black Desert, ArcheAge, TESO, etc.. only 10 years earlier, and better.
But there is no mess... We've only seen bits of the game and it looks promising, and they are still plugging away. Get something better to whine about.
You could say that about any game... If a publisher or private funding didn't 'buy the game' every game ever would have failed to deliver. Very few companies make a big game all by themselves. It relies on outside funding. Sigil did a decent job at making the game, but the management did a crappy job at securing funding. And selling to SOE was a desperate move and a shame that SOE was too broke to put in the money the game needed to finish it off. They had a tiny budget for that compared to other games at the time. If Sigil had the budget something like Rift got, they would have developed the game another several months and released a really great game that could have grown huge.
No it was good a year after release. They fixed everything except chunking which never took more than 5 seconds even without an SSD. And this was all done by SOE's team of 3 interns. If they had the original team of hundreds of people working another several months, the game would have been great at release. And it was built to grow as well with ideas for the first expansion, a soft level cap of 200. They had player controlled ships and oceans everywhere, it just needed mobs adding to them, etc. All this could have come after a successful release.
I agree with all that but they have done everything right since then. The Kickstarter just seemed rushed by over excited people who had good internal plans but didn't have anything to show the public. But since then he has set up the company properly with a whole management team so Brad can focus on the game itself. In other words, I don't think they are incompetent anymore. They may be, but I doubt it. We wont know until the December video.
They do care about Kickstarter but they have 0 credibility with the gaming community. This is why they are trying to put in some show work to get some VC.
