How Not To Run An MMO, In 5 Easy Steps

Posted on October 27, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 14 Comments

MMORPG.com has the story of what happens when an MMO goes out with both a bang AND a whimper. You know your community is spiralling into the ground with the speed (and loud death-whine) of a Stuka when your ex-outsourced community manager is fighting with you, in public, over who owns the license to your message board software.

Pity, he started out such a friendly little guy. How could you not trust your struggling game community to the care of Light Bulb Guy?

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  • imweasel

    Interesting read, but does anyone really still care about this game?

    I think I will file a class action suit to get those 5 minutes of my life back and anyone else that will join.

    Any takers?

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

    I’ve only ever cared about Horizons as a monument to ultimate hubris. I still recall when Lum did his anonymous-source report on what it was like to work for David Allen and how cool some people thought it was going to be.

    Jeremy Dixon is probably grinning somewhere. If not, he ought to be.

  • http://www.corpnews.com Mr. Poppinfresh

    I used to feel like I dodged a bullet when I didn’t get the CM job on Horizons (I flew down to that rathole known as Mesa, AZ for a final interview, but they ended up tossing it to some fansite whore with no experience, as I recall). I mean, it went bankrupt, massive asplosion, many tears, all that…

    But in some dark, perverse way, I think it might have been a little bit fun to watch this shit go down from the inside.

  • Evangolis

    Success is fleeting, but clearly, failure endures.

  • Xyntar

    I bet it’s cheaper to publish games back in 1995.

  • Diamonds

    J. do you have an offhand link for that? If not I’ll try looking for it.

  • scottj
  • http://ambernight.org Amber

    We would have also accepted “How Not To Run Any Business, in 5 Easy Steps” or even “If The Bush Administration ‘Liberated’ An MMO.” (which is funny because SL already has nukes…)

    I just love the line of reasoning that “yes we made mistakes, but no we’re not going to admit to any of them. Oh and our players, who we love and respect, are lying to you.”

  • http://www.killtenrats.com Zubon

    I can’t find the opposing interview with David Allen, where he more or less describes Bowman as a sociopathic liar who stole his company out from under him and ran it into the ground (i.e. David Allen says he is a good designer but is/was a really bad businessman/at office politics). I suppose both perspectives can be completely true, but I have wondered about that old Lum the Mad post. I mean, it even says the office was factionalized, which seems consistent with Allen’s story, so if you talked to someone from Bowman’s faction…

    I tend to give too much of a benefit of the doubt, but considering the Horizons brought to market, that benefit has been exhausted on one side.

  • Nathan J.

    Apparently the link to the story doesn’t exist anymore, but google has a cache of the first page.

    Here is the link:
    http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:YgwdSyx5O1IJ:www.gamemethod.com/MPOG/145/a-story-of-artifact-entertainment%3Fpg%3D1+a+story+of+artifact+entertainment&hl=en&lr=&strip=1

    the story was called: A Story of Artifact Entertainment.

    Ubiq had it linked to it in an old post.

  • http://mythicalblog.com/ Jeff Freeman

    Toldja forums were bad.

  • http://www.killtenrats.com Zubon
  • =j

    Page 4 of the article is missing from that snapshot. I pulled page 4 from a different snapshot.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20040811150251/http://www.gamemethod.com/MPOG/145/a-story-of-artifact-entertainment?pg=4

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