What if they could sell Pocket Legends?

[Fusionstrike]

I appreciate your speculations on what you think our business direction should be, but it really does not hold water with reality.

WoW was (and still is) an anomaly, but more than that it is a PC subscription-based game. The mobile market is vastly different and rapidly evolving every day. And video games are a notoriously difficult business in general.

I think we've done pretty good in this environment.

So we'll do our best to run a good business and provide you with more free games. We'll also try to support our older games as much as we can.

First, I'd like to commend you and the rest of the dev team for your level of engagement with the community. Although it has dropped off for PL from what it used to be, you've in general remained more responsive than you had to and have been willing to level with us, even when the truth has been painful. I consider your continued willingness to engage with the communities of all your games a definite strength of STS. It's clearly something you care about since you're willing to have tough discussions about uncomfortable topics. Kudos to STS for sticking with this value even when things get rocky.

As to your specific response, I completely agree that the gaming industry is particularly competitive and tricky to navigate. Technology in general and gaming in particular change very quickly, so you're always having to adjust to find the way forward. And mobile gaming like what you're doing is a much younger field, making it that much harder to keep your footing.

However, you dismiss (without proof) my viewpoint as not holding water. To my specific example of WoW, you dismiss it (again without proof) as an anomaly. All I can say is, of course it's an anomaly. Any best-in-class company or product is by definition an anomaly, because it's having far more success than any of the competition. No other company or product has been able to replicate or threaten it (yet). That's what an anomaly is. This does not in any way invalidate it as an example of what is possible in its industry. Had you pointed out some specific, special condition that catapulted WoW to its current position but that the competition is unable to replicate, then it would be fair to argue against it as a valid comparison.

It's true that WoW operates on a PC, which has specific challenges of its own, and that mobile presents its own challenges not faced on a PC. However, there are quite a lot of similarities in how all MMOs (and games in general for that matter) operate, which makes it still a fair example. WoW has faced, for example, a continuously-changing hardware environment, competitors eagerly trying to be better and steal their customers away, the need to keep up with technology changes to remain relevant, continuously trying to remain attractive to new customers while keeping the old ones happy and engaged, adding new and fresh spins to a game with a lot of history both in the community and a codebase that gets harder to maintain with age, and numerous other, similar challenges of games in general and MMOs in particular.

Somehow, WoW managed to come through all this not only intact, but wildly successful. It is the undisputed leader in its field. There must have been many times along the way that it would have been easier if they had just started over with "WoW 2.0", closing down the old game and building a new one from scratch incorporating all the lessons learned along the way. But they didn't do that. And it is my assertion that maintaining continuity of community is the biggest factor in its undeniable success. That all its customers continue to benefit from a continually supported and expanded game experience is an advantage that's hard to overstate.

And let's not forget that WoW wasn't just selling into an established market either. It had to innovate to become what it is today, introducing the MMO genre to a far wider consumer base than had ever existed before. Although other MMOs had come before it, WoW revolutionized the space with what it did. In that way, it's very similar to what STS has done in mobile. You guys have these other MMO examples to draw from, but no established path for success in mobile gaming. You had to take that on, and have been very successful at it. Even now, few mobile MMOs compete with the engagement and depth of STS titles. STS certainly deserves credit for what it's done for mobile gaming, and it's been a hard trail to blaze.

I don't ascribe any malice to the decisions of how STS has navigated its path forward. You've made choices along the way, ones that you certainly felt were in the best interest of the company's progression. And it has required doing so with imperfect information and the need to react to a fast-changing environment. Certainly it has been a difficult road to travel. I just can't see how there was literally no other way forward than to move away from an established and successful game, given how damaging it is to break customer continuity, especially in MMOs. One of the consequences of that choice is vocal customer dissatisfaction, which we've seen plenty of, and that's just the cost of doing business this way. It must be frustrating to have made this choice "for our own good", since you've stated repeatedly that the company could not have survived otherwise, and still hear negative comments from the community, which inevitably must seem incredibly ungrateful. Maybe there's something you could say that shows why this strategy was the only viable one. I'm listening and willing to change my mind when presented with contrary evidence. But so far I have seen none, and as a result I just can't get myself to agree that this was the only way forward. It's a shame, because I wish I could come around and be wholly supportive of a company that's done so much I've appreciated over the years.