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GamesIndustry.biz has comments made by Cyan World's Rand Miller at a recent GDC panel discussion. Miller again discussed the troubled history of Myst Online, offering his thoughts on the game's unique MMO focus and why past incarnations have failed to stay afloat.

Elaborating on why the game couldn't manage to initially keep itself alive, Miller said, "I'm always going to fall back on 'we were ahead of our time,' because it's easy."

"The biggest thing we did was an all or nothing proposal from an entertainment point of view," he continued. "It's not like you can start up a new TV network and give one show a month and expect it to be successful... We couldn't quite pull that off with the money we had."

Added Lewin, "I don't think there's any budget that would have worked," as the content production pipeline was extremely difficult. "Look at [TV series] Lost," he added. "Lost, at its level of quality, still can't get 26 episodes out in a year."

"There's a similar issue with Myst Online," he concluded. "It's a bigger issue when we're looking at broadband entertainment. The fallback is reality TV... [where the thought is] lets make users make idiots of themselves and we'll all laugh at them... We all do want to see the 'Lost's but production costs have to come down and we have to get smarter about tools."

GamesIndustry.biz: Myst Creator MMO Discussion

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