That's not so much a counterargument as one that supports the notion of a sliding scale to "good enough". You can always get a thousand people to buy something. The questions are whether that can offset your costs and can you keep them?
Besides, SOE themselves haven't themselves launched most of the mediiocre MMOs in their catalog as much as enabled them to get launched by providing key support at a critical juncture. And further, their model isn't nearly as vertical per title as companies with only one or two MMOs, given the economies of scale they've achieved with their infrastructure.
Yeah. What other company would have just blown up the Starcraft: Ghost project entirely when it was clear the game just wasn't fun?
How many other companies can afford to abandon a project that they've sunk millions into?
That's the point of understanding sunk costs: the money is already spent whatever it is that you do next. If you've blown $1 billion making new fighter jets and they don't work right, blowing another $1 billion because you already spent a billion is more painful than letting it go when you should have. Same for a lot of MMOs: what producers need to realize is that you can't afford to continue a project you've sunk millions into if it's unsalvageably bad, not the other way around. That's why Blizzard is money hats and Mythic is about to go bye-bye.
What if you're a startup and only have one game? What if the development money runs out? Nobody wants to be the company that just gave up.
Alternatively: cancelling that "not quite there" title means firing 40 people. In a company of under 100. The first 30 go the second you cancel the project.
Plus there is also the issue is that sometimes an 'almost there' title only requires a few extra bits of development to come through - at crunch time - to suddenly arrive. Valve has said that despite years worth of development, TF2 only became fun (to their standards) in the last few months of development. Is WAR "unsalvageably bad"? No, but it is going to take more money and time than EA will want to invest in it to make it salvageably good, along with good lead designer.
Blizzard can, at this point, afford to do whatever they want. They aren't a business model that any other development studio (maybe Valve...) can duplicate.
As a counter-argument, SOE in particular have shown several times that, once you have sunk those costs into a project, you can sometimes at least give yourself a moderate cash cow since MMOs aren't all that expensive to run (badly) in maintenance mode for even very moderate subscriber bases.
There aren't a lot of people running around who when SC2 is mentioned scream "I will never ever buy a product from those bastards at Blizzard again."
But if SOE announced EQ3 today, I doubt if you'd make it through the first page on most gaming boards without seeing someone who is still pissed off about SWG or even EQ1 enough to want to boycott the company.
If you can read this, you're on a board populated by misogynist assholes.
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