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by FD3SA 4585 days ago
One important point to realize for the author is that games are not services, they are works of art. As such, you can't say this is an incredible game with the same objectivity as this is an incredible service.

Ryzom was a great game, but MMOs are built on one thing: atmosphere. Blizzard made WoW precisely because WarCraft was its longest running and most popular brand to date. Blizzard already had a massive fan base of WC fans ready to play WOW. The lore was considered a masterpiece, which immediately immersed the players in the world before they even played it.

With services, things are much more objective, because we don't care about branding. Using a service like Dropbox is not a deeply emotional experience, but it does work very well. Apple is one of the few companies that can instill emotion into its services and hardware, and that is due to their marketing and design philosophies, which are considered the best in the world. However, this is nowhere near the level of emotion that art invokes.

As such, I would advise the author to carefully distinguish between art and service. When making art, you should never make it with the expectation that others will like it. You should make it such that it satisfies your own tastes. If others like it, you know that your taste is shared. If not, your tastes are unique. It's a win win.

Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm.

5 comments

>Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm.

Scientific discoveries also persist after your death. While making art is fine, it's hardly the only thing that people are known for.

On top of that, practically any action can leave a lasting impact, even terrible ones. So "effects persisting after you die" isn't really a way to determine value of your actions.

Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm.

Until someone turns off the hosting servers.

Why would anyone do that unless they were dead? :-)
Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm.

Sometimes I feel this is our main differentiation from other species.

Yeah, any member of animal kingdom can rationally analyze situations and make logical decisions based on facts, but art, on the other hand, is unique to humans. </s>
> When making art, you should never make it with the expectation that others will like it. You should make it such that it satisfies your own tastes.

I don't know, to me both are businesses and have to deal with things such as user acquisition, user retention, average revenue per user, etc.

We've read about the author releasing the game, but don't know the back story about user acquisition - what channels were used, what was the performance of those channels, what viral mechanisms were put in place, what A/B tests were run, how user stickiness was determined and improved upon.

Behind every "luck" story there's some dude or team of dudes whose entire job is user growth.

"Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm." Good words my man!