Radiant Machine building DDI

[kenmarable]

Not sure if this has appeared elsewhere (or is General Discussion rather than 4e, but DDI and 4e are pretty tight.) Some of my worries about DDI are somewhat lessened now. I think I rambled more about it on the Paizo boards, but I just have worries from my own IT background of a company trying to build a large new online initiative in-house can easily crash and burn from management not having enough IT experience. (My favorite example - taken from my own experience is 1997 Borders bookstores CEO laughs about how "Amazon still hasn't turned a profit because online retail is a bad business model", 1998 Borders CEO announces new Borders.com initiative to be developed and run in-house as a "bold new strategy", 2001 Borders CEO announces "refocusing on our core business", Amazon takes over Borders.com and entire online division laid off).

So I obviously worry when I see a business gambling millions of dollars in an online initiative and managing it in-house. Management without IT experience (and the WotC management might have extensive IT experience, obviously that's an assumption on my part) can easily sink even the best teams.

However, from a comment in this blog, I saw the name "Radiant Machines" mentioned. So I did a quick Google and it appears at least some of Gleemax and D&D Insider are being developed by an outside IT company. That makes me more confident in the result. However, the existance of the company was just announced yesterday and these are their first projects. So my confidence drops back down some. But they are just a new division of an existing IT company. So it perks back up some (even if the parent company's website is horribly bland, and the division's website is framed and horribly orange).

Needless to say, I think bringing in an outside company is a good idea. It's easier for management to hear "that's a bad idea" when it is coming from an outside vendor with a specific area of expertise than it is to hear it from a subordinate.

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

Yep, there's an ugly site right there. Well, working as I am on the whole Web-application development industry, I don't have any problems with a company being new or old -- most of those change names, split and merge all the time. I worry about there perhaps being an overabundance of developers and a lack of designers?

On the other hand, I hardly think Wizards wouldn't want to establish the site design themselves... So that's what they probably mean about designing in-house. Hey, that's pretty good!

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

I just hope this dozen all turn into the pile of broken promises that we got during the early days of 3e.

 

[Thaumaturge]

One thing to keep in mind is the success of MtG: Online. This isn't WotC's first rodeo with large scale online communication and play software.

Thaumaturge.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

However, the existance of the company was just announced yesterday and these are their first projects.

Radiant Machine's own press release, as I recall, announced the group was begun August 17th (announcement timed for Gencon?).

Also, this bios of the primaries state that (at least one fellow) was tasked to create SolutionsIQ (Radiant Machine's parent) the entertainment group back in April. This clearly became Radiant Machine.

It seems to me that it is reasonable to think that WotC approached this company back in April to get the ball rolling on this and that work has been going for many months already.

 

[Asmor]

One thing to keep in mind is the success of MtG: Online. This isn't WotC's first rodeo with large scale online communication and play software.

Thaumaturge.

I'm guessing you're not a player of MTGO?

Granted, I haven't played it in... damn, probably a year now (can't believe it's been that long!), but MTGO, as a service, is absolutely terrible. The program's also pretty bad... It wasn't that great when it came out, and it's only gotten longer in the teeth as time went on. They were working on a new version that looked promising last I checked, but as it was MTGO was a terribly designed, terribly implemented piece of crap.

Luckily, Magic's a good enough game that it was able to survive despite that, and for what it's worth WotC did their best with what they had. Here's what I understand of the history... Some company made the program, then stopped working with WotC (I don't know why). Then another company came by, Lizard something-or-other, to maintain it. Then WotC took it over in-house, and quickly decided to go into "maintenance-only" mode; they decided that the program was just too poorly designed and rather than rolling out all the new features they'd been so looking forward to, they were just going to make sure that it stayed up to date on sets and save all the new features for 3.0.

Ultimately, though, I think that this bodes well for DDI. They've already had a totally borked product, but they stuck with it, eventually made the hard decisions, and hopefully learned some valuable lessons. At the very least, I think it's a good sign that DDI will have a fair amount of support. Of course, on the flip side, DDI is going to be a drain on their budget, whereas I'm sure MTGO is a total cash cow, so it probably won't be as well supported... Let's hope they get it [close to] right on the first try!