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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 7874706" data-attributes="member: 58197">There are lots of reasons WotC might have decided to buy the company. We don't know what their reasoning was. It's quite possible that they bought Tuque because it was on sale for cheap, Tuque had some talented devs that WotC wanted on staff, and buying the company was easier than trying to woo the devs individually. Buying startups to get their talent is a well-tested strategy in Silicon Valley. If that was the goal, WotC may not care much how Dark Alliances performs. If it goes well, great; if not, they'll let it wither and assign the devs to work on other stuff.It's also possible that the D&D division has a lot of money sloshing around right now and some empire-building executive (who may or may not be Cocks) let ambition overcome their good sense. Or somebody's brother had a stake in Tuque. Or WotC wanted the Livelock IP and/or source code. Or any number of things.The idea that Tuque had something that was JUST SO AWESOME that Chris Cocks knew it was a guaranteed hit and bought the company for it... first of all, nothing in early alpha from a small, inexperienced studio is a guaranteed hit, and Cocks has been around long enough that he should know that. Second, if the proto-game is really that good, why didn't Wizards put some serious effort into marketing it with a suitably awesome trailer? We know they have the capability--the last three Magic: The Gathering trailers have been knock-your-socks-off amazing. They didn't invest that kind of resources here.At the moment, we have two samples of Tuque's output. One is Livelock, and the other is this trailer. It makes far more sense to judge the company on the basis of what it has actually produced, than speculation about what Chris Cocks may or may not have seen in a demo.</blockquote>

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