[BLOG] Ex-CEO of Firefall's dev urges community to let game fail

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PredictedCyborg
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[BLOG] Ex-CEO of Firefall's dev urges community to let game fail

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This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

If you're looking for a nice juicy story today, boy have I got a good one for you.



Back in 2013, the board of directors voted out of the company Red 5 Studios ex-CEO and lead design on their MMO game Firefall, Mark Kern. Now Kern is appealing to the sci-fi MMO's community to "let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be" - i.e. as he wants it to be.



Kern made the appeal through a post on Firefall's subreddit, which has since been deleted, in which he said that he would buy the rights to the game, but only once it was a failure. He also claimed that the company had taken his vision for the game and ruined it, so he wanted to buy the rights and remake it in his ideal.



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"I would only offer to buy Firefall if the IP fails and the game is shuttered or due for shuttering," Kern wrote on Thursday. "Also, buying a failed IP is cheap. You get the code, the art assets, the tools, the name, the customer lists, the story and characters, etc, but nothing else.



"So why buy it at all? First, its my game. I created it, and I hate to see what they did to it and what they did to the vets. Second, I want to finish what I was not allowed to finish because the Executive Team thought "WoW with guns" would be better. But first, Firefall has to die. There can be no confusion that the version I want to make is DIFFERENT and not a continuation. For that, Firefall (current) must end. So don't play it, don't buy anything for the game. Just let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be."



Understandably the community reacted with a bit of confusion and a lot of outrage, which resulted in the then deletion of the post. The most upvoted reply to the post was by another worker 'gotkerned' who basically called all that Kern was claiming "full of shit" and said that he must be "so delusional at this point that you really believe yourself."

"There was no "Executive Team" making actual decisions. Nobody except Mark could make real decisions. Mark rarely showed up to work though, so lots of decisions were made in absentia, and many were countermanded when he decided to show up. The state of Firefall is the result.



The eSports focus? Mark. Founders Packs? Mark. Higher-tier frames? Mark. (He wanted to sell a new one monthly, so he could be like League.) Real-money, per-use paint jobs? Mark. Vehicles, Pets, and dozens of other random features that were irrelevant to the core gameplay? Mark. The completely fucked up UI? Mark. He thinks he's a UI genius, and put himself directly in charge. Stage 5 and the clusterfuck that was the bus? All Mark. Cutting PvP? Mark again (and he told the forums before the devs).



The vaunted "story"? All bullshit. Was in constant flux. Major rewrites to support whatever feature was the flavor of the month."


Of course the game and its developer have been having a lot of troubles recently with a soft-launch in China Nov 2015 also coming with a memo to staff members that payroll couldn't afford to pay them over the holiday period. Then Feb saw investors The9 pull out of Firefall, leaving Red 5 to sell off shares for $76.5 million to a Cayman Islands holding corporation in March.



Still, in terms of ballsy moves this takes the cake. Too bad the post was deleted...



... But thank goodness for webcache. The post and replies can be read here if you're interested.
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