"I know for a fact that sometimes just having talent is not enough," Jacobs said after a long sigh. "You need leadership and you need patience. And what#DY#s most important - something that so many developers forget - is you also need to deflate the ego a little bit. You really have to remember that as good as you were then - #DY#Diablo#DY# was a great game - you#DY#re not always going to be right... I think for #DY#Hellgate,#DY# that was part of the problem."
He also said that no matter how great you think your game is, developers must listen to the community. "It doesn#DY#t mean you have to follow what they say, but you always have to listen," he said. "The test of greatness is to know how to look at it and either incorporate it or learn from it. We might listen to the wrong advice, but we always listen. That#DY#s how I think all developers have to be because nobody is that smart and nobody is right all the time."
On the topic of the listening to the community, I wondered what Jacobs thought about Funcom#DY#s May-released MMO "Age of Conan" and the trouble the company has had in terms of delivering promises to its fanbase. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime recently said that 40 percent of "WoW" players who left for "Conan" have since returned.
"If I was a #DY#WoW#DY# subscriber, and I played another game hoping it would be great and it wasn#DY#t, of course I would come back," he said. "I#DY#m not saying #DY#Conan#DY# sucks but obviously the people who left it thought it sucked, otherwise they wouldn#DY#t have left it. And the same thing may happen to us... #DY#Conan#DY# had great sales initially, but then [Funcom] failed to follow up with continued great sales. If you#DY#re not selling boxes anymore, if players aren#DY#t talking about how good your game is, then obviously people are not happy with it."
