The X-factor here is EA. I wonder if the problem is that he bought into EA’s PR about him. Or, perhaps they took an active hand in it at the end since they obviously know best. ;) When The Sims first came out he talked about wanting to continuously add free content to the game. However, EA preferred to sell expansions (and from a business point of view were smart on that count). How much of the paring down of content was EA thinking about how many expansions they could sell of the latest Will Wright game rather than Will being stupid?

It could also be that he was out of his depth trying to create a networked game. One MMO developer I know said that Will Wright “got online” when they were developing The Sims Online. Kinda doubt that given how TSO turned out. But, was it his decision to add more networked/online/social aspects, or a mandate from the top?

We’ll probably never know officially. But, as I said, I don’t think it’s him just being lazy or stupid or anything else.

Yep, it’s always tricky picking out what’s there from the design team, and what’s there from the Publisher’s “wish-they-were-designers-but-aren’t-good-enough” stakeholders, many of whom aren’t even necessarily on the credits list, but rather were powerful people with an unofficial interest in the title.

It’s surely even harder when you’re looking at EA, and their relationship with the designer / studio that created their biggest-ever hit series… I wouldn’t want to have been the Exec Producer with the responsibilty for “making sure Will’s next game is as profitable a hit as The Sims”.

But, in the end … if you allow a game to be associated with YOU, as a named (famous) individual, you are adopting a responsibility that IMHO cannot then be ignored.

Precisely – it is trivial (and, if you really need it to be, FREE!) to write a simple PHP or servlet to handle serialized game-state these days. Everyone from Google (AppEngine) through to the bajillion of free PHP hosting sites. Or even, you know, pay $5 a month for some hosting space on a virtual server, and a PHP install and MySQL DB all of your own ;)…

PHP is so easy to learn that I’m confident anyone who’s managed ActionScript will breeze through it.

Everything was made “friendly”, for the average player.

This is what appears to be “Development by Business Conference”… somewhere during the development, during meetings, somebody who does NOT play games feels that in order for the game to sell the “critter should have a smiley face”… “there should be happy music”… “it’s not accessible by the tweens”…
and, my favorite: “it’s too hard”

It’s not necessarily Wright’s fault, but it is most certainly his fault for not stepping in and saying “that’s not fun” or “it’s too shallow”.