2. Messy MMO Failures

It's easy to point at where this trend began in 2007: Vanguard. Every rumor you heard about Sigil and its founders was probably true, and only the largesse of SOE kept the title alive past May. Then you have the explosion of Perpetual Entertainment, a cataclysm that killed Gods and Heroes, may have "nerfed" Star Trek Online into a casual game, and has prompted an already controversial lawsuit.

Gods and Heroes wasn't the only high-profile failure this year; Auto Assault launched in such a lackluster fashion last year, it begged the question: "What happens if they launch an online world and nobody comes?" The answer: they shut it down.

It came down to the simple reality that neither NetDevil nor NCsoft had enough interest to keep it running, and so the players who liked that game lost out. An unsuccessful product shutting down may not seem surprising, but the last AAA online world to shut down was Asheron's Call 2 in 2005. Before that, I can only think of a handful of other titles that were in active operation which were closed down.

And there are a few games that are now the online equivalent of Schrödinger's cat. Is Marvel Universe Online still in production, or has no one yet formally informed the public of that the project didn't make it? The shakeout is not, I think, unexpected by industry onlookers. Just the same, they're sobering signs of the stakes in 2008.

Lessons to learn: High profile doesn't mean low risk. You need more than Vision(tm) to make a game. Silence is not golden.

click picture for next page

click here for full image