VG devs went to the most prominent MMO players and said, we’re making a game for you. What do you want? They ignored the people that said, hey, we don’t have ubergamer machines.

SCEA went around and heard that people would pay any price, any price at all, for a game machine that could also display HD movies on the HD TVs they were sure to have. Microsoft asked around and heard that young males loved their machine and had plenty of money. Nintendo said perhaps people don’t care so much about technical specs and are looking for inexpensive family fun. And so Wii wins this round.

It’s not that companies don’t take input from everyone. But they only listen to those telling them what they want to hear. And should not be surprised when the only people who buy their products are the ones to whom they catered. That’s not necessarily bad, but they shouldn’t expect to make a product for a select few and then expect to win over a large part of the market.

In VG’s specific case, you can’t ask someone to drop two grand on a premiere gaming computer only to give them the same run-and-grind every other MMO provides. WoW gives the same gameplay and runs on a $500 computer.

The next MMO company that I see making the same obvious mistakes as others before them will get a sticker from me that says, “Dumbass,” and a request that they stop making games that pollute the genre.”

Just send them a bumper sticker that says “I’m an MMO dev dumbass. What’s YOUR excuse?”"

Featurewise, though, you’re right with your last comment. One look into any thread with a death penalty war is enough to confirm that

A good lesson out of this: One man’s mistake can be another man’s feature.

Good one.

I wonder how much of the end product that we see is the result of committee design, politics, scope creep, or a patch for a huge bug?

I worked on one game that had a very cool graphical feature that was tied to a core game function. It created a slew of problems however, and we barely had time to scrap the feature and spackle the holes. The game was still fun, but ultimately the designers realized that the feature was an “equal or plus”, not a “minus or equal”.

The genre is already badled polluted imo, and I really hope things turn around. And for that, people do need to look at others mistakes.

Not sure who this quote is from, but it fits well huh?

“An idiot repeats his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. But a genius learns from the mistakes of others.”

“It didn’t fail because they didn’t have the time/resources/talent/technology to make it work. We do. (( Please ignore the fact that we, too are on a budget, schedule, and limited resource pool… and we lack the experience gained through the original failure… We wouldn’t hire anyone from that failed experience lest they taint the current project)).

That, to me, is the #1 reason for repeated “mistakes.” Just like that rabid forumite frothing at the mouth over the devs’ incompetence, we seem to lose respect for our colleagues when an idea we like fails elsewhere. We assume that it isn’t our idea that’s flawed, it was just poor implementation.

The big mistakes also have a whole lot of roads, which might look completely different, but get you to the same point of failure. The really hard part is figuring out where you’re headed early enough to take another road before you arrive in the big city of Suckville. Problem is, there are scant few maps, visibility is poor, and you’re not always the one driving

Dude, you are so tempting fate.