Riot Games MMO

Caeden said:

It is funny. I don’t think any D2 or WoW guys really did anything close to their blizzard work after leaving. I think you could say Brevik had a few solid things, but any former Blizz/WoW have just made vaporware.

Game Dev is about that one big idea and the right people on that idea catching lightening in a bottle. They peak and can remain solid but there’s usually only 1…maybe 2 big ideas in the brain trust guy.

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Yeah, design folks dramatically overestimate how importing the idea part is. What's the saying? "If you want to see how much ideas are worth, try to sell one of yours." I doubt most of those people really expected to do better after leaving though. They're mostly just creatives that wanted to work on their own thing. Just imagine being a designer working on GTA, "Hey boss, I have a great idea for a new game!" Boss: "That nice idea-boy, but are you done writing those 10,000 hooker death barks? Maybe once you're finished we'll see if you can convince one of our execs to abandon the top selling franchise in history to make your shitty my little pony mmo. We only needed one good idea, and we had it 30 years ago. Now get your ass back to the hooker hole."

Implementation and market conditions are far more important of course. I mean you still need an idea that has an audience, but I'd put that in the "market conditions" bucket. It's not just the individual devs though. Any designer will have tons of ideas, and a few of them are probably good. So any studio will likely have more good ideas than than the entire industry will release in any given year... But picking the right one to work on at the right time is tough, especially when you have a multi-year timeline with a rapidly shifting market. (With enough resources, you can kind of brute force it of course, but there are limits to that.) One good idea/implementation with the right market fit can potentially set a studio up for decades with sequels/related titles, but how many studios have had a hit and have gone on to make other, entirely non-related hits? It happens of course, but it's a pretty small number. Or maybe the better question would be, how many studios have gone bankrupt because they wanted to be creative and decided to make something different instead of making a relatively safe sequel that probably would have kept the lights on?