He "only" made money off of 750,000 players. If we go by that blanket statistic.
edit: Farmville was seen as a very successful cash cow, even if 3% paid, at 31 million players.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ent...-games-make-money-lessons-from-farmville.html
"he" probably didn't, as he was brought in by another company relatively late on to rescue a project that had completely gone off rails. i'm pretty sure it was contract work, and i bet he didn't end up with a large piece of the pie. that's probably why he started his own casual game company right after in fact.
lets get some things straight about John. the problems with Daikatana were pretty much exclusively poor project management. he had only ever worked with small teams before, and then someone came along with a crap load of money and let him put himself in charge of a massive team to make the ambitious project he'd wanted Quake to be.
large ambitions. in charge of a new team, larger than any he'd worked on before, many of who aren't used to working in a team (people who had previously only built single player maps) and many of who had never worked on a game before, things went horribly and predictably wrong.
that doesn't undo his talent as a game designer, but it shows his inexperience as a team leader at the time. he made a very bad call switching to Quake 2 which put them much further behind schedule than he expected, and that put the team into a pretty much endless crunch. after a while, most of the team walked out, and he had to find a whole new team. had to give the programmer months to figure out where the previous one had got to, and they were now even MORE behind, so still in crunch.
fast forward a bit, and most of the team walked out AGAIN.
by the end, they were just trying to get Daikatana out the door. by the end they had spent so long staring at the same stuff that they couldn't even tell what was good and what wasn't and started scrapping perfectly good levels because they were sick of looking at them and testing them.
the ambition in places outstripped what was possible at the time (AI companions that can follow you through the whole level and do whatever you do) and in other places was just crazy (lets have four complete weapon sets, enemy sets, texture sets, etc).
but even so, some of the game design shines through. to this day i enjoy the multiplayer. character movement and weapons feel great, and it's the first FPS i'm aware of that incorporated RPG stat type things into the multiplayer (kills gain XP, which earn stat points you can use in five different areas).
the multiplayer was really good. the single player game was woefully mediocre, and at launch, contained at least one massive game breaking glitch that effected the majority of players.
the main thing that i find encouraging about Ravenwood Fair is that John came in and rescued a development team in crisis, and turned that game around into a hit. i've never felt he lost his game design skills (though he certainly lost his confidence)... but maybe that shows that he learnt from the mistakes he made with Daikatana.
and maybe this old school FPS is the right type of project and the right scale of project for him to shine once again.
A Facebook game with 25 million players is not a success story.
yes it is. only Zynga had games bigger than 25 million players last year. 25 million put Ravenwood Fair into the top 10 games on Facebook in 2011. maybe even top five. if you're bigger than everyone other than Zynga on facebook, and you're bigger than *some* of Zynga's games... that's a success story.
