Massively^™

Scott Jennings, rather better known as Lum the Mad, made quite a splash recently when Wagner James Au at GigaOm published a piece called Why The MMORPG Subscription-Based Business Model Is Broken. Well, Jennings didn't exactly mean that, and he didn't exactly not mean that. Heck, really, the issue is a fairly complex one and Jennings takes some pains to clear up what he was talking about in more than nine words, and adds more than a little value besides.

Certainly, 15 dollars per month by twelve months with multiple subscriptions seriously eats into your annual games budget, even though a single subscription is often quite affordable in and of itself.

Jennings acknowledges, though, that subscription-based MMOGs can be fun, and that they can rake in the big bucks as well. That's not really the broken part. To get your fledgling MMOG to release and maybe get a piece of that money pie, it's actually irresponsible to innovate under current publishing models.

District Court Judge Manuel Real has ordered IGE's Debonneville and Pierce to a status conference at 10AM US Pacific time tomorrow morning (Friday, 25 April). As you may recall, Debonneville and Pierce were settling and had until 14 April to finalize that.

Well, apparently it hasn't been settled and Judge Real wants to know what the heck is up with that, as nothing has been filed by the due-date, though both parties said that they had agreed on all the essentials.