PotBS on Vanguard

I followed a link at Bildo's blog, sending me to The Pirate Spyglass, which is basically a dev tracker for the Pirates of the Burning Seas forums. Now if you ever read dev trackers for big games like World of Warcraft, you are used to a certain non-committing tone, and the devs never telling you too much, or too open. Thus the Pirate Spyglass comes as kind of a shock. Here is what they had to say about Vanguard:

Actually, if you search around we've covered Vanguard dozens of times. As have many other sites. But to recap:
1. Sony didn't kill vanguard, Sigil killed vanguard
2. Sigil had an enormous debt load when they left Microsoft
3. Sigil chose to ship when they weren't ready, not Sony
4. Sigil drove their game into the ground, and went bankrupt
5. Sigil fired all their employees, not Sony
6. Sony was left to pick up the pieces, hire back some of Sigil's staff, and to try and save what they could of the fiasco brad mcquaid created.

As for us:
1. We're privately financed with no external debt. Nobody is going to pull the plug on us.
2. Sony isn't pushing us to ship, and doesn't want us to ship until we're sure we're ready. They're weren't happy with Vanguard's decision to ship prematurely, and don't want to see that happen again.
3. We're not broke, and so aren't going to sell out for a song to 'save' the company.
4. Sony has left us completely alone when it comes to design, development, and such, other than offering us use of their tools for localization (which are great, btw)

We're not Sigil. I'm not Brad McQuaid. Let it go.

Ouch! I do believe them. But I doubt Brad McQuaid likes to hear that. Anyone know what became of him? In any case it's good to hear MMORPG companies speaking out against premature releases, we really don't need any more of those.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link