DDO: SueTown Online

So… I guess people wanted me to talk about the whole “Turbine vs. Atari” lawsuit thing?  I don’t know.  I mean, when it comes to this blog, I’m not attempting to cover all of the MMO news out there, even of the games I’m interested in.  If I have an opinion or a thought or want to talk about it, I will; if not, it feels a bit like pulling teeth to get a good paragraph out of the topic.

This is sort of like that.  I know lawsuits suck; I know that no matter who “wins” in this case, it’s still a publicity hit; I know there’s a level of weirdness for a MMO developer to be suing their publisher; I know Turbine has more sympathetic pals in the audience than Atari.  But that doesn’t really qualify me to make any keen observations.

It looks as if Atari might have been trying to intentionally sabotage Turbine’s DDO in various ways, even so far as to break free of Turbine prematurely in order to support Cryptic’s own rumored D&D MMO (Cryptic being under the Atari umbrella).  A lot of players I know and have read on the DDO forums will whole-heartedly agree that Atari’s given little to no marketing effort behind DDO, fueling the fire of this suit.  But then again, this is a he-said, she-said case where we have no idea what’s the truth.

Instead of listening to my half-hearted theories, check out Gamasutra and Massively’s coverage of this, and we’ll stay tuned to see how it pans out.  I think the one factor that everyone wants to know is if this will impact DDO’s relaunch and continued operations in any way.  Turbine says it has the rights to continue running DDO through 2016, so that’s good at least.

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• Posted in: Dungeons & Dragons Online