Closings, Alarums, Excursions And Wetsuits

Shane Kim, head of Microsoft’s Game Studios division, let slip during an interview during DICE that, yes, Marvel Online is dead, again. Because, well, there can be only one.

When we first entered into the development and agreement of the development of ‘Marvel Universe Online,’ we thought we would create another subscription-based MMO. And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success. And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors.”

If you believe anonymous gaming rumor-mongerer/ Obama supporter “Surfer Girl”, well, LucasArts believes there can be only two, and since they’re working internally, according to her, on an MMO based on their OMG THIS WILL BE THE BEST VERSION OF STAR WARS EVER NO REALLY WE KINDA GOT IT WRONG WITH THE GUNGANS AND ALL BUT THIS TIME WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING REALLY upcoming intellectual property (a term that becomes ever looser with Lucas the more Star Wars movies come out), and well, they already have this MMO, see, except, well:

Star Wars Galaxies will shut down within a year after the release of the new MMO. The Artistic Lucases think that they have the only IP that can pose a serious challenge World of Warcraft and find that the setting of KOTOR is too niche to be a threat. They apparently expect the new Star War MMO to have at least three million subscribers by the end of the first year.

My immediate, visceral response is that if the NGE didn’t kill SWG, it literally cannot be killed. No, really. Don’t try. Trying to unplug the servers will result in SWG, its hour come at last, slouching towards San Francisco to be born.

But all is not lost: we here at Broken Toys are all about responding to our readers and people following referral links!