Steven Eliot Altman, his fan & Playdom

Today I sow a very funny reply exchange between TheHermit aka Steven Eliot Altman and his fan :

himrchp36

thats hilarious cuz i’ve always hated the stupid quests, most of them make zero sense when it comes to the actual quest. your lame steven.

Steven Eliot Altman aka TheHermit :

TheHermit: Oddly, 10 million registered players of 9Dragons and you’re the very first player who ever expressed a dislike for the writing in the quests. Indeed, the feedback has been quite the opposite. But everyone is entitled to their opinion, himrchp36. Hopefully you’re not a well known critic or my bestseller status is surely in jeopardy. I personally don’t feel lame at all. And I guess thou shalt not be reading the book. But if you do, and would like to post a review, I’ll be excited to read it, good or bad.

http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=aV7vtMS

Basic, his fan said to him that is style of writing the quests for 9dragons “make zero sense when it comes to the actual quest”.In fact, Steven Eliot Altman was hired by Acclaim to adapt the story of 9dragons from Wuxia style to American style. And we all know what disaster means this in author language. For us, true connoisseurs of fine literary, and I refer here at the great European and Russian classics, the ‘shit’ written by the SEA as quests is at kindergarten level.

Some of you I bet remembers this :

So, TheHermit had to google for 5 russian authors…

I don’t know in what world SEA lives, but he is funny when he said :” Hopefully you’re not a well known critic or my bestseller status is surely in jeopardy”. Bestseller status? That must be a joke.

A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and specialties (number one best selling new cookbook, novel, nonfiction, etc.). The New York Times Best Seller list is one of the best-known bestseller lists for the US. The New York Times Best Seller list only tracks National and Independent book stores; it does not include sales from Internet retailers or box stores such as Walmart or Target. It is not uncommon that a book that appears as number 1 will fall short in actual sales.(Wiki)

As they said in there the New York Times Best Seller list is one of the best-known bestseller lists for the US.Let’s take a look : ‘Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 2000s‘. Steven Eliot Altman is not on the list. In fact, no way SEA can be on the other list also… I think he call himself a best-seller author, not that he is in any top or his novels are blockbusters. You just simply need to google the thing and is easy…

I tried at amazon.com and find out that SEA book scores low. For eg. Deprivers at Amazon.com Sales Rank scores 1,858,037 and 7 reviews and The Killswitch Review scores 1,959,967 and 5 reviews. Now, let’s take a look at a real bestseller book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown… scores 28,911. So, from 1,959,967 to 28,911 is ? Those numbers makes the best-seller. If you expand the search by International Standard Book Number (ISBN), guess what : only 3 books. His wiki page is not inferior either. How come a bestseller writer starts his biographical article with GAMES ? Wikipedia also have a warning add to his page:

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (October 2007)

SEA wanted to be superior with that kind of attitude and ‘tone’, but I guess he mixed up the boats. One is to say to the kids that you are a bestseller writer and than wait for a ‘large eyes’  and one is to say to some people who read real books and knows the publications and writers.

Hearing of SEA fame… Playdom has ‘merge’ to Acclaim. That is what Hermit said about ‘merging’… in here. In fact, Playdom acquired Acclaim. Who is this Playdome?

Playdom is a top game developer on Facebook and MySpace with popular titles including Social City, Sorority Life, Mobsters, Tiki Resort and latest game, Treetopia. To date, more than 100 million Playdom games have been installed on leading platforms including Facebook, MySpace, iPhone and Hi5. Playdom is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with studios in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; Eugene, Ore.; Boulder, Colo.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in South Asia.

Playdom before Acclaim just has acquired Green Patch, Trippert Labs, Offbeat Creations, Merscom and Three Melons.

From an article on net you can read this:

Acclaim will become the newest team to join Playdom’s growing cadre of studios. Marks, a former Activision 2.0 co-founder and Chairman of the Activision Studios, will run the Acclaim studio for Playdom and serve in a senior strategic role for the parent company focused on Playdom’s business development activities. Acclaim’s Chief Technology Officer, Neil Malhotra, a longtime Marks colleague, will now act as the studio’s senior technical officer.

To make a bigger picture, in front of Playdome in 2009 we have Zynga who just raised $180 million in funding, while rival Playfish was acquired by Electronic Arts for $300 million.Playdom has 28 million monthly active users. In comparison, Playfish has claimed 50 million, while Zynga recently touted its 200 million monthly actives. The measure of “monthly active users” counts users more than once across multiple games; Zynga says it has 100 million monthly uniques.

So, a small fish is swallowed by a big one and so on.

For us, basic, 9dragons will have new bosses and maybe old ones have the days numbered. What will be ? Stay tune !