Part of me is like "So Subversion now, yeah?" but another part of me fears to dream that dream again.
Thats what I thought about Qud. unormal kept talking about wanting to make commercially successful games, and he pushed really hard to get Sproggi on Steam and making a little bit of money. He talked vaguely about maybe coming back to Qud in 20 years sometime maybe so don't ask until then.
Then, on what I can only assume was a lark, he threw Qud on greenlight and got overwhelming support. So he threw it up on EA and started working on it, and it brought in more than his other purely commercial products.
Maybe now that Introversion has some experience in EA "continuous public development" style publication, they'll give their old pet project a shot in the limelight again?
Of course, the difference between these two scenarios is that Qud was fun but not immediately monetizeable. Subversion, they shelved that because (as they claimed) they couldn't figure out how to make it fun.
Honestly, I was never sure what they were on about there. I think everyone expected a classic heist game, distilled in the form of Monico, Invisible Inc, Payday, and a bunch of other things I cant remember the names of from DOS and C64 days.
I don't know WTF kind of game Chris was envisioning (introvisioning?), but I was imagining a 3d version of Impossible Mission from the C64, crossbred with something party/skill based. Except in a procedural city with some sort of crappy not-really-working faction system tacked on top, but no one would care because it would be a sweet procedural heisting / hacking game.
Maybe they just had a different vision, that they didn't articulate very well?