Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Could someone explain...
nightbird305
Member UncommonPosts: 272
Whats going on with SGW, CME and this supposed mmogul? I haven't checked these forums for a long time but now I see a ton of threads about CME rather than focusing on the game itself. So anyone able to get me up to speed ? :P
Comments
UH... is there any way to summarize the events of this game in a single post? I kinda doubt it. But I'll give it my best shot...
Gary Whiting owns MMOGULS, which in turn got people to invest in CME. However some of the investors couldn't be convinced to invest in a single game (SGW in this case) but would only invest in a game company which was working on multiple games. So a bunch of little sub-groups had to be fomred under CME to work on various other projects which didn't really seem to be going anywhere. As a result the money that was invested got devided up and sent off in virtually every direction imaginable, inculding some of it apparently dissapearing into Gary's pocket. Rumor also has it that Gary is a Mormon with multiple wives and some of them ran off with some of the money, but that could just be a load of crap... or it could be totally true. Nobody really knows exactly what happened to all the money but it is undeinably GONE.
As a result of this CME ran out of money some time last year. The beta stopped because they didn't have the money to keep the beta servers. They also didn't have the money to pay their employees either. For awhile they tried to bully them into working without pay but eventually a lot of them either quit or just stopped showing up for work. This is the point where the game pretty much died and despite what the remaining employees of CME would have you believe, no real progress has been made on the game since the end of last year.
More recently there have been a lot of events which shook things up. Gary found some new invertors to dupe into investing in CME. But apparently they didn't invest enough money to finish SGW so now CME has been tasked with developing a stopgap game called "Stargate Battles" which they will release to try to make some quick cash to finish SGW. Meanwhile a lot of people are super pissed off about where all the money previously invested went and this has resulted in a lot of legal actions aginst the company... and I can't even keep up with all of it. Some crazy ex-military guy runs around here on these forums talking like one of those TV lawyers who wants you to sue people you get into car accidents with. I stopped listening to him a couple of months back but he probably could summarize the legal stuff better than I could.
I'm sure some other folks will come in here and dissagree with and/or add to various parts of my summary. But to make the long story short: This game is hosed and will never see the light of day.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
No speed to get up too. Other than stonewall posts occasionally, there has been nothing said from CME since November of last year.
No servers, no good programmers, no money, no game. Any money that does come in goes strait to management.
CME doesn't even have the talent to get the dev tracker on their own site running correctly.
Right now they are focusing on getting a skeleton crew of programmers that can't get work anywhere else, to make a game that no one wants, in the hopes that gamers-Amway can sell enough copies to raise funds to make a game they aren't qualified to code.
Thanks guys for taking the time to reply to my thread
.
It's a real shame tbh, I got excited when I first heard about SGW... But that was also a long time ago, shortly before the tv-series got canned I think.
But yeah if they do manage to get enough cash to finish and release the game... well I doubt I'd play it unless they can prove that it isn't some half-assed game (which it sounds like). The way things are going, the game would be released and then immediately picked up by SOE's life support team due to lack of funds :P.
A lot of people don't like Sony (I don't like Sony), but Sony picking it up is probably the best case scenario at this point.
CME cant do the job and studios aren't lining up to buy it, even if SGW were shopped . Cryptic is starting Star trek Online beta, TOR is starting beta. So SGW is a gamble with that competition. Stargate software titles have a long dark past to overcome. Alliance died, the SNES title didn't sell well against similar games on that platform, and the CME situation is so far out there that it has crossed over into "Stranger than Fiction" territory.
Sony's the only one right now that might take the risk.
I want a stargate MMO
A lot of people don't like Sony (I don't like Sony), but Sony picking it up is probably the best case scenario at this point.
CME cant do the job and studios aren't lining up to buy it, even if SGW were shopped . Cryptic is starting Star trek Online beta, TOR is starting beta. So SGW is a gamble with that competition. Stargate software titles have a long dark past to overcome. Alliance died, the SNES title didn't sell well against similar games on that platform, and the CME situation is so far out there that it has crossed over into "Stranger than Fiction" territory.
Sony's the only one right now that might take the risk.
I want a stargate MMO
I personally think that MGM will buy it out and finish it. Idk although you are probably right and Sony will buy it out and mess it up in some other way.
MGM is unlikely to be a white knight, given that they are struggling to stay out of bankruptcy, and chapter 7 at that given the stories about it.
Damn, there is no way in hell a good game could have come out of that company based on the StarGate IP, even if they did get more money to get to a release state. The conditions at the company are not the best for a dev team to gel, become creative and enthusiastic about what they're doing, it just makes them go through the motions not giving it their best resulting in mediocre. This game will fail if ever released by this company, it should be scrapped and the IP given to somebody else that can make a new StarGate MMO using StarGate Universe as a bases.
I'm suprised nobody wanted to disagree with me about my summary. I wasn't even sure if I had gotten all the critical details in there, so much has happened. I figured someone would atleast want to add to what I've said. This whole ordeal has been quite a saga.
Anyway, I agree that nothing resembling a quality game will ever come out of CME at this point. Any game they release, be it Stargate Battles, SGW or any other game, would just be a giant reeking pile of unfinished garbage. At best it would end up like Age of Conan or Tabula Rasa, seemingly fun at first glance but lacking in all the areas which matter after the first few hours of gameplay.
But the problem with taking the game away from CME and turning it over to someone else is exactly who are you going to give it to that will know what to do with it. No smaller "indie" studio is going to want to pick it up because they won't have the money or manpower for a project like this. So it has to go to a big, well known developer which has done MMOs before. But the issues with that is exactly what many of us fear: whoever gets it will just screw it up worse by trying to finish it as fast as possible to get it released and turn a quick profit.
Take a look at what happened to Star Trek Online. Perpetual Entertainment (the original developer) had some great ideas for the game but lacked the funding and talent to make those ideas into a reality (much like CME). Perpetual went under and the game got sold off to the only group willing to take it: Cryptic Studios. And what has Cryptic done with the game? They threw out the whole design created by Perpetual and are now working on turning the game into the next "Mc MMO" that their company is so good at putting out: A fun and flashy game in the short term but with no signifiant depth or lasting appeal in the long term. They are even recycling the game engine from Champions Online to make it! Will any of this result in a better game than what Perpetual would have created had they actually made it to release? No. It will result in better Xbox sales than what Perpetual was working on but not a better game as a whole.
So if SGW was taken away from CME and given to any other developer all I forsee happening as a result of that would be the exact same thing which happened to STO: All the elements of the design which made the game interesting would be broken down for casual gamers and the end product would just be another "kill x number of bad guys and return for your reward" theme park game that we have seen several dozen times before.
Thus, I really think the best outcome at this point would be something like this: CME gets shut down, Star Gate video games are put on the back burner for the time being and Gary Whiting goes to prison for the rest of his life. That is probably the safest and most reliable outcome we can hope for at this point. Will it actually go down that way? I seriously doubt it.
As for the theory that SOE will want to buy the game, I doubt that too.
In the past SOE had a business strategy which made buying up bad games nobody would want to play a good idea. Their whole strategy revolved around their "All Access Pass" which they tried to sell to all of their customers. But SOE decision makers only see things in terms of numbers on a spread sheet. So in their minds more games, however bad those games may be, equated to more value for the all access pass and thus more people who would buy the all access pass. So it made sense for them to buy up crappy games with no future like MxO and Vanguard.
Now their strategy has changed. They have shifted away from subscription based MMOs and the All Access Pass. Insted they are making micro-transaction based games like Free Realms and converting their older games into micro-transaction based games as in the recent addition of a cash shop to EQ2 and the absurd card game in SWG. This means that buying up games made by other people doesn't help them anymore because simply adding another game to their all access pass is no longer the objective. Cash shops are the objective now and anything which doesn't aid them in milking people for every single piece of content in every single game they own is just going to slow them down. So I can't honestly see them showing much interest in SGW.
Plus, there are rumors that there were other reasons behind the decision to acquire MxO and Vanguard. Sony claims that Brad Mcquaid tricked them into buying Vangaurd. And the rumor is that Sony only wanted MxO because it gave them to oppertunity to acquire the rights for a DC comics based MMO (which they are now making). I don't put much stock in either of these theories and I still believe the all access pass strategy was their main motivator for SOE to buy these two games. But even if these rumors are true then it means Sony's reasons for buying up crappy games would not apply to SGW.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
To bad i was looking forward to this game
According to the forums (and the dev tracker which seems to work just fine), the game is still being worked on, and still going strong. They have had their crisis and things were iffy for awhile, but they are back on track.
Am I saying the game will come out 100% sure? No. But I will say I regularly visit the forums and have been following closely (though not so close to get my hopes up). They don't have as much money as the did before. They don't have as many people as they did before. BUT they are continuing and moving forward with the project. Whatever is said about this other (console?) game they may have started has nothing to do with Stargate Worlds and they are completely seperate.
The problem with the dev post tracker is that Shane Hensley's posts are not appearing on it.
I was to say less pissed after CME couldin't even manage there accounts, guess they thought the cash flow was endless. but now SGU is out and it seams like a knock off of battlestar and it just makes me wanna play the game more.
i hope it gets scraped or something soon i'm tired of getting my hopes up. but i agree Gary neeeds to be sent to prison and they need a new head if the game ever even has a chance.
You can't trust the devs on the official forums. They were saying all along that "everything is fine, all the bad stuff is just rumors, the game is doing great" ect. They even directly deined it (LIED about it) when the site appeared telling everyone that the employees weren't being paid. If they lied to us once before why would we trust them now? If the devs had it their way then the truth would never come out about this game. I'm sure they would like for all of us to think they have a million dollars in the bank and a secret beta test happening right this moment.
Plus, awhile back Shane Hensley (the current president of CME) visited these forums and pretty much admitted that they didn't have enough money to finish SGW and that they were going to work on Stargate Battles instead. He didn't DIRECTLY say that, but he did make it clear that the studio was in big trouble and if they did not get enough money to finish SGW then they were looking at working on "other games that take place in the SG universe" as he put it.
He wouldn't give us any direct anwsers to our questions (he kept saying how he had to be "corporate" about it) but it was pretty clear what he was trying to tell us if you know how to read between the lines. You can see his posts for yourself here.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields