Dear Aspiring MMO Game Developers,

Stop trying to make MMO games. You will not be successful. Even if you get a GREAT first couple months, players will drop off when they run out of content, get bored, and/or can’t convince their friends to quit Word of Warcraft.

You will never get a critical mass of subscribers to not only recoup the costs you wasted building the game and setting up infrastructure, but to fund the development of new content.

WoW was a fluke. It was in the right place at the right time, with a company and franchise behind it that most of the PC gaming world adored.

It doesn’t matter if your game is better. The graphics could be better, the gameplay could be better, there could be more variety, exciting combat, deep character building, and weapon crafting mechanics.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer IP behind it. Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer 40K, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, etc - irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter if your subscription is cheaper. It doesn’t even matter if your game is FREE to play.

You won’t succeed because everyone who is into these sorts of games (eg masochists) are only playing WoW because that’s what their friends are playing.

This means that in order to succeed in this market, you need to “convert” entire guilds en-masse away from WoW - which isn’t going to happen; and even if you do, you’ll lose them as soon as Blizzard announces a new expansion.

How many of these titles need to fail, and how many dev studios need to close doors before the industry comes to realize this? Stop making them - please. Think of your families.

You’d have a far better chance at success with peer-to-peer, instanced, co-op multiplayer games like Borderlands, and Diablo which require no central server to maintain persistence, and won’t require you to charge a subscription to play.

This has bothered me since the day Apple started throwing around their anti-Flash, pro-HTML5 rhetoric.

Today, as things stand, there is NO open substitute for Flash on Apple’s mobile devices (iPod, iPad, iPhone). The alternative is the equally closed iPhone OS platform.

Trading the Flash platform for the iPhone OS platform is the SAME DIFFERENCE. Pushing HTML5 video is a cop-out and a smoke screen.

Just look at all the site-specific apps on the App Store. Apple promotes the ABC, Netflix, WSJ, etc apps as benefits. I see the opposite - content providers being locked into yet another proprietary technology. How do sites being forced to serve their content via “apps” good for the “open web”? At least Flash is cross-platform (in the “it mostly works” sense).

That’s not to say I want Apple to support Flash on their devices. I’d much prefer Apple lived up to their marketing-speak and push HTML5 and deliver on the phoney PR promise of an open alternative to Flash. There are several young open HTML5 technologies including WebGL and Canvas that have the potential to provide a complete, open replacement for Flash.

Canvas is supported in varying degrees today by Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but the problem hindering each is miserable performance.

Unfortunately, Apple will not be the one to lead the charge for HTML5. They have no motivation to see Canvas and WebGL mature to the point where they can replace Flash because that would mean less content for their tightly controlled App Store.

Apple criticising Flash for being closed is hypocritical and two-faced.

Dear game developers,

As the gaming population ages, they have less time to game. Asking a gamer with a full time job, relationships, family, children, cats, to spend “60+ hours” on your game just isn’t happening.

Make shorter, more concise experiences. This isn’t an excuse to be lazy. In return I want better production values, more elaborate encounters, better level design, tighter mechanics.

I want less pointless fetch quests, grinding, collect-a-thons, repetition.

Raw length is NOT a selling point - in fact, it causes me to avoid titles.