Tag Archives: Ranting

Late Stage Capitalism Ruining Things: EverQuest Edition

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My post yesterday about Enad Global 7’s Q1 2023 financial results found me closing with the comment:

The joys of being a modest sized public company registered in Sweden I suppose, because if some Wall Street investment group was running the show they would be demanding stock buy backs and stripping it for quick cash boosts without thought towards the long term.

Of course, the universe had to immediately punish me for my hubris.

Enad Global 7

News popped up in my feed almost immediately about Alta Fox Capital Management sending a list of demands to the EG7 board of directors that they increase shareholder value now.

As I have opined before, most recently in a post about Blizzard and mergers, capital management firms are the new robber barons seeking a return to the gilded age, where the rich few basked in opulent luxury while workers lived in penury, with nothing to fall back if injured or in old age.  It is the time of the company store and Pinkertons and troops being set on workers seeking a living wage.

Capital management firms seek only immediate returns and dramatic increasing in shareholder value.  They have taken many a stable and profitable business and forced them into mergers or sold them off in pieces to maximize their return right then and there, with no thought to anything but their own bottom line.

Working in Silicon Valley and having been at several companies that have been thus maltreated… and having seen many other going through similar upheavals… I can tell you that the public, the customers, and the employees all suffer to enrich a very few.

Despite the lies told that these mergers will benefit the public via lower prices and more consumer choices, that is never the outcome.  The ideal merger is one that creates a monopoly that can then set prices however high the company sees fit.  Remember Mylan, which acquired the EpiPen rights?  It was already a $50 device to deliver an estimated $1 in drugs.  Having the exclusive right, they jacked the price so high that even the government noticed and stepped in, making them drop the price down to $600 for a two pack, a mere six fold increase in cost imposed on consumers simply because they could.

If you want a reason why we cannot have nice things, the words “capital management” should suffice.  Every public company is subject to their demands… though they make sure that senior management and the board of directors get paid off so they’ll cooperate.  They take care of their own and screw the rest of us.

Anyway, enough ranting.  What did Alta Fox demand that EG7 do?

  • Relist the Stock on a United States Exchange. Relisting in the United States would allow the Company to aggressively buy back shares at an attractive free cash flow yield, which is not allowed with the current Swedish listing. Even an up-listing in Sweden to allow buybacks would be better than the status quo.

If EG7 relists in the US then they would no longer be subject to the laws of Sweden, which has much more stringent consumer protections.  They certainly tip their hand as to what they want out of this by offering a side option in Sweden where the company is allowed to do stock buybacks, which is the common course in the US.

  • Initiate a Recurring Dividend. This would immediately turn the Company’s valuation multiple into a dividend yield. We estimate EG7 could easily pay a 10%+ dividend on the current share price while still properly reinvesting and maintaining a net cash balance sheet.

This one is just straight up “give us the fucking money!”  Pay enormous dividends while mouthing sweet words about still being able to reinvest.  Reinvestment is never allowed.

  • Run a Formal Strategic Review Process, Including a Sale of the Entire Company. We estimate multiple acquirers could pay a material premium to current prices and still have EG7 be a highly accretive transaction. Several peers were recently acquired for double-digit EBITDA multiples (SCPL and ROVIO), which we believe further highlights EG7’s valuation disconnect at ~4x EBITDA today.

Sell the company to some bigger fish we already own piece of, because that is a double win.  First they get whatever inflated price they can gin up… which will  first mean laying off a lot of staff to make the balance sheet look extra tasty.  Then, when they get that payout, the purchasing company will continue to reward them with stock buybacks.

This is all just naked greed with only one outcome in mind, and it has nothing to do with video games.  If they could increase shareholder value by 0.5% but shutting down all of the Daybreak titles, they would do it in a heartbeat.  They have no interest in the long term, just what they can grab today.

I used to be a firm believer in market capitalism, but Wall Street has spent the last 50 years figuring out how to min/max the system so they win and everybody else loses.  They get the money, the tax breaks, the loopholes, buy and sell supreme court justices, and are never called to account.

As with the Gilded Age, this is how you end up generating a progressive movement, where socialism isn’t a word you use for anything you don’t like.  This is how you get the working class to vote you out of office… unless you can keep them distracted by non-issues like where trans people can go to the bathroom or teaching history that isn’t just jingoistic lies.

The only upside in this Alta Fox demand is that if they had the voting power to do it, it would already be under way.  They hold 6% of the company currently and they’re trying to find some allies… and get a quick boost in stock price, because their fellow robber barons know what all these code words really mean.  It will be piggies to the trough and demands for more slop.

Related:

Blizzard Q1 2023 Financials were Both Up and Down while the UK Rejected the Microsoft Deal

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Activision Blizzard (ABK) released their Q1 2023 financials on Wednesday… they were supposed to land yesterday, but we’ll get to that a bit later… and was quite chipper about how well they did when compared to their Q1 2022 numbers.

Activision Blizzard

As has been the case since the Microsoft acquisition was announced, ABK once again declined to talk to investors, give a presentation, or take any questions.  They have a deal that says Microsoft will pay them $95 a share, what the hell else do you want?  Nothing else matters besides making that deal go through.

But until the deal happens they are still an independent, publicly held company, so they have to give investors something every quarter.

Overall the company’s revenues were $2.38 billion, up from the $1.77 billion seen in the first quarter of 2022.

Likewise, when breaking out Blizzard, the company was quick to point out that their revenue was up by 62% over 2022 in the first quarter, ringing up $443 million in sales.  Not bad, but that 62% year over year calculation is both accurate and deceptive at the same time.

The company doesn’t exactly go out of its way to remind anybody that Q1 2022 was the recent nadir of Blizzard earnings.  Let’s do a quick review of the last two years:

In that selection of quarters, Q1 2023 is decidedly mid-pack.  $443 million is literally the median number, in the exact middle of those nine quarters.  So it was a good quarter, given recent history, but I wouldn’t exactly be spiking the football and doing an end zone dance on the year over year metric.

That said, it could have been worse.  As I noted with the Q4 2022 report, Blizzard had nothing set to launch in Q1 2023, so the whole quarter was going to be something of a judgement on the quality and stickiness of Dragonflight as a WoW expansion.  So good on that.

But… it is $40 million shy of Q2 2021, which was a similar situation where revenue was largely driven by the residual subscriber effect of the Shadowlands expansion.  So I am somewhat mixed on how much praise Blizz should get.

Yay, Dragonflight didn’t die off right away, but neither did Shadowlands and if you want to lay the blame for Q1 2022 on anything, Shadowlands would be your go-to choice.  And Blizz did suggest that Dragonflight hadn’t started off as strongly as expected.  We never got a “Dragonflight exceeds past WoW expansion sales” press release, which was a staple of the game for every expansion up through and including Shadowlands.

So good, but not great, with the weight of the past seeming to weigh down on WoW.

Likewise, the Monthly Active User count, about which I rely on MOP’s reporting, was down bigley, dropping to 27 million in Q1, way down from the 45 million seen in Q4.  Again, that isn’t the low point for Blizz MAU numbers, which were down to 22 million in Q1 2022… that cursed quarter… but it does indicate that some of their holiday boost for their buy to play games like Hearthstone and OverWatch were transitory.

As for what else was said about Blizz, here is the excerpt:

  • Blizzard segment revenue increased 62% year-over-year in the first quarter, with each of Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo contributing to growth. Segment operating income was broadly stable year-over-year, reflecting higher development and marketing costs, including launch investment ahead of the second quarter release of Diablo IV.
  • The Overwatch and World of Warcraft teams delivered substantial in-game content and live operations to excite and sustain their communities following major product launches in the fourth quarter. Following the November release of the DragonflightTM expansion for the Modern game, our World of Warcraft team is delivering more content faster than ever before, and subscriber retention in the West is higher than at the equivalent stage of recent Modern expansions. While Overwatch engagement moderated versus the Overwatch 2 launch quarter, hours played were approximately twice the levels seen prior to the release of the free-to-play experience. Season 3, which launched in February, drove strong retention and consistent player investment versus the prior season.
  • Diablo ImmortalTM on mobile and PC also contributed to Blizzard’s first quarter net bookings growth, with the game experiencing stable trends across engagement, retention and player investment. Elsewhere on mobile, Warcraft: Arclight RumbleTM, an action strategy game internally-developed at Blizzard, continues to progress well through regional testing.
  • Diablo IV, the next major installment in the genre-defining series, will launch on PC and console on June 6. Public testing of the game in March saw very high engagement and positive feedback, and pre-sales are strong. This ambitious title will serve as the launch for a compelling live service, with regular seasons and story-driven expansions planned to drive engagement for many years to come.

That strikes me as a whole lot of hand waving about other things, while the hope for sales in Q2 and Q3 are pretty much pinned on Diablo IV being a huge success.  Basically, that is all they have on their road map.

I do not doubt that Diablo IV will be a big success, and we should see a big revenue spike in Q2 2023.  We shall see how it matches up with Q4 2022 and the Dragonflight launch.

Then there is the Microsoft deal.  I kind of expected this to be the final ABK quarterly report, that the deal might close before we got to a Q2 2023 report in late July or early August.

Then the bad news started to roll in on the deal, with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announcing early on Wednesday that they had decided to block the Microsoft acquisition, which I am pretty sure is what got the financials released a day early, so it could include an immediate counter to that decision.

The CMA decision naturally has Bobby Kotick spitting nails and threatening to kick puppies all the way to Westminster where he’ll demand to speak to the manager about how big business isn’t getting the service they expect from the Tory government they purchased.

He has become some sort of Gordon Gecko/Yosemite Sam cross over character in my head at this point, but he is sure he can fix this.

The odd bit was the CMA highlighting the need to protect the emerging cloud gaming market as a key part of its criteria for blocking the deal, something that got a very quick “wut?” reaction from me… and apparently from ABK.

On April 26, 2023, the United Kingdom Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) announced a decision to block the merger, stating that competition concerns arose in relation to cloud gaming and that Microsoft’s remedies addressing any concerns in cloud gaming were not sufficient. Activision Blizzard considers that the CMA’s decision is disproportionate, irrational and inconsistent with the evidence. Microsoft has announced its decision to appeal the CMA’s ruling, and Activision Blizzard intends to fully support Microsoft’s efforts on this appeal. Activision Blizzard continues to believe that the deal is pro-competitive, will bring Activision Blizzard content to more gamers, and will result in substantial benefits to consumers and developers in the UK and globally. The parties continue to fully engage with other regulators reviewing the transaction to obtain any required regulatory approvals.

I mean, I am extremely dubious about this deal being “pro-competitive” in any reasonable sense of the term.  It will do what most such mergers do; lead to layoffs, increase costs to consumers, limit consumer choices, and raise the barrier to competition.

It will, in short, enrich large stockholders to the detriment of nearly everybody else.  Welcome to America, where we have returned to the 19th century era of corporations and nested trusts (which we now call “Capital Management Groups”) and the Pinkerton company… Pinkertons are still a thing for fuck’s sake… and railroad conglomerates destroying towns while getting the government to fight unions over simple requests like sick leave… it is the freaking Gilded Age all over again.

So to have all that to work with and then to lead with cloud gaming…

Cloud gaming?

Like the thing that nVidia, Sony, and Microsoft… you know, the main player in this deal… have been trying to make happen for quite a while now?  The thing that Google just gave up on with Stadia?  The thing that CCP just gave up on with EVE Anywhere?  The pipe dream that various companies have gone bankrupt pursuing for a couple of decades?  THAT cloud gaming market?  That is the big worry?

Am I missing some other cloud gaming option here?

Suddenly quite on point

As I have written in the past, big corporations have been trying to bring back the thin client, terminal connected to a mainframe, version of computing since the first desktop PC escaped into the wild.  It is all about controlling, and the fear of, the end user.  The problems and costs facing the idea still outweigh the benefits, as we have been reminded over and over.  “Fetch” will be a thing long before cloud gaming is anything to worry about when it comes to video game market share.

Also the CMA is pretty sure that Call of Duty won’t run on a Switch, probably because somebody’s nephew saw a post on Reddit about it, so they’ve said “No” to the whole thing.

All of which might just be a tempest in a teapot… which is the generally accepted metaphor to describe UK post Brexit… because the EU and the US FTC haven’t give their responses yet.  The former is due later this month and the latter not due until August.  We know the EU simply hates US tech firms… not without reason, but they go beyond reason… to the point of making up specific regulatory categories mostly focused on them. (China gets a nod too, but they couldn’t find an EU company anybody had heard of for a fig leaf to show they aren’t just targeting the foreigners.)  So that might be a bigger worry than the UK.

Meanwhile, even with a Democratic president in the White House the bar Microsoft needs to clear to be approved is about 2mm higher than the nothing it was under the last administration because I won’t claim that UK politics are bought and sold at the corporate suite level and then pretend that the same isn’t true in the US.  Still, maybe we’ll be surprised.

So when Microsoft is out there pouting publicly that this CMA announcement represents its darkest day, I can only suggest that the horizon may hold even darker days still.

Also, is nobody at Microsoft old enough to remember the late 90s and early 2000s when literally EVERY government agency in the world hated the company and wanted to drop it for Google Sheets or Open Office or whatever?  JFC Microsoft, get a grip!

Related:

CCP Once Again Fails to Read the Room, Announces Funding for Blockchain Title

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We’re back to blockchain at CCP.  Something, something, crypto, blockchain, Project Awakening.

I don’t even know what to say, aside from the fact that this will fail like every blockchain scheme has failed so far.  CCP can’t even make a second successful video game, so saddling any idea with blockchain nonsense seems like a double guarantee for failure.

It was just a year ago when we saw CCP’s CEO bragging about hanging out with a bunch of crypto grifters at GDC.

Hilmar in the middle of the crypto suite

The backlash was such that they had to swear that NFT meant Not For Tranquility.

You might think that sort of experience with your installed and paying player base might cause the company pause.  But no.  Pearl Abyss has invested heavily in blockchain and dammit, they’re going to get something out of it… and Hilmar is apparently just the sucker to believe he can do it.

So the announcement today is that Andreesen Horowitz… as in Marc Andreesen, whose one claim to fame was to be in the right place at the right time to make Netscape happen, and then sell it to AOL before its failure became manifest… is investing $40 million with CCP to fund them creating and “innovative new AAA game set in the EVE Online universe.”

To start with, as some devs I know are probably saying, it is charming to think that $40 million gets you the league of AAA games.

Then there is the fact that blockchain is pretty much a landscape of failure, an idea that has no practical application, a technology that is simply a tax on transactions promoted by rent seeking venture capitalists, and any benefit from it can be done… has been done… cheaper, faster, and easier with existing technology.  It is a garbage idea promoted by scammers.  It belongs in a museum alongside ideas for perpetual motion and those tablets that would turn water into gasoline.

But even with the spectacular failures and the myriad of stolen apes, people keep pushing on this like it just hasn’t found the right home.  I wonder how many of last year’s crypto startups are even still around, or are still investing in this?

The Blockchain Game Alliance – GDC 2022

Oh Ubisoft, there you are, right at the top, right where you belong when it comes to bad ideas.

Anyway, this is me posting angry in the morning.  I’ll probably have something coherent to say at some future date, possibly when they have something beyond overblown expectations and empty quotes about the project, should that ever come to pass.

But it will no doubt have an impact on CCP and what they work on.  Software development isn’t 100% a zero sum game, but it can be close to it.  You can only work on so many things at once.  If we’re lucky maybe this fiasco will just pull resources off of their first person shooter project.

Related:

Is EVE Anywhere Anything to Care About?

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I like the idea of being able to just play any game in a browser rather than having a dedicated client, but are the limitations worth the effort of building such a client?

This, of course, is related to CCP’s EVE Anywhere implementation, which was announced quite a while back and has been out in a limited beta version since March of 2021.

EVE Anywhere as long as you accept the limitations

I bring this up again because CCP released a dev blog yesterday announcing that EVE Anywhere was now available for Alpha accounts, which are those who haven’t opted for the monthly subscription plan.  The free players.

(As an aside, to whoever wrote the headline for that dev blog, it sounds like EVE Anywhere is ready for alpha testing, though it has been in beta for over a year.  I can’t tell if that was poor phrasing or a warning about the state of the implementation… though why not both?)

I tried it out when it was first available and I tried it out again this past week and… almost everything I complained about back then is still true now.

  • Fixed resolution (1920×1080)

Not the worst sin possible in and of itself, but if your monitor is not that resolution things may not look right.

  • Can only be run in full screen

This, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass, and all the more so as the app makes you think you can run it in a window or some mode besides full screen.

The lies the client tells me

But no, as soon as you get out of full screen the window is obscured by the banner that required you to click to get back to full screen.

No, you must play full screen

Oh well.

  • Doesn’t remember any settings client settings

I could probably live with the first two and find some utility in being able to log in with a web client, but then there is this.  This is the deal breaker.

Basically, any setting that the standard client stores locally… which is pretty much all of your UI choices and your overviews and such… are not picked up by the web client.

You might expect that.  The real problem is that it doesn’t remember any changes you make in the web client either.  Every time you log in it is the new unconfigured client experience.  I don’t like fiddling with my overview on the best of days, so I certainly don’t want to do it every time I log in and undock.

I will say that at least it does run in Firefox now.  It wouldn’t work for me last time, though I will admit I have my copy of Firefox locked down pretty tight.  Now it will run… it just doesn’t work very well.  Keyboard short cuts don’t work so you need to mouse and click on everything, including quitting the client.

I know, you’re going to tell me it is in beta.  It says so right there on the launch button, so it is a work in progress, and I should be charitable.  And, even a year in, I can buy into that idea.  It still isn’t very useful to me, but nobody is forcing me to use it, so its problems do not have my problems.

The little red beta flag is there to deflect criticism

And I wouldn’t have bothered with this post at all save for one detail in the dev blog.

They did, indeed, make it available to Alpha clone players, but those Alphas have to pay to use it.

Every 24 hour period required you to pay 30 PLEX which, assuming you buy the 3,000 PLEX package, means you have to pony up $1.25 a day to play.  And that just blows be away.

There are, in my world view, only two reasons you would bother making a web client version of EVE Online.

The first is that CCP is concerned that some portion of their player base, real or potential, don’t have machines that can run the client in a way that makes the game look good.  A cloud based thin client, something about which I wrote about previously, puts all the processing and rendering on the server side of the equation and the end user can just look at the pretty space pictures on their Chromebook or whatever.

And maybe that is the aim of the feature.

But the other reason you would do all of this work on a thin client so that players could run your game in a web browser is to reduce the friction that keeps new players from trying your game.  Remember that chart CCP showed us back in 2019?

How many new players log back in as time passes

CCP has been focused on the 10K or so players who log into the game to keep them logging in.  But you could argue that the stand-out number on that chart is the gap between the number of accounts registered versus how many actually log into the game.  Half of the potential players don’t even make it to the point where the game is confusing and the UI is indecipherable.  They fail somewhere between making their account and clicking “play” on the client, and I would guess that most of those fall off somewhere around download and install of the client.

Downloading and installing and configuring, those all represent friction that can keep players from getting into your game.

Ideally you could find a way… like a web based client… that would remove that friction and allow a player to just create an account and then click a button to start playing.  So the web client should at least push more new players into the game so they can hate it for what it is rather than for making them download and run an installer.

Except, of course, that new player cannot do that with EVE Online because in order to use the web client you need to spend some money to get some PLEX, and if you think downloading and installing a client is friction, getting people to pull out their wallet will dwarf that.

Back when MMORPGs were making the transition to free to play en masse, one of the primary arguments was that not forcing people to pay up front would get more players to try the game and that some percentage of those who wouldn’t pay up front would pony up once they experienced the game.

And, just because I feel like piling on a bit more, I am also very much of the opinion that if you charge for something, “it’s in beta” is not a defense.  If I’m paying you can call it whatever you want, but I am going to treat it like a finished product because what else is it at that point?

But wait… what if it isn’t actually still in beta?

CCP also ran a press release on their corporate site that said that EVE Anywhere launched yesterday.  That was enough to get some gaming sites who did more than copy and paste what they had been emailed to point out that the service is live.  Game Developer (formerly Gamesutra) took that to mean that it was out of beta.  They should have tried logging I guess.

Or maybe CCP should just be clear in their freaking press communications, because the dev blog headline sounds like it is in alpha, the dev blog itself doesn’t say it has left beta, and the corporate press release says it has launched.

I am this close to making unfavorable comparisons to Daybreak when it comes to communications here.

So what are you going to do?  As I said, it something that doesn’t affect me really, so I can safely ignore it, but it still managed to irk me and serves as an example of a poor product being handled badly.  And I can’t even start in on the fact that EVE Anywhere is not available everywhere, but still in a limited number of countries. You can’t make this up.

All of which makes the answer to my question in the headline a pretty definite “No!”

Related:

The Trainwreck of 21st Century Lord British

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Once, long ago in the history of the blog, I wrote a post about how people seemed to be picking on Richard “Lord British” Garriot de Cayeux, largely because the fashion at the time seemed to be to use the silly space suit picture of him whenever he came up in a news cycle.

#winning

Of course, he seemed to be headed towards self-parody with his own photographic choices, like this image used on his Portalarium site

The first image from Portalarium

I cannot explain that moment of sympathy.  It certainly evaporated quickly enough when just a few months later I wrote a post with the title The Madness of Lord British.

There was a lot going on in that post, with lots of links out (some dead, you may need the Wayback machine to find them) to his dubious behavior, strange ventures, and odd ideas, including comparing himself to Tolkien or declaring consoles dead or how he was even back then running his company remotely with some sort of wheelie robot video presence.

It was also the kickoff point for his “ultimate RPG,” something he went on about for some time, trying to wheedle permission to use the Ultima brand from EA by saying nice things about them in the press (but not by, you know, actually talking to EA, who were busy tarnishing the Ultima brand with some garbage called Ultima Forever.)

Then he tried to get into bed with Zynga because Farmville and Facebook games were in the middle of imploding.  He eventually left that behind and jumped onto Kickstarter and used that trend to fund Shroud of the Avatar based largely on his reputation, work, and goodwill left over from the Ultima series of the 1980s and 1990s.

The Kickstarter was a success in that it met its funding goal, but as we knew even then, for a project trying to be an MMO that is just a marketing campaign, a publicity stunt to try and bring in more funding from other sources.

There was an attempt to emulate Star Citizen‘s successful ongoing crowdfunding by selling virtual land and castles as well as actual blood and other Lord British related items.  That was modestly successful at best.

Shroud of the Avatar did eventually “ship” in March of 2018 after some time as an “early access” title, however it was rough to the point of primitive for a game in the second decade of the 21st century, a strange mixture of awkward design and poor aesthetics, that I described as “retroist hobbyism” for lack of a better term when I was playing it.

It wasn’t a failure, but it also wasn’t what many people expected or wanted to play.  Lord British walked away from the title before it was done, transferring it to Catnip Games, though it wasn’t really clear he was all that in involved for quite a while before that.  It carries on as a dubious, low key title, a disappointment to many who expected a revival of the Ultima series, with a small and defensive team trying to eke out a living from the title and its connection to Garriott.

When Lord British walked away from his then flailing “ultimate RPG” I figured that was his last hurrah.  As I commented elsewhere:

This is a man who had the wealth and status to rest on his laurels, consult, speak on panels, and otherwise be a developer emeritus of great regard.

He made video games, got rich and famous doing that, got even richer by selling out to EA, lived in a castle, and got to be a space tourist. He could have called it a day 20 years ago and just spent his time being Lord British for fans now and then and we would have envied him, we would have aspired to be him.

But, as with pro sports stars, if something has basically been your whole life, it is hard to walk away.  So he has carried on, trying to recreate the success of his youth and living off of the reputation that gained him.

And that has been his downfall.  I have no idea what he is like in person, but his public persona has been one of self aggrandizement… he set himself up as the “father of the online gaming industry” at AGDC in 2004 back when he was promoting Tabula Rasa, much to the chagrin of Mark Jacobs and others who had online titles in production long before people like Raph Koster helped make Ultima Online a thing.

He has a history of badmouthing EA for all the problems that occurred after he got richer by selling Origin Systems to them. (Except when he was briefly praising them.)  And he also blames NCsoft and the people there for the failure of Tabula Rasa. (There was an Ultima 8 and Tabula Rasa double blame feature.)

He believes he is the best game designer around, calling the ones he worked with in the past “lazy”  (remember, that includes Raph Koster), and takes all the credit for anything he has touched.  He only made an exception for Chris Roberts when it comes to game designers, and that was clearly because he wanted to draft off of Star Citizen‘s crowdfunding success, a cringe worthy “notice me senpai!” moment.

And all along the way he has been a font of bad advice.  He has a history of grabbing onto a trend in gaming and telling people that is the best way forward just as it tanks.

Still, I foolishly thought he was done, so was both surprised because of that… but not surprised because of his history… when I saw the announcement yesterday that he had thrown his hat into the ring and declared he is making a blockchain MMO.

This is doubly ironic in that this follows on UbiSoft backing away from its NFT schemes and CCP declaring that NFT stands for “Not For Tranquility” when it comes to EVE Online.  Even as gamers are pushing back hard against crypto monetization and studios are realizing that they are alienating their core customer base by attempting to embrace it, Richard “Lord British” Garriott de Cayeux has decided to open his mouth wide and piss straight into the wind.

Words fail me.

Well, except for expletives.  I had plenty of those.

I have, for the last 20 years, found a way to excuse everything he has done based on fond memories of games he coded himself back in the 1980s.

No more.

This is the most contemptible, tone deaf, obvious cash grab in an industry long accused of cash grabs.  This raises the bar on cash grabs.  For years to come I predict I will be saying, “Sure, this move by X was bad, but was it as bad as the Lord British blockchain MMO?”

I am not a fan of Star Citizen, but this announcement has made Chris Robert palatable by comparison.  I don’t believe CR will ever be able to deliver on all, or even most, of the promises he has made, but he is selling a dream and has something tangible in alpha and has managed not to get bored and wander off mid-project.  If you were to ask me if you should buy a spaceship in Star Citizen or give money to Lord British, I’d say knock yourself out with the spaceship.

With other celebrities, I might suspect that somebody had just promised them a dump truck full of money to use their name.  But here we have somebody who has had an independent existence of bad ideas over the last two decades, a history that looks like a series of attempts to cash in on his name and whatever the latest trend was.

He has shown us who he is enough times already to know that this is authentically him trying to get back in ahead of another trend hoping to recreate the fame and fortune of his youth.  I am sure he is using somebody else’s money, but I am equally sure he sees glory and riches for himself in this move.  He is not being used, he believes he is using the investors.

Lord British is dead to me from this point forward.  In the hierarchy of people and companies whom I have vowed never to give money to, anything associated with Richard “Lord British” Garriot de Cayeux is now at the top of the list.

Seriously, I am now willing to give EA the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their history with him.  It makes me think of the Churchill quote about the devil:

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

That is where Lord British stands with me today.  He has now shit on his reputation so thoroughly that he is beyond redemption in my eyes.  Everything he has touched since Ultima Online has been a trainwreck.

Other coverage:

Expert Systems in the Face of Failure

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As I noted yesterday, if there is one thing you can count on from CCP, it is an overly grandiose and technically incorrect name for something mundane.

Last week CCP announced a new feature called “Expert Systems,” which I immediately summed up as “rent a skill,” as you’d be hard pressed to convince me it was anything else. (It was certainly nothing like an expert system.)

No expert that I know

It has been billed as a way for new players to try out skills they have not yet trained, which doesn’t sound awful on the surface.  The announcement, lacking in details though it was, did specifically mention the “magic 14” skills as part of the plan along with some industry stuff, but nothing about it was crystal clear.

The thing that got a lot of people riled up was the implication that this would be a paid service.  The gut reaction was “pay to win,” though “rent to be mediocre” might be more accurate, but the deeper issue on that front for me was the company having its hand out looking to make money from helping new players figure out the game.  That isn’t a good look.

Well, that and the whole thing seeming to add up a tepid and ineffectual compromise that won’t change anything, which got me back to the bigger problem of the new player experience and how it drives away pretty much everybody who tries the game.

We saw this chart back at EVE North in 2019, which was when CCP said they were making the new player experience a priority.

How many new players log back in as time passes

But we’ve seen charts like that in the past like this one from FanFest 2014.

New Player Trajectory – 2014 edition

CCP has been focused on the new player experience, the NPE, for a year and a half now, tweaking and making modest updates and generally trying to fix the issue without really doing anything too radical.

And it seems to have largely been a wasted effort so far.  CCP was given a golden opportunity during the pandemic to increase its user base.  Every month of the pandemic I have posted the revenue chart from SuperData which has indicated that revenues across the board have been up 15% for video games.  Even CCP has seen a bit of that surge, with the peak concurrent player count finally cresting above the 40K mark back in April as people sought indoor activities during the lockdown.

Hilmar himself was on a Venture Beat panel in late January where he said that EVE Online added 1.3 million new players in 2020. (This number gets mentioned again in the Expert Systems post.)  That was more that the previous few years combined, a gift to the company from the pandemic.

The question is, where did they go?  If CCP was running at the 4.4% long term retention rate their EVE North numbers suggested (which also didn’t seem bad compared to numbers I could find from comparable titles), that ought to have dumped another 57K players into New Eden.  That would be about a 20% boost over the approximate 300K monthly active users that Hilmar has mentioned in the past.

With that big of an influx of new players… so I am assuming they are not counting returning vets joining the war or looking for something to do during lockdown… the peak concurrent players online ought to be up enough for that surge to stand out.

But is it?  Looking at EVE Offline, it doesn’t seem to be.  After the great valley of the null sec blackout and Chaos Era, when CCP seemed keen to actively drive players away, the PCU climbs, sees a surge around April and May, then settles back down to about where it was pre-blackout.  Congratulations to CCP for flattening the curve?

Further evidence for CCP failing to capitalize on the jackpot scenario include the 2020 financial results from Pearl Abyss.  On the surface it looks like the EVE Online IP is growing.  But in we cannot forget that in Q2 2020 CCP was able to re-open the Serenity server in China and in Q3 EVE Echoes launched and attracted a couple million players on its own.  If you were to subtract those two items I suspect the EVE Online IP bit of the chart would be closer to flat.

And then there is the bottom line for the Pearl Abyss acquisition of CCP, which ended up with PA paying just $225 million of the potential $425 million price tag due to CCP missing performance goals, which I am sure included some revenue requirements.  Hilmar and some other big investors missed a payday there.

Fun times.

I don’t want to go all “EVE is dying” meme now.  But in the face of all of this, which stinks heavily of failure, the idea that CCP spent dev time to design and implement this new Expert Systems feature which allows new player to rent skills for some amount of currency in a game where skill injectors exist seems like a wasted effort.  It doesn’t feel like something that will move the needle at all on new player retention, in large part because it doesn’t feel like something that will impact a new player’s experience before they get frustrated or bored and log off.

I have bemoaned the fact that EVE Online is old and cranky and and has issues that will never be fixed because, after nearly 18 years, there just isn’t the time, money, or wherewithal to do it.  And I myself have been cranky about CCP in the past about things like selling skill points and the fact that when they say they won’t do something, that statement has a hidden expiration date of about a year.

But I try not to get too worked up about monetization.  This is a business and, frankly, the price we pay to play hasn’t changes in almost 18 years.  It was fifteen dollars a month in 2003, it remains fifteen dollars a month in 2021.  But I am going to bet somebody has gotten a pay raise or the rent has gone up or costs have otherwise risen in that time.  To balance that out you either have to make more money or have less staff.

So I am not irate like some about the real money aspect of this so much as being unable to see how this will make a lick of difference.  Software development is a zero sum game.  You only have so much time and resources, and if you waste them on things that don’t make the product better you cannot get that time back.

Now, maybe I am just not seeing the big picture here.  Maybe CCP has all the right data to hand and they know that this is a winning idea.  I’d like to be wrong in my assumptions and the announcement was vague enough for a lot of wiggle room as to how this will turn out.  Unfortunately, I have been party to way too many half assed, badly calculated products and features in my career to have a lot of confidence.

The real problem with software is that is written and designed by people who all have their own special collections of bad ideas.

Related:

Expecting Too Much from New Eden

Last Tuesday afternoon, just after I got home from work, I brought up the launcher for EVE Online.  I did so by accident, as I meant to bring up the Blizzard launched to play WoW Classic.  But I let it patch and run up just to keep it current.

Then I looked at the online player count and was a bit surprised to find it below the 15K mark, and you know what came to my mind right away.

First known occurrence of “EVE is Dying”

I realize that a weekday afternoon, and one after a three day weekend in the US, isn’t necessarily a peak time, but 15K seemed pretty low.

For the past year or so I have come home in the afternoon to find the count between 20-22K most weekdays and, as I have written in the past, I generally consider low ebb later in the evenings, when the Euros have gone to bed and it is safer to move things around, to be about 18K players online.

I had heard The Mittani talking about diminishing peak numbers on consecutive Sundays since the start of the Chaos Era, but that seemed premature to me.  That was two weeks ago.  You could chart small declines, but I thought you really needed to get past the login bonuses and free SP event before the numbers would start to really be telling.

Well, here we are, Chaos Era in full swing, more nerfs on the way with the September update, and no promotions or events in progress.  So Goons are working on gloomy charts (with some add on charts in the comments), Nosy Gamer is having a look at NPC and player destruction that doesn’t bode well, the MER has NPC commodities as the new biggest ISK faucet, and my own anecdotal evidence all seem to add up to something being amiss, manifested in the concurrent player count numbers, which you can see over at EVE Offline.

I realize that CCP doesn’t mention concurrent player count anymore, preferring the trend towards daily and monthly active users, the darling metrics of the mobile domain where ads are often part of the revenue stream. (Have you seen Candy Crush Saga lately? There has been a pretty big swing towards “watch an ad video, get a booster!” in their model.)  But the concurrent player count feels more like the reality we play in, so a dip is not good news.

This has, naturally enough, led to a cottage industry over on /r/eve and in the forums and wherever else about what CCP needs to do to fix this.

What I find interesting is how many people can move straight from the stance that CCP is both slow and incompetent to a grand master plan for fixing EVE Online that pretty much demands that the company be both quick and excellent at their craft.

My poster child right now is this post, which is a master class in glossing over reality.  The premise is that CCP should add back walking in stations, shove whatever Project: Nova is right now into the mix, and try to turn the game into what Star Citizen aspires to be some day.

Leaving aside my myriad objections to avatar play in EVE Online (summed up as: You have to build a whole different game to support it), the very easy jokes to be made at the expense of Chris Roberts, and the completely half-assed, evidence free, changing horses mid-stream vision being espoused, what in the last sixteen years could lead anybody to believe that CCP has the capability of doing this in any time frame that doesn’t include the heat death of the universe as a benchmark measurement?

I remain convinced that people outside software development think that just because it is easy to describe something it must therefore be easy to develop.

That is not the way of the world.

Just last week I suggested that CCP wasn’t going to be able to fix the new player experience in any meaningful way that would have even the slightest impact on new player retention.  I mean, I wrote “point and laugh” as my possible response to whatever they come up with, but that was what I meant.  And I say that because of CCP’s history.

It is like when people say that CCP should make things like level 4 missions more fun… something else I have seen come up as part of this… and I again wonder what people think has been going on since 2003.  Do you think that CCP has not tried?  Also, your idea on how to do this is badly considered garbage that won’t work.  Just accept it.

The game is what it is, having grown and developed almost spasmodically over the last decade and a half.  It hangs together on social bonds, vengeance fantasies, pretty screen shots, angry memes, and the sunk cost fallacy, and anything that CCP could do to “fix” the game has a pretty good chance of upsetting that balance.  I swear the corporate motto ought to be, “We did not see that coming!”

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think CCP can do things to help the game along, and even make the NPE better.  There are lots of ways the game could be made better.  But what CCP needs to do is way down in the fundamentals, blocking and tackling level stuff.  There is no room for Jesus features any more as there are too many balls for CCP to keep in the air as it is.  That one labelled “faction warfare” rolled under the couch a couple of years ago.

But what you don’t do is mask things with uncertainty.  Chaos is not a viable business strategy unless you’re selling safety from it.  Rational people, when faced with chaos, tend to try and find a safe place to weather the storm.

Anyway, we’ll see what comes to pass.  I fear that the Chaos Era may have officially pushed me into the bitter vet status, so i’ll probably just go play some more WoW Classic.

Others on the Chaos Era:

A Short Rant About the State of the MMORPG Market

This started as a response to a post over at Massively OP about the worst MMO trend of 2018.  However, a few paragraphs in I realized I wasn’t really on topic, focusing as I was on MMORPGs, since MMO pretty much means “online multiplayer” in today’s market, and I wasn’t keen to dump this much text into their comment section where about a dozen people might see it before it scrolls off the front page into oblivion.  Better to bring it over here where I can regret it again later.

So we’ll call this another end of 2018 post and I’ll run with what I had.

The most disappointing trend for me isn’t really a trend, but more the realization that MMORPGs are a trap for most studios, a tar ball that they find they’re stuck with once they have one. An MMORPG can bring in money, sometimes lots of money, but they have expensive infrastructures to maintain and they need a continuing stream of content to hold enough of an audience to keep them viable. They can eat up all the focus of a smaller studio, so they neglect or never start other projects because you have to keep feeding the monster or it will stop crapping out money.

But the population peaks, often very early these days, and then every content update pisses somebody off and they go away like it is a game of musical chairs and each patch is another point where the music stops. Or it would be like that if people wouldn’t also leave if you don’t patch often enough.  You can’t sit still or you will lose players and you can’t change anything or you will lose players.

Meanwhile MMORPGs have only gotten more expensive to make, which makes innovation a risk that few can afford. And then there is the target player base which complains about every game being a WoW clone and yet will also complain even more bitterly about anything that strays from the WoW formula.

And don’t even get me started on the false hope that is PvP.  It seems like a great idea, and a true money save, to just get the players to be the content.  In reality, anything beyond a tiny, consequence free instance of PvP in an MMORPG will be shunned or ignored.  Few developers who follow that path and go in on PvP are rewarded with any success and trying to move PvP out of its tiny corner is almost always a waste of development time.  Add in a capture the flag arena game… or a battle royale game these days… and move on.

The customers are no better, myself included.  The loud demographics that haunt any developer’s forums should serve as a warning, but if that is the only feedback you’re getting then where are you going to go?  There is always somebody agitating loudly for their favorite thing.  Some want PvP everywhere, others think your game will die if it doesn’t have player housing, another group hates walking and wants to fly everywhere, and somebody in the back seems to believe in time travel and that everything would be great if you could just teleport everybody back to 1999 or 2004 or 2007 or whenever they felt they were having the most fun playing your game.

And none of them has a fucking clue about the level of effort their one “simple” request entails.  But if you’re not doing exactly what they want or it is taking too long then you are “lazy” or “stupid” or both.

If players could keep their focus on actual game play issues it might not be so bad.  But they are on about how you charge money for this or that, with “greedy” or “cash grab” being favored terms.  They complain about how they just want to play the game and not worry about real world politics, a sentiment that is usually the opening salvo about how they’re bent out of shape that the CEO or some dev or some rumor indicates that the company has somehow transgressed the whiners personal stance on the topic of the day is; gamer gate, gender politics, overtime, unions, campaign donations, boarder walls, or whatever.  And then there are the truly loopy who see conspiracies, collusion, and corruption in the machinations of a studio that is really just trying to keep the lights on and the customers happy.

Add into the mix the players who see the genre as a zero sum game, so feel they need to constantly crap on every game that competes with their favorite.  The worry is that they might be right.

So we see studios going under, the weight of their MMORPGs around their necks pulling them down.  The revenues are no longer enough to keep them afloat, much less fund anything new, but they cannot let go because what else do they have?

Even Blizzard, long addicted to the huge income stream from WoW, once past a billion dollars per year, is in trouble now that the game is stumbling again. They don’t want to depend on WoW, but they haven’t made another game that has come anywhere close to the money WoW was bringing in at its peak.  And even their best, Overwatch, could only sustain its peak for a few months at a stretch and is now reported in serious decline.  Companies, like people, size themselves to match their income, and when it drops tough choices loom.

Someone in Blizzard at least recognized a bit of the problem, so we don’t see the company making any more MMORPGs.  But WoW was enough to distort the company and change investor expectations.  They can’t go back to selling stand alone games.  They have to keep WoW going or die, because there is no replacing it.

Game development is a bad business to start with. But at least with a stand alone game you can walk away to work on the next thing. An MMORPG never goes away, unless you have several and you have to make Sophie’s choice. Studios tied to MMORPGs die and other studios with less ambition buy the remains, put the games on life support, and try to milk the remains for some more cash. But only the unbalanced jump into the MMORPG market to create a new game and expecting happiness and success.

And so it goes.  Expect more studios to shut down operations, more games to be closed or put in maintenance mode by some third party game aggregator like Gamigo, and more loud complaining from players that if the studio had only listened to their completely uniformed opinion, then everything would have been fine.

Oh, and expect the usual level of optimism for every new MMORPG title announced because we also apparently never learn.

There, with that out of my system, let’s move on… or not.

In Search of the Thousand Dollar Video Game

Last night Keen saw fit to retweet this gem, which is the sort of statement than makes me shake my head in dismay.

There it is again, the false comparison between lattes and video games, with a game dev angry that people are not paying enough for his product.  Even the go-to comic from The Oatmeal to cover this is more than five years old now. (Clicking on the image will bring you to the full comic, complete with the coffee comparison.)

The comedic exaggeration of the concept

The argument here, salted with jealousy, seems to be that all luxury goods are equal, so your baseline for deciding where to spend you money should be solely factored on the value one gets in return.  In that world, the fleeting experience of a latte pales in comparison with the many hours of enjoyment a video game can bring.

Except, of course, that is specious at best and more akin to complete bullshit for most people.

The buying decision for a latte is never formulated as “What is the best value for my money today?”  In my experience the situation is more akin to, “I NEED coffee NOW!”

I don’t actually drink coffee, so I might not be the best person to make that assessment, but that is what it looks like from the outside.  I have seen developers get panicked and upset when they mislay their coffee mug and I am keenly aware how often we have to stop at Starbucks so my wife can get her favorite coffee beverage. (She prefers a “soy caramel macchiato,” which might as well be a magic incantation so far as I am concerned.)

Anyway, video games likely never come into the buying decision.  The latte experience is so different and so removed from video games that comparing the two is… well… I already used the words “specious” and “bullshit” didn’t I?  That.

So whining about people buying lattes instead of your video games is just a self-serving attempt to blame other people, including your customers, for your own problems in a cheap attempt to milk some guilt out of them.

And what are your problems if you’re a video game developer?  I think a lot of that has been covered elsewhere.  But then there is the video game market itself.

The video game market is overloaded with choices, most of which are uninspired imitations or direct knock-offs of worn-out concepts we’ve seen many times before hidden behind a series of horrible user interfaces that defy people to actually find the gems in the huge steaming stack of dung that is the video game market.

Imagine if Starbucks was run like Steam.

You’d have thousands of different lattes, each with a name that might or might not relate to what was actually in them, vaguely described, with mashed-up references to sub-genres of coffee drinks.  You would have to order them from a computer screen where you could only see 20 or so at a time.  Oh, and some of them aren’t compatible with your coffee cup, while others say they might be, but probably require you to upgrade your cup in order to enjoy them fully.

How is that for an analogy?  Let’s push it even further.

You can… slowly… look at latte reviews, but some of the positive ones are from people who were given a free latte, while some of the negative ones involve aspects outside of the latte experience.

Meanwhile, every previous latte you ever ordered from Starbucks is still available to you.  You can look in your latte library and see them all.  There are some in there you really liked, but probably a lot more that you barely even took a sip from.  Sure, you might be a bit tired of the ones you like, but they are reliable, certainly more palatable than most of your attempts to find a fresh new latte.

Oh, and then there is the Starbucks Summer Latte Sale and the Starbucks Winter Latte Sale, during which many lattes are marked down from 25-to-75%.  If you aren’t dying for that specific latte right now, you can wait and it will probably be cheaper.  Seems like a good idea, unless all of your friends are simply raving about some new latte.  You’ll buy that one right away.

I’m tempted to bring GameStop into the picture and examine the situation where you can return your latte for credit on a new latte, but I think I have pushed the envelope of absurdity far enough to make the point that comparing video games and lattes is an argument for the dim, desperate, or drunk.

While I too scoff at people putting down five bucks for a latte, connecting that to video game sales seems ludicrous.

Instead, they are a form of entertainment.  Video games are fun, not food.

As such, they compete with other forms of entertainment.  Here, the original tweet claims the entertainment value for video games should be $20 an hour.

That would make video games a pretty expensive form of entertainment.  My immediately to-hand similar comparisons:

  • Movies – $20-25 per person for 90-180 minutes of entertainment, including popcorn and a drink.
  • Books – $12 for a paperback, $30 for a new release hardback, 4+ hours of entertainment
  • Audiobook – Varies, but I just wrote about an $18 book that is more than 7 hours of entertainment
  • TV – Even being gouged by Comcast, probably close to a dollar an hour as much as our TV is on
  • Netflix – $12/month, used enough to be under a dollar an hour
  • On Demand – HD movie, 90-180 minutes, anywhere from $4-12, whole family can watch

At $20 an hour, the value proposition for video games doesn’t look so hot.  When you’re argument is undercut by Comcast, you’re on the wrong side of history.

Which is not to say I do not see the entertainment value in video games.  My Steam library runneth over, my history with them goes back more than 40 years, and I write a video game blog for Pete’s sake.  I love video games.

But if you think playing the bitter game dev, shaking your fist at your customers (and potential customers) and blaming them for not giving you what you feel you deserve, I have to say that you’re not doing yourself any favors.

And, after all of that, I have to admit that I did find a video game that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have paid over $1,000 to play.

It is called World of Warcraft.

I know I have spent more than that much, counting the base game, the expansions, subscription fees, and the occasional cash shop item.  Blizzard was just smart enough to not ask for all the money up front.

Of course, the Gods of Irony must be paid their due.  This shining example of a video game that many, many people are willing to spend that much money on… is the sort of game he disdains in a subsequent tweet.

So most gamers just give up and keep playing League of Legends or World of Warcraft and forget about trying to find anything new.

There is the problem.  It isn’t that we’re not willing to spend that much money on a video game.  It is that we’re not willing to spend that much money on the “right” video game.

I think somebody in the comments on the corrupt developer post made the music comparison.  A lot of people want to get into music, be a rock star, and live the lifestyle.  But there is only so much room at the top.  Likewise, in the video game business you get a few really successful games, and a few devs rich enough to afford to become space tourists, while the rest labor on, never achieving fame or fortune.

Anyway, cranky rant over.  I’ve been down this path before, more than once.  It is a pet peeve of mine.  Keen posted about this as well in his more optimistic tone.  You might prefer that.  I’m just too jaded to buy this sort of blame shifting.

Quote of the Day – The Problem is You Not Buying My Stuff

You see, we have a problem in the mobile gaming sector, thanks to you. You would rather buy a pumpkin spice latte a few times a week and enjoy it for a few minutes than buy a game that you can play as long as you would like. In order for creative games to be made, there needs to be a major culture shift. We need to be willing to spend a few dollars on a quality app, rather than for a few extra lives or other in-game purchases.

Aksel Junkilla, The mobile games market is an absolute mess, thanks to you

There is an almost physical sense of irony in reading a post in which the author complains about the entitlement of his audience and yet fails to notice his own sense thereof.  If we want good mobile games, we need to pay for them… starting with his game.

We’ve been down this path before here.  And as amusing as I find The Oatmeal on occasion, if you find you are borrowing an argument from a four year old web comic, maybe you should take a deeper look at your idea.

The comedic exaggeration of the concept

The comedic exaggeration of the concept

However, that is not his sole target.  The author, once he is done taking his potential customers to task turns on his fellow developers, calling on them to unite against the socio-economic menace that is Free to Play.  Only when that has been defeated will people be willing to pay what his game is actually worth.  He then points at the wondrous joy consumers used to feel parting with $40 for a Pokemon game and so on and so forth.

What a load of shit.

I actually expected him to go full Marx and declare that work has inherent value.  But he didn’t quite go that far.

And he certainly didn’t go after his real problem, which is low barrier to entry.  Nintendo can charge $40 for a Pokemon game because they invested in creating an ecosystem where not only do you have to pay that much for Pokemon, but you also have to spend $150 on hardware to play it as well.  To get in the App Store you just need to development kit, meet some basic criteria, and be ready to give Apple their cut.

I love when people… and developers especially… bitch and moan about Apple creating a walled garden with the App Store, and then go back to playing games on pretty much any console ever.

And a particularly sweet dumpling in this rich soup of irony is that this walled garden has pretty much failed to weed out crap.  It is, rather, a complete mess, with page after page of half-assed knock-offs and derivative shit.  And even when you aren’t mired knee-deep in crap, there are often still many options.

The other night my wife wanted a video poker app as a warm up for EVE Vegas.  Go to the App Store and search on video poker and tell me how many results you get, and how many nearly identical apps you find in the results.  And most of them were free.  So yeah, we didn’t buy a $4.99 app because it was not different in any discernible way (at least before purchase) from a number of free options.  So now my wife has a perfectly serviceable video poke app on her iPhone that looks just like the real thing in Vegas.  She only gets a limited amount of money to start with, and has to buy more if she runs out… that is the in-game purchase option… but she hasn’t run out yet.

There are things that certainly need to be fixed with the mobile market… problems that have been around since the App Store showed up, if the author had done his market research… but the fixing customers should be nothing more than afterthought on any list you can create if you want to live in the real world.

Complaining about customers isn’t a path to success.  As in any market with low barriers to entry, you have to stand out from the crowd, distinguish yourself from the pack, make some effort to prove to potential customers that you’re worth the price.  Plenty of mobile games out there have made money, and not just the free to play ones.  If yours wasn’t one… well, you can blame whoever you like and declare life isn’t fair while you’re at it.  But that won’t change reality.

(Hat tip to: What If…)

Addendum: Tim Cushing at TechDirt takes on this story and tears it apart.