Michael lewis' headaches are (mostly) familiar to any owner of a small business. Is my staff too big? What should I focus on next? If I wear ice armor, can I have laser vision, too? The answer to that last question is, No, you can't—in the online gaming world, you gotta keep it simple. Keeping it simple is critical to the suddenly roaring success of Cryptic Studios in San Jose, Calif., a hot shop founded and majority-owned by Lewis, 32. Cryptic's massively multiplayer Internet game, City of Heroes, debuted in late April and has 180,000 users, adding 6,000 more newcomers every week They pay $50 up front and $15 a month to design their own superheroes, arm them with an arsenal of mayhem machinery and pit them against a huge array of villains in the virtual Paragon City.
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