Innovation At Risk
from the they-just-want-something-better dept
A look at just how badly EA's Majestic game turned out to be. There had been a ton of hype when it first launched, and people talked about how it would revolutionize video games. The game (if you missed the hype) was more or less based on the movie The Game, where it would integrate a conspiracy theory into part of your life. The article above shows just how badly the game did. 800,000 people started to register for the free version, but only 71,200 actuall finished the registration process. Only about 10,000 actually paid to continue the game. The article blames "gamers" who kept asking for something new, and then ignored it when they got it. I disagree. If Majestic had been any good, this might be a different story. They weren't rejecting the Majestic concept - just the fact that the game itself wasn't all that interesting.
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one man's opinion (again)
The concept was cool, but I just didn't know that it would be fun -- it wasn't predictably fun, as opposed to Quake 3, Age of Empires, etc. where the genre is better known.
So if you can't separate the genre from the method (uncertainty is the genre and the method), then you can't predict the fun, which made me less likely to really engage.
Again, just my reasoned $0.02
Todd
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Majestic
Comment 2: Sounds like mass market "gotta have a hit" syndrome - the real reason for lack of innovation. The guys who started D&D (which might be the only new genre of game to come along in several hundred years, and is the grandaddy of all role playing and LAARP games including Majestic) would have killed to have 10,000 people paying for their game during the month that it came out (all $5 or so for the copied and stapled sheets, if I recall correclty). Yet they grew their company into a huge success (temporarily at least)over many years, and transformed the gaming world in the process. It sounds like these Majestic guys expected to have hundreds of thousands of people playing from day one and can't make a profit without that many. Someday soon some college kid working in his parent's basement will make something like Majestic fly. In the meantime the big companies will have to stick with tried and true video shooters because they are the lowest risk way to get the necessary big hit, which they need to pay for their hundreds of employees and media blitz advertising.
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Re: Majestic
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Re: Majestic
I got the cd and have unlimited access, so monthly charges were not an issue. The price of the cd was the same as any other game. I believe their main problem was the fact that there are still too many people with slow connection who had to wait endlessly for files to download. The game is simply ahead of its time.
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