I'm really excited for Wildstar, and refuse to punish a committed, entertaining dev group because of their choice of publisher...
To me, this is a bit like people who make the argument that you shouldn't boycott Wal-Mart because even though they're an evil company, a lot of good people depend on it for jobs. That may be true, but if you continue shopping there, you are implicitly condoning their business practices and nothing will ever change.
I've never disputed that Carbine isn't a perfectly good company, and I suspect that the developers who work there are fine, upstanding people who are unswervingly loyal and dedicated to Wildstar and making it as great a game as it can be. That's what's going to make what I think will happen to them before too long a real shame. And I'm not denying that Wildstar is a fun game; I haven't played it so I honestly can't say, one way or the other.
But two things that I do know is that: 1) If I spend money on Wildstar, that money isn't going to Carbine, it's going to NCsoft. To do so would be implicitly condoning their business practices, which I am not going to do. And 2) at any given time, NCsoft has the ultimate authority to pull the plug on Carbine and Wildstar, and history has proven that they're willing to
even if the game is making a profit. Because Wildstar is an MMORPG, a genre of game that induces people to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on it, I'm not going to do so unless I have some reasonable expectation that the game will stay open as long as it is successful. With NCsoft, I have no such reasonable expectation, therefore I'm not going to waste my resources on it.
Obviously, I'm not sitting around hoping that everyone at Carbine gets laid off, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But practically speaking, that's exactly what I'm pretty sure is going to happen in the not-too-distant future (I am personally giving it two years maximum). I also can't help but think that the damage NCsoft is causing to the MMO industry is greater than the good that Carbine is doing. I'm convinced that it's just a matter of time--sooner rather than later--before the same thing happens at Carbine that happened at Paragon Studios, and the developers working their asses off right now to produce the best damn game they can are going to see all of their hard work and artistic creation flushed down the toilet when NCsoft cuts them loose.
Whether their eventual future was or wasn't foreseeable at at the time they inked the deal, my best advice to them right now would be to look for another job while they can still leave by choice instead of circumstance, and now that NCsoft owns all of your creative effort on Wildstar, find something else worthwhile without their taint to pour your heart and soul into.
Again, I harbor no ill will towards Carbine or Wildstar, or anyone who wants to play the game. I
do encourage you to keep a really close eye on your wallet and not invest much into the game, because as I said, I'm convinced that within two years at most, you're going to see any money and time you've poured into it disappear.
