An extremely funny thing to say three years before World of Warcraft. In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor discussed the death of its new MMO, Project Blackbird, as well as his thoughts on the games industry's current economic crisis. The takeaway? While things are bad, he thinks we're still in a boom and bust cycle that will come back around, and he's heard some of this routine before. MinnMax host Ben Hanson asked if Firor had come into any recent epiphanies about working in games, leading the developer to express his disagreement with analyst Matthew Ball's bombshell report on the state of the industry. Essentially, Ball argues that gaming has hit a saturation point, with fewer new people entering the hobby, and companies competing over the remaining audience share with not just each other, but also social media. Gaming is "losing the War for Attention," according to Ball, with short form video in particular representing a major threat to the industry's continued growth and health. "That was very, eerily similar to E3 2001, when we went to E3 with Dark Age of Camelot, with no publisher," said Firor. "We met with⁠⁠—I'm gonna say 18, but it was probably five⁠—publishers. And four of them were like, 'There's already enough MMOs out there, no one is ever gonna play a new one. There's Everquest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call. I mean, really, what are you doing that they can't?" "Forunately, the fifth one was Vivendi, and they ended up publishing Camelot. It's just cyclical. It's always cyclical. There's always a boom and a bust, and we're riding a pretty weird bubble right now, tech-wise, but I've seen it before." This prompted Hanson to ask if a new MMO could potentially succeed no matter the market conditions, so long as it was good enough. Firor had a more reserved, perhaps less optimistic answer on that front. "I would like to think that's true," he said, "But there are a lot of really good games out there that nobody