Rand Miller on Uru Live

Its a fairly old article, but I found it on IGN.com and thought it interesting how verbal Rand was on how Ubisoft ditched Cyan without even giving them a chance to success… or fail for that matter.

IGNPC:How have you handled the transition from the cancellation of the project to its resurrection under GameTap?

Rand Miller: We poured everything we had into Uru back in the day. We worked on Riven and consulted on other projects but our main focus was Uru. We were convinced that providing content on a regular basis would keep people coming back. It took a lot of time and money to make that happen. We didn’t have enough to do it by ourselves so we had to hook up with somebody bigger.

So we partnered. Whenever you partner, there are risks. Companies’ directions change. We ran up against one of those. At one point there was a great partnership and then just prior to our launch, directions changed and things fell apart. Failure doesn’t crush us. It’s not getting a chance to fail that demoralizes you. If you’ve got a great idea and you get it out there and it doesn’t fly, you gain some insight from that and can move on. It helps a lot of people including yourself. But when you don’t even get a chance to launch, that’s tough, especially when you’re so close. 40,000 people signed up for beta and we’re ready to go and we don’t take a dime from anyone. That just hurts.

It’s not what you know; it’s who you know. We had a relationship with Turner for years. Never did anything with them but there were people we knew there. Oddly enough, the failure of Uru and the launch of GameTap by Turner seemed like an interesting combination. Talks began. They started getting smaller games and began toying with the idea of doing something larger and more exclusive. We fit into that very nicely, filling holes in both the MMO category, the exclusive category and the episodic category. It seems like a perfect match.

[Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/747/747605p3.html]