Muckbeast

The pet rock was a fad in the mid 1970s created by ad executive Gary Dahl.  The concept was a hit for a few years, making Mr. Dahl millions of dollars before it died out. Pet rocks can be found occasionally on eBay, but they are no longer “manufactured” or sold. The pet rock [...]

I read a couple of really good blog posts recently that I highly recommend:
From Spinksville:  You cant heal stupidity!
and
From Bio Break: The Long, Hard Road to Console MMOs
and
From Elder Game: 2009: A year of Shitty MMOs.
For reference, you might find this post from Bio Break really useful: MMO Timeline. It includes dates of every major [...]

I recently published an interview with Andrew Cowan, founder and administrator of The Mud Connector.  If you are not familiar with TMC, it is one of the most important web sites in MUD/MMORPG history. It was the first major MUD search engine/community web site. It helped millions of gamers find an online home.
The Mud Connector [...]

I just learned of this and it is sad news. Near Death Studios, the indie game company behind the resurrection of Meridian 59, closed down on December 31, 2009. One of the founders of Near Death Studios (Brian “Psychochild” Green) is a respected colleague and frequent reader of this blog. Brian announced the closing publicly [...]

This is obviously not a healthy sign for Warhammer: Report: Layoffs Hit EA Studios Including Tiburon, Black Box, Redwood Shores, Mythic.
According to the report, Mythic lost 80 people or 40% of their staff.
EA had a recent investor conference call, and of course they avoided giving hard subscriber numbers for Warhammer. A 40% layoff pretty much [...]

I am going to try not to get too esoteric or philosophical. Lets eschew things like success as defined by making people happy, bettering the world, adding good ideas/concepts to the game design space, or all sorts of totally unmeasurable things like that. For the purposes of this discussion, lets focus a little more on [...]

… while counting their money?
I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.
Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions [...]

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while. This article at MMORPG is the final push over the edge.
Most MMOs have gone with the shard/server approach. Each copy of the game has a distinct community. You make characters on a specific server, and the character can only be played on that server. Each [...]

Wolfshead has started a really great discussion on his blog: Waiting for the Next MMO Revolution
The reason why I’m in a perpetual state of angst is that I feel that the MMO industry has squandered all of the great potential that was evident a scant 10 years ago during the first MMO revolution heralded by [...]

By now, many of you have read my article What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? Is it a failure? Since I wrote the article, new leadership really has not done much to address those issues. In a recent interview, the head dev. of Warhammer put the blame for WAR’s problems on the game being too [...]