As funny as it's been watching the progress on R60 go from "code complete, lets ship this bitch!" to two year grim death march as soon as the people who really did the work left, at this point I have to wonder just what the hell is going on in the house of Wu.
Does she really believe she'll get the thing done and shipped by every deadline she sets, or is this just a stalling tactic concealing bigger problems? She allegedly has a final build, we know she has a trailer updated to the new textures that just needed a little editing to put the proper release date in to it, it's a day or so of work to update the website to the new marketing assets. Why has she so far done nothing to promote the game in the month since the final build was supposedly done? Why is there still no officially announced release date?
The original game took 3 years to make. This cosmetic mod of it has now taken almost two years, and at this point it would be insanity to release it before July 11th, so we're still at least a month out from it ever seeing the light of day. How does this even happen?
I'm of two minds about this:
Part of me thinks that nobody could be so cynical as to drag nothingness out for this long, this inert promise of a non-game, the very definition, literally, of vaporware....
But then I think, if anyone could be capable of that, feel no compunctions of guilt, and actually pull it off....it would be John Flynt.
I mean, compared to creating an entirely fake human being, lying up a fake port of a game seems like very small potatoes indeed.
It seems to me that, in the same way drug addicts tend to be able to completely compartmentalize their brains to avoid thinking about consequences and the future, the only way this bit-by-bit, promise-then-lie pattern could be sustainable in her own mind would be if Wu was only thinking day-by-day.
They say all a con artist needs is just one more day, and that sounds consistent to Wu, in my opinion. Of course this is all conjecture, but that would mean Wu is really not thinking in terms of any end game....Being supported by Frank means that this act, this charade of being a game developer is not about money, really...its more about esteem and justifying John's high opinion of himself, a way to explain his condescension, inability to focus, and constant need to virtue signal / glom onto the next big trendy thing. Of course, I'm also quite sure that Wu has grown to enjoy the perceived "Smart Cred" that comes with pretending to be the best Unreal developer in the woild....but I think that's more his tendency to brag on everything he does, rather than the ultimate goal.
If that's the case, then Rev 60 has
already served its purpose: it got Wu's foot in the door, so to speak: John Flynt has now become the quasi Internet Celeb Brianna Wu.
I think
that, more than anything else, was the goal. It seems that Rev 60's actual legitimacy has become something of a millstone around Wu's neck: It's not often, and he's good at ignoring it, but the occasional Patreon cries to produce something must truly annoy him. The fact that Wu didn't care
what medium "His Girls" got into seems to support this, I think: animation, film, sitcom, game, radio drama (?)......It was all about the notoriety. Speaking of the last bit, how in the hell did Wu ever think a radio serial would be remotely viable in the present?
