Excellant Bill Roper Interview (Flagship CEO) at 1UP

[Thrasher]

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.off ... Id=3169356

Bill Roper sounds like a very decent human being.

This part really made me think:

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Less. It's actually a pretty easy answer. I would have done less. Now, I think that some people will immediately think: "What else would you guys cut out? There wasn't enough!" But I don't mean less in terms of content but in terms of breadth -- so that we could have had deeper content. Taking the time that we spent on doing a Vista version and supporting the Games for Windows program and doing a single-player game...there were a lot of things that we did where we could have put that time into better content generation.

So Vista was partly to blame for Hellgate issues. Why am I not surprised. Unfortunate timing.

 

[Oarfish]

Sounds like a bit of a crappy excuse to me. It's not like they were doing a Mac port.

 

[Pegultagol]

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Certainly, I would have not left Blizzard to start a new company with its greatest premise being an attempt to ripoff a previous game design.

 

[Thrasher]

Sounds like a bit of a crappy excuse to me. It's not like they were doing a Mac port.

Except that Vista was a moving target, and very late.

 

[racofer]

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Certainly, I would have not left Blizzard to start a new company with its greatest premise being an attempt to ripoff a previous game design.

 

[Kingston]

Poor fella. He's cool beans enough to look after the employees he's had to lay off. Good interview though. Could you imagine a magazine filled with good interviews like this, with no extra shit anywhere? Would be a magazine I'd buy.

Jeff, your journalism continues to astound me. You got every piece of information from Bill that I, as a Hellgate player, wanted to know, and yet you did it with so much compassion I never felt defensive for Bill.

ಠ_ಠ

 

[Brother None]

Jeff Green is a grade-A journalist.

Bill Roper is not a grade-A businessman. But at least he's a decent enough fellow.

 

[Thrasher]

It's surprising that someone would mortage the IP they had put all their heart and soul into to keep the business afloat. And that their creditors actiually think they can get some value from the collateral.

Good luck to their bankrollers trying to make something of it without the original development team and tools...

 

[Murk]

sounds like they really were caught up in their own vortex of hope mixed with 'stupid' in trying what they did

agreed on the interview itself being good, very telling, probably one of few where i finished it thoroughly and learned something i didn't know before hand

 

[sportforredneck]

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Certainly, I would have not left Blizzard to start a new company with its greatest premise being an attempt to ripoff a previous game design.

 

[Thrasher]

Another snippet on some lessons learned from the development team:

With Hellgate, one of the challenges we faced halfway through development was that our U.S. and Europe publisher decided that they didn’t want to get into the PC business like they’d originally said, and therefore weren’t going to do the operations and back-end networking for our game.

So we had to create Ping-0 halfway through development of Hellgate: London, and it had to perform billing, provide the back-end technologies and customer support and all kinds of things that we didn’t intend in the beginning to have to do. We’re a development company, not an online operator or publisher. Going forward, we’re going to make sure that we work with solid partners so that we can do what we do best, which is making games.

See the full article here

http://www.gamecyte.com/2008/08/14/capt ... ldree/2930

 

[Binary]

So they tried to make a Vista version? Failure serves them well then

 

[aron searle]

My understanding is that hellgate was just bland, generic, and poorly balanced.

I don't really think they can use any excuses other than "we fucked up, we fucked up bad".

 

[Fez]

They aren't going to admit they suck at their job if they can blame piracy, the alignment of the planets or some other pathetic excuse.

 

[Lemunde]

GFW: When you say hybrid, you mean...

BR: Free- and subscription-based. I think we should have picked one or the other. We should have said, "Hey, you buy the box, and then it's free online play, and we're going to [disappear] for a year, except for bug fixes, and crank out a new expansion." Or we should have said: "You know what? There's no single-player version. It's subscription only. That's how we've geared the game. That's how it's gonna work," and done that from the beginning. We wanted to get people who'd never subscribed to a game before to play it by themselves, then go online and play it with their friends, and then they see all this new content and want to subscribe. But I think that was a model that caused a lot of confusion and caused a lot of division amongst our community, too. I think the thing with Mythos that you saw in a lot of the gameplay elements, the business model, and the way we were working with the community was based on what we learned that we did wrong with Hellgate.

Deep down I had a feeling this whole mixed subscription system wasn't going to work. I mean you would essentially be paying money for something and you'd have absolutely know idea what you were getting. After the first couple of months I think it started to become apparent that what little extra content was being released wasn't worth the money.

They should have just emulated the Guild Wars system from the beginning. I would buy an expansion pack. I would not pay a monthly subscription and hope for the best.

 

[Thrasher]

I agree. The strange thing is the Mythos team leaders (now Ruinic) seem to really have boughten into the subscription model. They seem to think people will fork over more dollars for isolated transacted goodies, rather than a full well-thought out expansion. I think that's a greedy and ultimately non-fun strategy.

 

[Nightjed]

why are ppl showing pity for Roper ? he made a shitty game with the only objective of making a money cow, he never even sit down and thought about making a FUN game (he even hyped the whole subscription deal more than the actual game), they finally released a piece of crap that barely works for a bargain bin disposable weekend game, drowning in bugs with ultra crappy character design, unbearable story and what they call "humor"...
and then their billing methods had a lot of trouble ("charging way more than they should" being the best of them), they barely released any "premium content" to justify the extra cost and when the company was obviously going down the unsubscribe button suddenly "disappeared" from the billing options

oh yeah, he is such a decent piece of human trash all right

 

[Thrasher]

At least it appears he's trying to help his past empioyees.

It's rather immature to believe that making a bad game and being a bad businessman makes you a bad person.

 

[J1M]

Vista excuse is stupid. Supporting games for windows was stupid. I wish I got to blame my stupid mistakes on other people.

 

[Thrasher]

I certainly haven't wasted any of my time with Vista. Seems common sense to me.

 

[DefJam101]

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Certainly, I would have not left Blizzard to start a new company with its greatest premise being an attempt to ripoff a previous game design.

 

[Mefi]

So how's Sol's new website going?