Remember how the only 10,000 copies released sold out in seconds but because it was only 10,000 copies it was a bad game? Yeah, I didn’t understand that one either…
While 10k released doesnt MAKE it a bad game, it makes it a flop in the eyes in investors. Which as we’ve seen with Tomb Raider even having millions of sales can count you as a financial failure.
What people tend to forget, is how old SAO actually is. The story was written in late 2001. Before world of Warcraft, before Ragnarok online. Online gaming was practically non-existent. The only MMORPGs on the market were really Ultima Online and Everquest Online. Kawahara has stated several times to having played Ultima, and if you look at Ultima Online’s game mechanics at launch you’ll see SAO copies several of it’s core mechanics when it comes to skills and player killing.
Back then a launch of 10k would have been great giving that before Ultima servers couldn’t even handle more than a few hundred players. Ultima was a success and it took several months to even reach 50k subscribers. When it ballooned in popularity to several hundred thousand the servers couldn’t take the strain. That’s the era of technology SAO was coincieved from. In that sense it’s pretty amazing the things kawahara got right, like widespread use of wifi.
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