There is a perspective held by certain long-time current and former players of VO, which needs to be factually rebutted by someone with greater awareness of history.

I keep seeing versions of this come up, over and over again (on social media, comments on articles, etc), and if I write this down all in one thread, we can link to it and reference it easily when it comes up..

The perspective can probably be summed up by this recent poster. I've seen this written a lot of different ways, and this is more politely stated than most:

The worst thing that happened to VO was the introduction of multiplatform gameplay. The game is in the same state, and same content that it was fifteen years ago. Since then, devs have spent all their time making it available to phones and tablets and networks. If the game stayed confined to one platform, the devs could have spent some time on content, and people would adapt their means to be able to play the game, because it would have appeal and the ability to retain a loyal player base.

Now, obviously the game has always been cross-platform, we went online in 2002 with support for Windows, Mac and Linux. But he's clearly talking about our support for mobile, which happened quite suddenly in 2010.

Also obviously, the game has actually seen a hell of lot of development, and major game changes in the last 15 years (not mobile specific). But those weren't all the changes that all the people wanted, and some people who feel disappointed tend to also believe "their" play-style or perspective is the "only one", but let's leave that aside for now..

The problem with any theory like this, is that there are always "elements of truth" even if the overall claim is bogus. For historical example, NASA's marketing team infamously sent out some incorrect photos in the 1960s, but that didn't mean that they faked the entire moon landing.

So.. Yes, development of mobile support took time, and does increase the overall workload of development and Q/A.

But this ignores something critical, which I've mentioned many times before on forum threads, but people just choose to willfully overlook:

If we hadn't pivoted onto mobile, we would have gone out of business, and Vendetta Online would have died.

Notably, we never had much capital to begin with. Our publisher went out of business as we shipped to retail in 2004, so both launch marketing and retail revenue were curtailed. In 2006 I mentioned in this post how we were basically "hand to mouth": our revenue barely covered our costs.

Then, by around 2008 we were shedding PC subscribers. First a trickle, then a flood. They didn't say why they were leaving: We were focused intently on releasing a lot of content people claimed they wanted (like early capships, for instance), but our subscribership kept dropping. By the beginning of 2010 we were in pretty bad shape, I had stopped paying myself a salary and was effectively "living on credit card debt", so we could make ends meet to support others in the company.

Later, I learned that we were not the only ones experiencing problems. You see, Free To Play games were starting to emerge, and subscription-only MMORPGs were generally having problems. If you had a big enough marketing budget to still find new players willing to subscribe, then you were doing okay. If you had NO marketing budget (like us), well.. that presented challenges.

For example: Turbine's then-new game, Dungeons & Dragons Online was having real trouble maintaining subscribers, which pushed them to re-work much of the game into a Free To Play game around 2009, and re-launch it with a new marketing campaign. This was the subject of a lengthy GDC talk.

Even the titanic World of Warcraft started hitting headwinds, despite their massive marketing budget and overall clout. Yes, they kept growing in subscribership until 2010, but that was the peak and it soon began dropping. By July of 2011, WoW began offering a Free-To-Play experience up to level 20. That was a colossal shift in monetization strategy for the top "triple-A" MMORPG.. they had previously followed the model of EverQuest and others, where players had to both buy a $60 game in the store, and then ALSO subscribe.

Persistent-world MMORPGs like ours, that always had a "free trial" were few and far between, prior to ~2009. And we couldn't get enough new users in the game:
- We couldn't get onto Steam (I had tried-and-failed several times, a different long story, and "Greenlight" wouldn't exist until late-2012), and we had no real marketing budget.
- Console was basically too "walled" of a garden at the time, with policies preventing game self-update and cross-play between platforms.
- Those new users we could get, from our limited reach, were not "converting" well enough into paid players.
- And, lastly, while we were really trying to engage with our newsletter and other systems, we couldn't get enough "previous" people to return.

So in March of 2010, I attended GDC with a strong sense that I needed to "do something" or the company would die.

At that show, two things happened that were particularly significant:

1) A Friend of mine was running the NVIDIA booth on the show floor, and showed me the new "Tegra" mobile chip, which despite a pretty bad-looking demo, seemed like a really cool advancement in "mobile phone" capabilities. While phones were doing "3D" before Tegra, they were a hell of a lot slower and less capable; NVIDIA brought about a huge jumpstart in performance, and potential gaming capability.

2) I attended Google's development talk on Android, after which they (unexpectedly) gave everyone in the ~500-person audience a Motorola Droid. The first one, which was Verizon-only, and had very-new "Android 2.0 Eclair" installed. We still have it somewhere. The talk was about the debut of the Android "Native Development Kit" (NDK), a system that would let high-performance C++ games run on Android, instead of the previous requirement for all Android apps to be written in Java.

I leveraged our long-existing relationships with people like NVIDIA to get us into mobile at a fairly high level: not as some instant panacea of revenue, but to try and acquire users. After all, I couldn't pay to market the damned game, so a "free" player-acquisition channel sounded pretty useful.

This led to a direct (albeit unpaid) relationship with Google by later in 2010, and in January of 2011 I was meeting with top Android execs at places like CES. They asked "what I wanted", and I said "I need exposure" (ie, marketing), and they said "okay" and sent a single email to Verizon, introducing me.. which immediately resulted in the our being the centerpiece of all Verizon mobile marketing for something like the next two years.

Again, to be clear, neither Verizon or Google were directly funding us in any way. There have been other conspiracy theories about that, but no, that's all BS. We did get exposure in exchange for giving them a great technology-demo by literally shipping Vendetta Online for mobile: A full-blown PC MMORPG running on a mobile device. It was a useful "story" for everyone, ourselves included.

And it brought us a hell of a lot of new players, and gave us a lot of new relationships that made it possible for us to weather several more "storms" that came later. I'd have to look up the numbers, but at one point Vendetta Online was the #1 game for tablets on the Android Market, beating out "Angry Birds". We were definitely seeing tens of thousands of installs per-week from mobile, many of whom went "oh, this is a PC game?" and then tried it on their PC.. and converted to long-term players.

There is no doubt that this saved Vendetta Online, so why all the complaining?

The misconceptions around this really frustrate me. People seem to basically get angry at me for saving my company, and protecting my employees who needed to pay their rent and feed their families. And their anger is entirely based on the idea that I somehow did something "wrong", despite the fact that it's pretty well-documented that even big shops like Blizzard were struggling to adapt to the situation.

The line that people claim is "I've dedicated all this time to your game, and development didn't go as planned!". Which, even as an empathetic MMO player myself, seems like a pretty loopy thing to yell at a small independent game studio running a custom-engine MMORPG with a minuscule team (and keep yelling at them, over a decade later).

Again, I do have empathy for any player who puts effort into an MMO title, but you supposedly did so because it was fun at the time? You are not an investor, I didn't lose your life's savings, and your family isn't out on the street if the company does a face-plant.

I also didn't scrap the game or gut the gameplay, I'm still trying to achieve the same goals I set out with 25+ years ago. They just "took longer". Which, while that's frustrating for everyone, isn't it more important that we still exist at all?

The whole point of "pivoting" and finding some alternative solution to keep you afloat is that you "live to fight again". It is predicated on assumption that it's better to have a chance to finally deliver the game I want, even if it's delayed by many years, than it is to close the whole show down and walk away.

But, some people are so embittered about this situation, that they genuinely seem to think we should have chosen to die-off, instead of adapting and continuing to evolve. Some have said as much, to me (perhaps not the person whose text is quoted above, but others). I don't accept that.

But why weren't you more transparent about your potentially-imminent demise, back in 2010?

This is a pretty easy one. As a veteran studio-head (even if a small one), I'm friends with a lot of other industry CEOs and studio heads. And as any well-connected studio head will tell you, we generally see about one friend every year who has to close down their company and desperately ask all their (CEO) friends to hire their employees (who, again, need to feed their families). Sometimes this is a dozen employees, and sometimes it's in the hundreds.

Even though my company can't directly absorb layoffs, I'm well enough connected that I've done "company-death hiring-outreach" for.. more companies than I would like to recollect, both big and small. It's a part of being in the strange and chaotic community that is game development. These are not clicking a little "Caring Heart" onto someone's LinkedIn post, these are big back-channel email chains and phone calls, where we try and brainstorm about how to help.. and we each know that "next year, it may be us".

And yet, of all my friends whose companies I have seen go down in flames, not one of them who publicly went out and said "We're about to go out of business, please help!" had a positive result from doing that.

Sure, we might have seen an uptick in subscribers, for a little while, out of some kind of sympathy. But it's not like we could cut costs more than we already had. And the flipside of announcing "we're unstable!@#" comes with two big drawbacks:

- Any new marketing to end-users is now tainted with "don't bother investing time in this game".

- Any conversations with corporate partners is now tainted with "this company may suddenly evaporate".

For instance, it's pretty unlikely that Verizon would have centered a marketing campaign (that likely cost them over $50M) around a company that had recently announced that it was about to crash and burn.

So, what you effectively end up doing is shooting yourself in the foot, and eliminating the very lines of opportunity that are most likely to pull you back from the brink.. all on the "hope" that somehow a zillion people will show up and give you a bunch of money (and then.. keep doing that). And hey, maybe they will, but that's a hell of a risk.

Yeah, but you missed a lot of milestones and the game didn't progress as fast as desired!

Sure, but that's kinda.. always true? This is "videogame development". But yes, certainly a lot of development has been challenging. I've openly admitted to mistakes and missteps before, features I thought were "done", but on reassessment were completely non-functional (Trident variants, or expanded weapon-damage-types, etc). "Stuff happens", but it was always a failure of optimism or project-assessment, and not any intent-to-mislead.

Also, as I admitted earlier, mobile does place some increased burden on us.

But "mobile" is not the sole reason why things take a long time. If I look at the last, say, four years, two of the biggest time-sinks have nothing to do with mobile at all. They are:

1) Player-management and emerging toxicity issues, and resulting administrative systems. This has been a huge one, and it's on-going.

2) Player accusations of PvP cheating, also resulting in increased in-game toxicity, which ended up being completely fictional, but required a lot of analysis and time-consuming effort to definitely prove that.. no, people were NOT cheating.

That's not "mobile development" specific. It's not even related. And most of those players who were being toxic or crappy or yelling at one-another over perceived PvP issues..? Those are all PC players.

To quote Walt Kelly: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”.

The "mobile" development that is most readily castigated for "slowing down development" has not actually been responsible for the most draining and time-consuming issues of the last ~15 years.

For another example: I've written about this elsewhere, but at one point around 2015, I did some back-of-the-envelope math on the amount of time I was spending dealing with what I'll call "extreme player drama". Basically, heads of major guilds and well-known game players screaming at one another over perceived issues, and pushing their "aligned" friends to similarly go after their perceived adversaries in toxicallly vindictive ways.

At that time, I determined that I was spending about 50% of my time, over the previous six months, dealing with escalated issues (tickets, emails, drama, in-game logs, etc) that were caused by.. (wait for it).. FIVE players.

If you assume I work about 1,000 hours in six months, that's about 500 hours dedicated to being "dad of the Internet". Overseeing, essentially, melodramatic personality conflicts between 40 year olds who behave like angsty tweens.

To be clear: It was not always so. We had been around for over a decade at this point, and at some point around this time, some "veteran" players simply became more enthusiastic about the "meta-game" of trying to hurt each other through toxicity, manipulation and administrative-action than they were in shooting each other with pretend space-lasers.

I didn't have the development resources to build better management tools (not without REALLY delaying all existing work), and I didn't have the personnel to really be able to "hand off" these escalated issues, because they were often pretty "politically involved" and embedded into our game's community.

The point I'm making here is: The very "self-righteous angry PC veteran" player-base that most often blasts me over having "slow development" is also the group that is most-responsible for directly impacting my time and headspace (which then, directly impacts development).

So, once again, consider the notion: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”. Or, in this case, "He Is You, Angsty Embittered Former PC Player".

I make no claims that I haven't made lots of mistakes. I'm just not sure that "mobile" was one of them.

I'm one of these obsessive people who constantly questions and berates themselves for any perceived failing (or, at least, tries to actively learn from my mistakes). I have no lack of potential missed-opportunities and failures over my 25-year tenure as a game-studio CEO. I'm not going to start trying to list them all, or I would never finish writing this post..

I'm certainly not trying to claim that everything about development has gone well and perfectly and everyone should just "smile and be happy". It's completely reasonable for our game-progress to be "insufficient" for some players, and for them to move on. I totally get that.

But, if that's how you feel, then move on. Stop berating us on every public outlet for your confused mis-understanding of events. Go be-happy and play EVE or Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous or whatever else. We always wish our former players well, we don't have ill-will about people leaving us. Tastes change, times change, and the specific flavor of an independent MMORPG can be uhh.. an "acquired taste".

And please stop berating small companies for adapting in uncomfortable ways that allowed them literally to "stay in business" and continue feeding their families. Not everyone can be transparent about that process when it happens (see what I wrote earlier about the "downsides of announcing instability"), but I've been candid for years on how pivotally beneficial it was for us to launch on mobile, and how it literally saved the company.

At the end of the day, even if the game isn't "for you" any more, that doesn't mean it isn't fun for anyone else. Let those people enjoy it. Every project that doesn't work out the way you want shouldn't have to be burned at the stake, as a sacrifice to your personal preferences.

Is the game (Dead|Dying|Doomed)?

NO. (Facepalm). Back in 2020 I wrote some behind-the-scenes commentary about what's required to push the game to the next-level, and how many pieces have to be aligned to make that all actually work properly. And notably, that post starts with the line:

"First of all, the game and company are in a great position right now, but we're still being a bit "quiet" as we work on some of the things Whistler mentioned."

If you look at our cadence of Newsletters over the last few years, it's pretty self-evident that we kinda stopped pushing them around 2021.

It's not like we suddenly "forgot how to write newsletters", so it's reasonable to assume we're intentionally being quiet. The full reasons are a bit beyond scope for this post, but you can imagine if you "make lots of marketing noise" and then the gaming press decides to re-review your game (before the UI and tutorials and things are redone), now you have yet-another-review that says "VO's onboarding is old and clunky and has walls-of-text". And you're stuck with that on the Internet until the end of time.

"Developing a game in public" kind of sucks. We cannot do the Blizzard-style "expansion drop" thing at our scale, it just isn't feasible, so we have to slowly do everything "live", week-by-week.

I've publicly posted our development direction, which is largely a bunch of stuff that people don't care about or want to hear is our priority ("Exploit Mitigation"? My favorite! Game of the year!). But, the reality is, that this is the stuff we need in order to start marketing the game more intensively.

Everyone wants to move furniture around and do "fun" interior design. No one wants to hear about the leaky roof. We need to fix the ****ing roof.

Sometimes you find other problems when you pull off the roof. Termites. Rot. A really angry nest of wasps.

So, I'm not claiming everything has gone to plan. The fictional cheating thing was a big distraction. The really weird Quest situation was also extremely unpleasant and unforeseen, and cost us a lot of money and time. There are other things, too, that I can't really talk about. Unforeseen stuff that comes out of left-field, and that's without getting into "general" stuff like "apocalyptic global pandemics" or families or health or any of the other "normal" stuff that can go awry.

Basically, the result is this:

- If you have faith in us, and/or you like the game, or are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, great! We'll keep doing our best!

- If you don't, and you'd rather move on, then all the best to you! Just don't actively berate us for living in an actual reality (building and maintaining a huge, complex game) that you probably know nothing about.

The game is still here, despite the field of landmines we've crossed in 25 years; and it still gets better every week, even if it isn't the development that either the players or the devs believe is the "most fun", it can still be the "most necessary".