[Loser]

I live in Colorado Springs and we have an airport. Once upon a time a ambitious company called Western Pacific decided to make us their hub for their new airline. This was during the boom and the city was growing wildly as companies brought technical and customer service jobs to the area. They made a lot of money and were quite successful while they stayed in their niche.

Then one day Westpac decided it was time to grow, time to take risks, time to make more money. They moved their hub to Denver International Airport, where they could reach more, where they had a larger local pool to draw from, where they had more prestige, and where they got beat down by TWA. Westpac was not ready to play with the big boys. TWA beat the snot out of them and the company went under.

The moral of this story "stay in your place" in this case does not apply to the developers or the publishers but in a fit of personification, to the genre itself. Right now maybe this genre does not belong on somewhere that it has to compete with click-fests, walk-through adventures, MMORPGs, RTSes and racing games. To attempt to design a 4x game that will compete for the attention that is typically given these other genres has resulted in failure.

As long as a 4x game stays with its, admittedly limited, 4x audience it can still be successful. That's my opinion and wacko theory for this specific moment. I might be wrong, and I might just let it go.