They're not exactly building castles in the sky, either. If the concept of "money in, game out" is too radical to someone in this industry, they should consider taking up a creative endeavor that isn't so consumer-facing.
Venture Capital(ist) publishers? No major MMO publisher is structured like a VC firm, nor do they operate like one.
For all the imagined impatience on the part of your corporate taskmasters fiending for their ROI, I've yet to see an MMO from an established publisher released so prematurely that its own director referred to it as a "minimum viable product".
Your complaints are cliches and your wild ignorance has conjured up a boogeyman to pin blame on while ignoring the primary reasons that games turn out bad: infeasible (technological) and/or inconsistent (conceptual) design, dev inexperience/incompetence, and production mismanagement. Read any game
postmortemand you'll find those to be the most lamented problems.
Since I called you a FFA refugee cliche you just had to do the PeeWee Herman? How droll.
Two things; one more involved then the other.
First, you are repeating yourself like an idiot. You can stamp your feet, clap you hands, scream and repetitively shout "minimum viable product" if you like but if you don't acknowledge how he qualified the term immediately following stating it and instead repeat derisive characterization then you will remain an idiot yapping. The term 'viable' is a relative term and that malformed angry thing you call a consciousness is not an objective measure for that.
Second is on the issue of deductions and how you suck at them. I made two similes and your argument against them were "You're wrong. Ad hominem. No basis. Gratuitous snark" and "It's not that. It's this. Wikipedia link." You are one intellectually lazy fuck.
Let's talk about the first comparison between game publishers and a venture capital firm. Now I never said they were the same I just said they were similar and all you did in response was a blanket dismissal without basis and then adding derisive commentary like you run of the mill hipster. In order to prove you wrong I just have to show how they operate similarly. That is easy in two fundamental ways.
1) They both give startup capital in return for a share of the profits.
2) They both exert control over product development through control of the budget if not through more explicit means like a board of directors.
Finally, is your denial in the role publishers play in the failure of games. Continuing along the lines of you sucking at deductions is the notion of mutual exclusivity. If you are going to provide a counter example to deduct an idea then you need to make sure that the two idea are mutually exclusive. This can be tricky because words have multiple meanings and a particular thing can be all kinds of things at once.
With the above in mind are your common problems mutually exclusive with the role a publisher plays in game development? Obviously not and here is my basis.
It became apparent in the late stages of Warhammer Online beta that there was an ability lag that behaved cumulatively the more people in the rendering area. It really became bad during keep and city sieges, the core endgame, where it would get up to seconds. Jacobs knew about it and was upfront with us. He said that the fix required a change to the core engine but they were not authorized to extend the release date and would not get any more money. Now I suppose that this would fall into the categories of technology and mismanagement but release dates and budgets are the bailiwick of the publisher. At the same time, EA grosses nearly $1b a quarter and they could've funded it but chose not to.
Given you personality type you likely would have enjoyed all the teeth gnashing and throwing of keyboards as CC breaks and heals delayed for over 3 seconds and wipes ensued. My guild quit because of it after awhile.
The release date or deadline is when the publisher gets their ROI. Generally speaking tech developers don't want deadlines. It's done when its done and shit happening is a fact of life; it gets back to the iterative process that V talks about. Chris Roberts refuses to give a release date. Publishers also define what the budget is and that becomes the primary parameter of what is possible. Going over budget is a fact of life where you have two groups with different priorities: publishers with the bottomline and developers in making cutting edge technology. The entire art of dealmaking with offer and counteroffer also feeds that dynamic.
With crowdfunding and presales, all of that dynamic goes away. There is no firm demanding a ROI. The budget is instead defined by consumer confidence and what the market will bear. It's the difference between venture capitalism and market capitalism.
Game publishers are like a cross between a venture capital firm who funds tech startups and the soulsucking jerks at the record companies who sign acts and sell their music. You are their champion.
