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Anyhow If you've gotten this far, and not completely destroyed your keyboard in a fit of rage at my comments, shaken your head in utter disgust or just plain given up on my idiocy I invite a response if your eyes are not bleeding.




LOL

No, none taken, and none intended for my part either.

Believe me I am on your side. It drives me up the wall to not see another game like SB out there... but the simple fact is, SB was a risky gamble which worked for a while, and ended up with Wolfpack Studios closing down.

I'd challenge anyone to say the industry hasn't been creative. Sure, there are lots of clones but there are also lots of unique ideas. Not all are successful or popular, and we certainly have not done enough to build on the successes that are already out there.

Mankind rarely takes massive leaps forward in improving life. More often, someone takes a massive chunk of technology and refines it slightly to make it a little better.

We haven't even done that yet.

So from a consumer standpoint, you're absolutely right... for the product that is on the shelf, developers are failing consumers. This is why across the board everyone is re-assessing what sort of entertainment service to provide and how best to do it.

You are also right about risk v reward. Every developer wants all of the features that you mention. But just because they want it does not mean it will be completed, and even if it is, there is no guarantee that it will be any good when it is complete (ahem... Vanguard).

That's nothing to say of the investment that is required to make it. There's a lot of capital that goes into that fourth, fifth, and even sixth year of development, and people want to know where their money is going.

Ten to twenty million in capital is nothing today. It gets eaten up very quickly, and it has to be used judiciously. It's also the base end of what an MMO takes to be developed (this is aside from advertising, box costs, PR, network bandwidth and support costs, etc.) There HAS to be a return on that investment, and the reason I mentioned questionable products is because a lot more "safe" concepts get canceled for a lot lower budget. It's a live or die situation for many studios.

Anyway we are all on the same side. Wanting to create the games that people want to play and actually delivering on them is just much more of a beast than anyone ever realized.

Sometimes I can barely believe we get the damn things to turn on lol...