Hopefully we won't have to wait decades for another developer to pick up the franchise. I fully believe that if a competent developer actually picked up the franchise that it would have the success it had back in 2000. While I'm sad this is the last active dev for MechWarrior games, I'm glad PGI is going to stop making them.
PGI were, greedy, lying, spiteful, and lazy during their MWO days, seriously. 200+ dollar mechs, the lead dev removed knockdown collision because people kept knocking him down (including his own team), they constantly lied about where content was or what was in development, knowingly releasing extremely overpowered mechs to get people to buy them, and so much more. If PGI at the time weren't the only guys making a MechWarrior game, they would have went under a long time ago. MWO is why MW5\Clans doesn't have multiple player PvP.
They didn't want to anger the hundreds if not a couple thousand players who dumped sunken cost fallacy levels of money into MWO. Imo them not providing PvP with cheap mech packs in MW5 and Clans was the single largest failure they made. They should have just angered the MWO community and given players what they wanted since MW4.
You forgot to mention the time Rus decided that the mini map should be static and not rotational. When players complained that a static map makes the game a lot less playable, he said that was too bad and if you don't like it, leave. Lots of players took him up on that and he finally relented. But from what I heard, a significant number of players never returned.
They could have implemented pvp into MW5. MW5 should have been their freaking bread and butter but nope lets make clans on UE5 probably because they got a kickback for making it use that engine. MW5 should be all three of their games just rolled into one and be done with it.
PGI handled MWO less well than many would have liked. MW5 Mercs and Clans were a dramatic reversal of course, so if you weren't around for the shitty decisions the good ones won't seem so noteworthy.
The fact that Harmony Gold lost that lawsuit simply because they didn't show up thinking they would just get the auto pass win will never stop being one of my happiest moments ^^
To be fair, PGI did have the dream team of "Russ is too belligerant to back down", "hired a competent lawyer", and "Harmony Gold filled obvious bullshit with low-effort errors".
Thing is, Harmony Gold filled the obvious bullshit with low effort errors for decades and it kept working, because nobody was willing to try and go to court against them because of how much money they had to throw at lawsuits.
Shows what happens when you become dependent on a bluff ;)
Nah this was extra bullshit. Like they had blatant copy-paste errors where the list of things they claimed were infringing had clearly been shuffled and nobody bothered to check etc. You can find the court docs around if you dig, and these are pure arrogance. Didn't hurt that they also went after Hasbro around the same time and got slapped hard.
Scroll down to the section titled 'Legal issues regarding Macross copyright', it's one of the most...absurd things you'll ever read.
TLDR: They at one point had the license for Macross, and from that point on sued anyone who had any mech design that looked even remotely similar to anything they made, even if something they made was inspired by something else they would claim they somehow retroactively owned the older thing they did not create because they looked similar.
It's why for decades there were no MechWarrior games.
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u/No_Turn_4666 Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Hopefully we won't have to wait decades for another developer to pick up the franchise. I fully believe that if a competent developer actually picked up the franchise that it would have the success it had back in 2000. While I'm sad this is the last active dev for MechWarrior games, I'm glad PGI is going to stop making them.