A year ago, at the close of 2007, I threw out some prognostications about the coming 12 months. Those months have now passed and it’s time to pay the piper. Just as with last year I’m going to grade my predictions on a straight pass/fail basis; percentages are for actuarials.
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If you’re tired of my using this site for self-aggrandizing linkage, I apologize. It’s my blog and I’ll link if I want to. You would link too …

Anyway, I got pinged for an article about Activision/Blizzard about a month or so ago. It’s just now shown up on the Gamasutra site, and I’m in some unexpected company. Along with “the game attorney”, Thomas H. Buscaglia, usual-suspect Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan weighs in on the merger. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Pachter … you actually probably are. He’s an analyst who weighs in on the games industry fairly regularly, and it’s very surprising to find myself sharing article space with him.

I uhh … don’t remember being as pithy as I’m quoted, but apparently I was in a ‘mood’ that day:

“Will the new company try to use the Blizzard folks as sort of internal consultants on other MMO projects in the organization? I’m probably going to go with a no,” Zenke continued. “While certainly there are areas of development, design, and certainly technical areas where Blizzard is an industry leader, most of those concepts are on the institutional level. That is to say, I’m not sure a quick consultation from Rob Pardo would be all that helpful to another group’s game.”

Also in me-centric news: My very first appearance in print is going to be hitting the newsstands soon. As Simon notes in a roundup of the next issue of Game Developer, I’ve got a piece in there about the rise of the “small” MMO. I did a bunch of research on relative size of titles for another project for them that I kind of let fall through, and they were nice enough to let me turn that into a GD article. I think it’s interesting stuff; at the very least I’m sure it’ll stir up conversation.

In another notable feature, Michael Zenke examines free-to-play MMOs such as Nexon’s MapleStory, and why they might be more important than many subscription-based MMO developers might think: “Smaller, non-subscription MMOs have been slowly but surely making their way into the hearts and minds of the game community. But now, they’re getting too big to ignore. Are tiny MMOs eating away at your subscribers?”

If you read me this week, make sure to let me know what you think.