Okay, so the title only works so much, but after I see that Funcom is making its Fourth MMO I can't help but wonder. I try to say I don't actually act as a "fan boy" or "hater", but in reality its hard for any human to not have a little bias. Personally, I suffer from an underdog-love-syndrome that instantly attracted me to Age of Conan, (Though it didn't hurt that I enjoyed Dreamfall) And I had previously looked into Anarchy Online for the Free Play Blog while GAX was around. But, liking the core of a game doesn't change the fact that these guys make a lot of mistakes.

First, AoC looked like it would be their chance at redemption, but ultimately followed a very similar route to Anarchy Online's release, which albeit is something that all recent MMOs have suffered from. That said though, can you think of any company that has such a large community that simply hates it? SOE and (most recently on the list of angry people) NCsoft have developed a group of people who have sworn off these companies for ruining their game (SOE) or shutting them down unfairly (NCsoft). Consider this though, these are companies with large umbrellas of MMOs and still have reasonable player amounts and still have supporters,(FanFaire and HeroCon being visible displays.) But look at Funcom, they've collectively worked with the miniscule number of two MMORPGs, and have managed to fuel so much rage both times, that never quite compares to the fires that came around later.


Getting to the Point

But the thing that I wonder then, if these guys have set so many fires, how is it that they manage to keep pushing forward? Two titles, one's getting an expansion, another is getting a complete overhaul; Anarchy Online is supposed to be fitted with the same AoC graphics. And even more so, they have two more titles along the way! From what I can tell, this is clearly an Indie development team that knows how to use a shoe string budget when they need to, but are working off the same big money investments that AAA MMOs are supposed to get, so they know how to take these losses and keep working with them despite never-ending setbacks. The only question that remains though is, where are they getting all this money from in the first place? Complain all we want, we can't deny that they're still here, and presumably successful. Is there something that silent majority is seeing that the largest vocal minority can not, or is there a stigma that simply makes us shout so loud we don't realize the numerical differences are so small?