You also said something else that I’ve said myself:

And it’s so easy to let things slip, especially in an environment where people are more concerned about pride or job preservation instead of being honest about the work and making results the top priority.

I can think of more than one developer, by name, that created and maintained poor content because of pride. He had the “This is my content/zone” attitude and it just killed us as raiders. It ruined our experience and we lost folks because of it.

One failed link in the chain, so to speak, makes a big difference.

Is it the focus? My answer is no.

Where is the game industry to you hear about the leadership and vision that is require to manage, direct, and motivate this huge team of many people? These recent posts are simple about management failure.

Once they realize they need to solve the management of hundreds of people, which has been solved for longer than recorded history, then they can get on with making games that require many people to make.

How many game companies have management experts verse programming, design, layout or art experts? Valve is the only one that comes to mind on how they do stuff gets similar attention to what they produce.

It’s sad that our society is increasingly hostile to people who do everything right, succeed, and are financially rewarded by their customers for that success. After all, it’s not fair to the people who lost focus, who didn’t show up, who phoned it in, and didn’t succeed.

When you can start a project and face all these hurdles, it’s a hard decision whether to take the risk. If you can look forward to most of the rewards being taken from you if you succeed, you’ll likely decide not to bother. Even if you’re doing it because you love it, there’s a limit to the amount of money someone will be willing to risk for an ever smaller share of the possible reward.

In order for products to be developed, the rewards for success need to go to the people who provide the money and work to develop the products. And if we want more products and more people working on creating them (instead of being unemployed), our society needs to increase the rewards for success and try to lower any artificial barriers to that success.

But things are going in the opposite direction.

I actually disagree with the post that you linked. Like you I think good games will get played. If nothing else, WoW (and to some extent Guild Wars) seem to have high enough churn that I think there is plenty of room for more WAR, LoTRO, and EQ II sized sucessess (though I realize that WAR was aiming higher than that). I suspect the fact of the matter is that the majority of lapsed WoW players aren’t playing another fantasy MMO. That close to a million players tried out WAR and AoC should say something. The pooch was not doomed by the potential of the market, Funcom and (to a lesser extent) Mythic screwed it.