Weird-Ass Dream Watch!!!
As with so many of them, this isn't a whole dream--just fragments weaving in and out of a larger tapestry of shit that makes no sense.
In my dream, Champions Online and DC Online had kind of merged by release--the game was called Champions and made by Cryptic, but it appeared to be based on the DC Universe. I was looking forward to it a lot more than I am either of those games RL, where I am highly skeptical that either will be any fun (otherwise the rest of the dream wouldn't matter at all). So it comes out, gets reviews saying "they do some stuff right, they do some stuff wrong, but my God is it buggy." At about the same time, due to a death in the family, I'm out of town for a week and a half. With nothing better to do, I'm checking websites every night in the hotel's internet center, making plans to buy the game, and brainstorming what I'm going to make. Get home, buy the game, and my computer goes out and into the shop. Stories start to emerge that sales were pretty abysmal, and Cryptic and Atari are in bad shape. Finally, there's a big announcement: the bean counters have decided that to make the game playable would not be financially viable with an initial playerbase under 50,000 (which they were). So they're not going to bother; they're just going to shut down forever after only one month of operation, sweep it under the rug, and move on to another project. Needless to say, Atari's shareholders aren't happy. Retailers who stocked the game aren't happy. And the few people who did buy the game and were looking forward to the progressive improvements and bugfixes weren't happy. And I didn't even get to PLAY it until the very last day it was in operation, when they were running an 'ending' event like Tabula Rasa did in January.
It's all probably a metaphor for something. Damned if I know what.
In my dream, Champions Online and DC Online had kind of merged by release--the game was called Champions and made by Cryptic, but it appeared to be based on the DC Universe. I was looking forward to it a lot more than I am either of those games RL, where I am highly skeptical that either will be any fun (otherwise the rest of the dream wouldn't matter at all). So it comes out, gets reviews saying "they do some stuff right, they do some stuff wrong, but my God is it buggy." At about the same time, due to a death in the family, I'm out of town for a week and a half. With nothing better to do, I'm checking websites every night in the hotel's internet center, making plans to buy the game, and brainstorming what I'm going to make. Get home, buy the game, and my computer goes out and into the shop. Stories start to emerge that sales were pretty abysmal, and Cryptic and Atari are in bad shape. Finally, there's a big announcement: the bean counters have decided that to make the game playable would not be financially viable with an initial playerbase under 50,000 (which they were). So they're not going to bother; they're just going to shut down forever after only one month of operation, sweep it under the rug, and move on to another project. Needless to say, Atari's shareholders aren't happy. Retailers who stocked the game aren't happy. And the few people who did buy the game and were looking forward to the progressive improvements and bugfixes weren't happy. And I didn't even get to PLAY it until the very last day it was in operation, when they were running an 'ending' event like Tabula Rasa did in January.
It's all probably a metaphor for something. Damned if I know what.