Say you were buying a car that you were going to drive for a couple years, and you saw a kind of car that you'd never seen before. It looked cool. You'd have a car payment every month. You want it not to break down or take time out of your life. You want to enjoy it.

So you compare that company to other car companies you know, right? You say, "Toyota has a staff of tens of thousands in all these countries. This company is two dozen guys in a garage. But *damn* it's a cool looking car."

OK, so here is Notorious Games by the numbers, compared to Turbine's staff for LOTRO *only*:

Turbine's LOTRO: over 300 staff involved, probably about 250 full time on that game. Includes five devoted staff to online community relations and social media. Includes over twenty for PR/marketing. Mostly devs, art, story, production. They also run their own datacenter, as far as I know.

Notorious Games: About one dozen, mostly in Siberia; HQ in CA with a handful of folks and did I read somewhere the datacenter is in Chicago, presumably on contract.

As far as I know, Jordi is self-funding. In one investment round, before LOTRO was nearly as big as it is today, Turbine took $40,000,000 in investment from Warner Interactive (who later decided it was such a good deal they bought the company).

I'm willing to bet Jordi doesn't have $40M in his pocket, much less as a small part of his investment.

So, guys, if you think it looked amazing AAA in the showroom, and you didn't look up the definition of "indie" before you signed away your big investment of money (and I suppose leisure time), how much of that do you own. C'mon.

Over at MMORPG.com, Wood's going on about how he doesn't buy the "indie" thing. But this is a bit like saying, "I don't buy the idea of independent film being edgy, flaky, and sometimes omg how cool was that?" Big studios like big, safe ideas. I've blogged over on Gamasutra about how indie and mid-line and even AAA studios are getting pressure from investors to produce the next WOW.

If all you want to see in the market is the next twenty WOW clones, sure, why not. But if you support diversity from formula, you're going to have to waste some time and money here and there finding the next CCP, and that company isn't going to be obvious a month after launch.

NOW, all that said, let me say a few things to Notorious Games: reputation counts. It's no longer 2003 (when SWG launched) where the gaming community tended to stay on their own game's forums. What I am seeing (and sometimes refuting) is that this game is being slammed for being DOA, and for a lack of transparency.

There is a difference between a game that expects the community to discover the game mechanics as part of the game (and help refine both the community and mechanics in the crucible of experimentation) and a game that can't talk to their community meta-game. We need to know more about how things are going. We need to be involved. We do not need to be told the outcome of your weekly scrums, but it would be nice to know if you have them, and how people were, authentically, feeling at the end of it.

We'd like you to present this game to the market more authentically too. We'd like to see you manage expectations of folks buying in, so they have less likelihood to call it a scam upon ragequitting (assuming the folks calling it a scam for over a year weren't right -- I actually believe this is more of an understaffed dream, myself).

We'd like policies put in to update the splash screen for the launcher with *current* server status (not wishful) and a log of when the servers have been down and why and with what rollbacks on the launcher.

If you can't manage these things because 150% of your staff time is on the code, then you're doing it wrong.

If the community didn't do due diligence on the game, you haven't done your part as the game company to be transparent.

Shava/Ani