What are your thoughts about the number of cancellations and the few high profile failures the genre has had in the last year or two? What has gone wrong and what can we learn from it?

Richard Garriott: "What's interesting about seeing cancellations and failures is how visible they are based upon the fact that this kind of what I'll call industry segment is so new but I actually believe that the issue is that they are more visible not that they are more prevalent."

Richard went on to draw upon his experience as a producer and drew a comparison between non-massively multiplayer games and the similarities and perhaps even benefits the MMP carries over the standard "solo-player packaged goods games". The standard gaming industry releases thousands of games every year and yet only a very, very small percentage of those are actually truly profitable. Therefore it's somewhat amazing that we have not seen more failures and cancellations so far. [more]