Amazon built the most incredible open world pvp MMO, entirely player driven, dynamic, sandbox game someone could hope for. Entire player built cities, territories that could be held by virtue of players actually guarding it, massive guilds, server politics, or you could just ignore it all and do your own thing and explore a huge beautiful realm.
It was called New World (alpha test). Then because it was too novel and perhaps not fun for people who can’t handle that type of game, they destroyed what would have been an incredible hit and rebuilt it from scratch to be a mediocre half-baked clone of every other PVE mmo without realizing you can never make a PVE mmo player happy without endgame loops and a constant stream of new dopamine drips.
And when it failed because they were unwilling to go ahead with something a suit thought was too risky, they gave up.
Yes and no. It's all about the people and specifically the people in leadership positions. Money can make it easier for very obvious reasons (unlimited resources to hire the best people, have the best equipment, focus on the product and not the bottom line, etc..).
The reason it can make it harder is because if you don't have the right people being held accountable to make the studio successful on an agreed up timeline along with what the definition of success looks like from top to bottom and a well defined organizational structure that takes into account growth, those unlimited resources tend to result in over hiring before the recipe has been figured out, politics, moving targets, fractured focus, and organizational chaos.
Part of it seems to be opportunity costs, perceived or otherwise. A small, passionate, under-capitalized team is willing to keep a game running to slowly capture an audience (if it’s good enough to do so) whereas a larger org expects a certain level of returns, and if it doesn’t achieve that quickly, it cuts and runs—killing the game and/or the studio.
I think various other things that come with the territory of being a larger company make it difficult to replicate the success of game studios that produce great video games? I'm not entirely sure but maybe there's typically bureaucracies that hinder making successful video games.
Amazon built the most incredible open world pvp MMO, entirely player driven, dynamic, sandbox game someone could hope for. Entire player built cities, territories that could be held by virtue of players actually guarding it, massive guilds, server politics, or you could just ignore it all and do your own thing and explore a huge beautiful realm.
It was called New World (alpha test). Then because it was too novel and perhaps not fun for people who can’t handle that type of game, they destroyed what would have been an incredible hit and rebuilt it from scratch to be a mediocre half-baked clone of every other PVE mmo without realizing you can never make a PVE mmo player happy without endgame loops and a constant stream of new dopamine drips.
And when it failed because they were unwilling to go ahead with something a suit thought was too risky, they gave up.