The continuing Saga of VG: Saga of ZeroesFollow

I know I've brought this up a number of times in the past but really I am quite fascinated with the whole experience. As an avid MMO~er since 2001, the insights the whole debacle has given into the industry have been huge.

http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more

f13net has what appears to be a very reliable interview with a Sigil employee who recently left.

Has some pretty interesting stuff on Microsofts involvements, SOE's non involvement, Brad being completely AFK during beta 2 and beyond, and most notably the firmest numbers on subscriptions we have seen yet. 200k box copies sold and only 90k subscribers, which is actually good retention rate consider the game is a PoS.

In case some of you didnt know SOE bought out Sigil a couple of days ago and the entire sigil design staff was let go. It talks about that whole process. It also pretty much reflects the views that Alla put down about Brad awhile back.

All in all I feel bad for the Sigil staff. I know what is like to commit yourself to a project, to work long hard sh'itty hours because you believe in something and the people you are working with, where it isnt just a job or paycheck but something more. I also know what is like to see it fall apart due to mismanagement and poor leadership.

90k -- ouch

The guy touched on this but I think that much of the "catastrophic failure" of the game came from its hype and the belief that people had that Brad would usher in a new dawn of EQ experiences. Without the McQuaid name and rosey EQ memories, its failure would have been just another Horizons or Shadowbane but with prettier graphics.

Nothing McQuaid said contridicted the anonymous employee's statements, even when he was asked point blank about it. The closest he came to saying "That guy is wrong" is repeating "A small team" when the interviewer asked why they only had a single QA guy working on the project.

In a way, the situation with Sigil--more specifically, Brad himself--reminds me of the guys who started the company I used to work for.

These guys started out in the mid-90s as engineers at InFocus, which for a very long time dominated the market in video projectors, long before Sony or NEC or any of the other big-name electronics companies got into the game. In those days, video projectors were huge things being used in a very limited number of capacities. A "portable" projector was over 10 lbs.

So these engineers designed a prototype of a < 10 lb projector and took it to the high muckity-mucks at InFocus, who decided they "didn't see the market going in that direction" so the engineers struck out on their own, got some venture capital, and founded a little company called Lightware, with whom I became employed at the end of 1998. They brought the first projector under 10 lbs to the market, and it was a HUGE hit. All of a sudden, travelling presentations became a much more workable possibility. They introduced the first sub-$3000 projector to the market, and that was a huge hit too, because suddenly a lot more schools and churches and low-revenue organizations could afford them. They even managed to be the first company to bring the price point down to under $2000. For something with more power, they have a much brighter, 13-lb projector that never really was all that successful, and from that, they learned to stick to their niche market--lightweight, affordable projectors.

Then, just about the time I hired in with them, things started to go very, very wrong. Seeing the success of the Lightware projectors, suddenly InFocus realized that yes, there was a demand for lightweight, portable projectors, and decided to get into the game. Also, NEC and Sony and the other big electronics companies were throwing their hats in the ring. Lightware positioned themselves to be the first company to introduce a sub-5 lb projector to the market, but they were stalled time and again by design and manufacturing difficulties, and by the time they finally got what was supposed to be their new bread-and-butter signature product to market, their competitors had gotten there first with what were ultimately better products.

They had a few other neat ideas that also didn't pan out all that well, like not selling through distributors and trying to go with a direct-sales model similar to Dell--all that did was **** off their retailers, who viewed them as trying to compete. The corporate atmosphere was also pretty cool, the company run by some very good people, and for a while it was really great to work there.

A couple years after I hired in with them, though, they were going under fast, and decided to sell to a Japanese company, PLUS Vision Corp. At first, there was all this talk about how PLUS was going to keep the Lightware brand name and signature products and be more of a silent partner, running the Lightware and PLUS lines as two separate entities. Yeah, that didn't last. The corporate atmosphere was going to remain more small-business/family-like, rather than Japanese corporate. That didn't last either. Within six months, Lightware was being phased out and PLUS was taking over. Slowly, our people were replaced by theirs, the corporate atmosphere became more regimented and inflexible, the small-business mentality went away, and those of us whose jobs didn't fit within the new paradigm got laid off. Thus, my employment with them ended four years to the day after I hired in.

What's my point to all of this? That Brad and Co. remind me a lot of those engineers who started Lightware. Decent people with a really great idea who just don't have the first f'ucking clue how to run a successful business and consistently bring a good product to market and maintain the momentum of their early success. So they keep having to rely on others to bail them out and provide a business model that actually works, and in so doing, the idea that was so unique and wonderful to begin with gets corrupted, because the bail-out isn't free--the people doing the bail-out want their say in the matter.

I believe that if Vanguard had hit the market the way Brad & Sigil had envisioned it, it would have been a game to blow away all other games. They just couldn't do it the way they had imagined doing it. It's a pity.

If nothing else, it's interesting because, without the McQuaid name and the population of Classic EQ fans dying to return to open-book medding and racing to catch boats, it's doubtful the game would have ever been produced. Particularly given the issues that were involved. Licensing of existing products is how they're selling MMORPGs these days (FFXI, WoW, LoTRO, Warhammer, Conan, etc) and the V:SoH licensing hook was the McQuaid name recognition and promise of "the Vision" in the end product.

OMFGZ!!

(uh sorry BT's avatar just made me laugh...out loud)

It's too bad, I hope Sony manages to press on and improve what needs improving.

Yeah, like that's going to happen.

I totally am taking credit for coining the phrase Saga of zeroes though!