Totally yea, but are players willing to pay MA's bills for doing that?
Despite MindArk's fantasies, for the past 15 years (not even counting beta), players were
the only ones paying their bills. Even in what regards the biggest avenue for investors, namely planet partners, the two most succesful are actual former players, namely the owners of Rocktropia and Arkadia. (I think the former owner of Next Island was also a former player, but I am not sure).
Cyrene and Toulan, who have behind external investors, are in a ...weird position after quite some times since their introduction, but probably there's alot more to it than we know publicly.
MindArk made some rumours in the market when they sold Treasure Island to Deathifier and then hit the big headlines when they sold CND to Neverdie. Every damn major publication featured them and the influx of new players was really unbelievable, OJs were literally flowing off the new arrivals, so they needed to open, iirc, 5 starting cities for them (and CND having its own starting point, I think?).
What they did with all that mass of players? Squeezed them during the roaring 2007-2010 with those abhoring ul items with 10k tt, absurd volatility etc Instead of trying to be the Coca-Cola of games, they tried to be the Louis Vuitton. And failed miserably.
Then they had a decent series of phamphare announcements which went to trash:
- in-game advertisment which was meant to sponsorize a part of the loot. Nothing happened.
- in-game cooperation with artists and some interesting ideas for New Oxford. Died.
- in-game banks which were supposed to bring even a RL bank. Became pawnshops, the RL bank (the one from Atlas Haven) went silent, at least they solved the plague of unregulated in-game loans.
- one of these banks was a very much trumpeted cooperation with Anshe Chung. Stopped before going anywhere.
- bank license and direct debit card connected to Entropia. Died fast.
- some investment fund (anyone remembering Bridge Fox Investor?) which was supposedly the Niagara of funds, nothing came out of it after alot of noise (and endless jokes on the forums)
- sale of Calypso to an external investor (SEE), which died in a scandal. We lost some awesome members of community, but we remained with shinkiba and kerberos
- we still have a LA theoretically of some Swedish university, nothing came out publicly
- there was some cooperation with NASA announced at some point, MindArk were already contemplating themselves as the next stop of virtual education and such
- there was a nice Nobel streaming at some point. Once.
- at least two more planets announced which never came past bragging point.
And I am forgetting for sure some. They always had this ...unashamed style of bragging with deals, when those were not even set properly. I blushed when I saw some of the above mindfarts presented as achievements in the whitepaper of the deeptoken. And on top of this, there are always rumous of their lack of cooperation with planet partners. It doesn't even matter who's right, there simply shouldn't be an occasion for this. But I digress.
I think is fairly damn clear reading the list of the above tentatives of various collaborations that, to this point, it was exactly the players paying their bills. Even their stupid castle was paid by players (hope they got rid of that thing).
It would be just bloody great if at some point they would learn something about being serious with their image and their resources. Even if it's damn almost 20 years since they're in the market and you'd think they already learned something. How many CEOs in a row are needed for a company to start behaving?
P.S.: when will loot 2.0 be finally implemented?? We're now 9 month after the initial stage, we still don't have looter professions, we still don't have weapons using the new system, we only have shrapnel and some system kept vague and unfinished. Where is mining and crafting update??
