After Highguard collapsed, I saw a lot of anger from online gamers that revolved around a specific strain of thinking: They genuinely believe the company knew the game was doomed but put it out anyway. In some of the sunset threads, for example, people called it an intentional “rugpull.” Another person called it a “money burner” – that is, the kind of game where the execs suspect all along that the game isn’t going to succeed, but they have a stack of investment cash they want to burn through and get everyone working on it paid for as long as they can before the jig is up and the investor kills the project.
It’s a little bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, right? First you think that they should’ve known it was doomed, then you move into conspiracy thinking that they did know and went ahead anyway. But every game is a gamble on some level; if successes were so easy to predict, we’d never have failures, right? And as long as players are getting refunds – and many are – I don’t really blame Tencent and for at least trying to launch the game and seeing whether it would take off before giving up. All games are doing this on some level. Some are just more transparent about it than others.
Do you believe failed games are often “rugpulls” and “money burners”? Or do you accept them as the gambles they are? Should studios launch to see what happens? And if you’re suspicious, do you buy them anyway?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
