Goblinworks: the rocky road began and then a chasm opened up and swallowed Dancey

So, I received an email with Lisa Stevens' community address. It had some interesting bits this time:

1. Ryan Dancey has resigned and stepped down as CEO. He is still a shareholder. Reason for this is identified as "personal."

2. Most of the Goblinworks staff has been laid off.

3. Lisa is now acting CEO.

4. There are about 3 staff members left. The remaining PO subscriptions keep these guys employed.

5. Goblinworks is now talking with game publishers to bring the game to open enrollment. Hmmmm. I wish this said, "Goblinworks is now in talks with real game companies to license out the Pathfinder name on something that looks and plays like Pillars of Eternity." Sigh, one can dream. Also, apparently they fell 75% short of the operating budget to get this game to "open enrollment" which I will note is not the same as "completed" nor even the industry standard term used to reflect the game's phase of development (early alpha, closed beta, open beta, etc.).

Let's do some math. Assuming these three employees cost $50K annually (I am assuming wages are so-so at Goblinworks and that they are getting some sort of medical package, probably around $6-12K depending on coverage type), then maybe Goblinworks is pulling in $180K annually on PO. At $15/month that would suggest a minimum of 12,000 subscriptions active. A couple caveats: at $50K per employee that puts them at around $24/hour and I am not sure if they actually make that much, though I would hope they do that at least. They also might not actually have benefits; Goblinworks is clearly a "small employer" by Federal ACA standards so they would be exempt from the 50+employee requirement of large employers (that technically reaches that threshold next year, anyway). So it's possible that the overhead is less, or the employer splits the cost on coverage, or any number of other factors. I'm being simple and ignoring unemployment taxes, 401(k) contributions and other potential employee costs in this assessment, too...so we'll just ballpark it at around 12K. That's about what I've heard Darkfall and Mortal Online might be doing.

Of course, none of the above accounts for operating expenses, and I assume Lisa is paid out of the Paizo budget.

I wish I'd written it down, but during the first Kickstarter a few years ago I told a very optimistic friend of mine who backed it heavily that he could expect Dancey to disappear in a puff of smoke in about three years. Damn my lack of prescience at not writing that down!!!!!

It's not that I think Dancey was deliberately fleecing the Paizo crowd. But I think his MMO track record was weaker than his ability to sell it, a lesson CCP also went through with his time with EVE Online (and something that reflects much of his industry time, to be honest). With the jaded eye of one who spends far too much time watching the way the video game/MMO industry spins around on itself, Pathfinder Online has always looked like a rolling disaster....and now it's come to the brutal end. I wonder what interesting and unpleasant things he will have to say about Paizo and Goblinworks in the future.

....sigh. Look, I mock a bit, but I feel bad for the whole group. I really wish when they did that Kickstarter that no one had listened to Ryan Dancey and they had instead done what WotC is currently doing: gotten some decent licenses attached to the current revival trend for isometric RPGs, Hindsight, alas, is 20/20.

Erik may need to add this one to his Failstarter list!

Pathfinder Online now offers $0 entry and 15 Day Free Trial

Goblinworks just announced the change in their approach to accessing Pathfinder Online. Now you can try the game out at zero cost for a 15 day trial and there is no purchase price. This is a smart move; the market is so flooded with Unity-Powered games of quality ranging from "okay" to "induces blind rage at how bad it is" that it's a good idea to demonstrate your product so people can judge it for what it is and not what it's competition looks like.

That said, I have had my reservations about Pathfinder Online, and doubt it could be worth a regular subscription price....but thanks to the 15 day trial I can find out first-hand whether these suspicions are true or not. Considering some of the awful stuff I've been trying lately, it can't possibly be any worse...right?

I'll report back once I've had an opportunity to actually play it.

Wednesday Blaaaaaaagaggghhhh! Rage: The Scorchers, Goblinworks Begs for your Money and more

This is one of those "filler" blogs to keep up with my personal quota, so no cool game articles, no controversial off-the-rails rants (unless it just happens, heh) and only a little bit of news. First off:



Rage gets "The Scorchers DLC

So id, now owned by Bethesda, has been quietly trying to get more DLC ready for release for Rage, a beautiful looking game with some very, very tight shooting mechanics strapped to the rotting skeleton of a Fallout 3 wannabe environment, with some "so-so kinda okay but not really" driving events tied to it. I downloaded it last night, but it essentially tacks on a new campaign and opens the game up for some modest open-world post-endgame continued gameplay. I somehow still haven't gotten to the end of this game, so I have no idea how that meshes, but the existence of this DLC smacks of Bethesdian influence on id, and also suggests that a future Doom 4 might look less like the conventional style of shooter that id has refined to the point where it is methodically by the numbers and may instead have a dash of Fallout and Skyrim mixed in. Hopefully more than a dash...either way, imagine a Doom 4 which provides for the open-world environment of Fallout....hmmm. It could be cool, but I admit, I'm suddenly having a hard time imagining Doom in an open world environment. Maybe Quake, yeah, but Doom....? Naaah.



Goblinworks Needs Your Money

The Goblinworks Kickstarter Round Two is still going and just under halfway through with less than half its goal of One Million Dollars. Lots of discussion about this on rpg. net, but I have to say, the more Ryan Dancey discusses the Pathfinder Online plan the less I care about it. I'm not a hardcore PvPer (despite what my wife's Rift guild thinks....they are constantly making me PvP on my Bahmi rogue to earn their guild quest goals) and in fact have found every conceivable description of the old days of Ultima Online or more recent games like EVE to be unpleasant, to say the least. Call me a carebear if you like, but unless hardcore PvP comes with hardcore consequences (i.e. when you die your character is permanently deleted and you are kicked from your account permanently) then we'll never have a game environment which can even come close to creating the sort of immersion and visceral sense of realism that I feel such an element could otherwise achieve. Then again, the hardcore PvP crowd that likes this sort of thing could care less for immersion, so I may be missing the point of what games like Pathfinder Online, Darkfall, EVE and others are trying to achieve, anyway. Which still makes me "not a part of their target demographic" despite the fact that I would love to play a Pathfinder MMO that...you know...actually felt like Pathfinder the RPG that I've enjoyed for a few years now. But what I play at the table bears not even a glimmer of similarity to what Ryan Dancey is describing in his discussion of this game.

Either way, the current MMO kickstarter keeps heaping the promise of book content for money. It seems that motivation and interest in the MMO alone is not enough to motivate donations. Still, it is about halfway there...almost...and has several weeks to go.

Resident evil 6 Campaign #2 Update

I'm playing through the Chris Redfield campaign now, and making good progress since I set the game to "casual" mode. The description of casual mode is basically, "You just want to enjoy the ride." The game suddenly got fantastically more fun and engaging without the stress. I am now remorseful that I didn't play the Leon Kennedy campaign on casual mode, because I suspect my aggravation with it would have been considerably less. Anyway, a proper review of the second campaign soon!

As an aside, RE 6 for the PC is slated for March 22nd next year. As an aside, the earlier RE game from this year, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, recently got its DLC released for PC as well, and has been showing up discounted in various areas. Despite assertions by some that it wasn't that great (expectations will influence this view) I found the game to be quite enjoyable. Then again, I rather liked the idea of playing as a squad of Umbrella mercenary black ops agents, and also expected the game to be exactly what it was: a co-op themed riff off of the Left 4 Dead subgenre. As a result, I've actually enjoyed RE:ORC more for its game play than RE6, because RE:ORC at least handles third-person action smoothly (and better on PC, I should note) than RE6 does (at least until I flipped the casual switch on).



Okay, enough ranting for Wednesday!

Pathfinder MMO Kickstarter

Wow, so Goblinworks, whom I hadn't heard much about recently, is now doing its own Kickstarter for the Pathfinder MMO project. The Kickstarter phenomenon, which unless you've been living under a rock* with no internet access is something you should have been hearing about by now, is apparently turning into the new cool way to suss out extra funding and support for a project while also demonstrating general interest in said project. Steve Jackson Games just recently knocked one out of the park for the new Deluxe Anniversary Ogre edition, for example, and of course there was the recent Wasteland 2 event.

I admit, I am not sold on the vision of a Pathfinder MMO as being described by Ryan Dancey and the rest on their web page....it sounds very much like an MMO in Pathfinder name only, and the idea that the Pathfinder ruleset can't translate well to the medium seems ludicrous to me, given that we have a very healthy (and entertaining) D20-system RPG out there already in the form of Dungeons & Dragons Online.

That said, the Kickstarter's barely begun and they've already almost met their base funding level (the enormously modest $50,000 sum, of which they probably can't even afford to pay a year's salary to one programmer). So presumably they're hoping for a runaway success ala Wasteland 2...

Myself, I admit that I'm having a hard time seeing how they will pull this off, still. I want them to, I think a Pathfinder MMO could be a lot of fun....but that said, they've got some stiff competition out there. This year alone has Tera and Guld Wars 2, as well as Star Wars: The Old Republic and probably the WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria looming. Admittedly those are all "here and now" and I would be surprised if we see a working Pathfinder MMO before 2015, but I still don't know how Pathfinder will distinguish itself sufficiently to gain traction in such a volatile market.

Plus, attracting Pathfinder fans is not their problem; attracting the entitlement-minded prima donnas that are the MMO crowd in general will be the real challenge. Browse through the forums at mmorpg.com sometime, and you'll see what I mean; these people will condemn a game with all the vitriol and venom they can muster if they so much think the game made them sneeze or something...!





*In which case, stop reading my blog and go watch Avengers, you rock-dwelling loon!!!!

Pathfinder MMO

The story announcement is here, and some company called Goblinworks is the licensee. Don't get too excited yet, though! Goblinworks appears by their new website to be founded by the Paizo gang. That's okay in and of itself, if they are able to properly wrangle together the sort of manpower necessary to make a full fledged MMO (just watch the credits roll on any typical computer game to get the gist of just how munumental such a project is), but time will tell. 

Shocked, We Iz!!!!