This is a blogosphere type of post. Cosmik says that the Vision(â„¢) is now blind. But the point is that the Vision(â„¢) is missing from a long time.
He didn’t quote the relevant part of the message (source):

Does anyone get the feeling that SOE tried to really grow the market through innovation? Can you look at SOE’s games and say they really tried to assimilate the meta-lessons of the genre – the community, the emergent behavior, the tension between cooperation and competition – and approached the genre tabula rasa (as Richard Garriot claims he’s trying to do with Tabula Rasa)?

Or do you look at the lineup and conclude that they wanted to grab real estate in the new world of MMOGs and fell back on the same trite conventions that stagnate the retail games business? Planetside (FPS, but MMOG!), Sovereign (RTS, but MMOG!), the cancelled EverQuest Online Adventures (EQ, but PS2!), Star Wars: Galaxies (UO, but Star Wars!)

Which is the same thing (even if written in a readable english) I’m writing from a month:

If there’s passion you don’t need motivation. You have it already. Smedley openly stated: “I want money”

My opinion is that now they are lively because they don’t like Blizzard looting them and become the number one. So they need to start to move again, they have to catch up.

There’s no intention to work on the ideas. There’s the intention to capitalize. A game for every slice of the pie. There’s no intention to develop and advance one world, there’s just the plan to conquer the whole market, once a slice of the pie is conquered they move on a new project. They never consolidate. There are targets and there are games. There isn’t a plan and commitment to ONE “world” to let it advance, evolve, improve.

Instead there’s the need to cover and conquer the market, developing games to fill all the possible gaps. Instead of INTEGRATING parts into one world, they SPECIALIZE. Classic EQ for the catasses, EQ2 to hook new players with new shiney, Planetside for twitch etc…

Conclusion: It’s market-driven development, not passion-driven. Their plan doesn’t follow the desires they have “no matter what”. They do not have wishes or aspirations. They only aim for the market and develop the game as a specific target.

With the recent announces the fun is that Blizzard demonstrated that even if you want to take over the world and become the King of Money, you don’t need multiple products.
One is enough.