Broken Toys

I was looking foreward to Warcraft as well. I expect I will probably even buy it just to see what it’s like if it does actually come out. Mythic one thing: no task dungeons till the game has completely matured please. Having played DAoC from the week after launch till a few months after TOA, then rerolling on the Old School servers after they came out … the task dungeons killed all emersion in the game. They were a fast way to get to 50 so you could RvR … I can see that but they killed the rest of the game entirely.

Mark:

If you take any piece of feedback away from this, please take this: No matter how much money you offered to discount EA, you couldn’t have gotten anyone with the authority to say so to talk publicly about how they haven’t served the MMO community well.

Remember that E&B was at 30K subscribers when it was cancelled. That’s still a lot of money. They would’ve made up the development money in reasonable time span at that rate. It was a modest success. Modest successes are prime tax deferrals for Madden’s profits.

Note that it’s you who’s having to go around defending yourself for the publisher’s former actions. No one from EA would ever have done that for you. If they’ve changed, they haven’t changed that much. You find someone at EA to talk with candor about why they have augured the MMO market so far and how they plan to change that, and I will have full faith and confidence in this partnership, and I’ll even buy an extra box.

Furthermore, you now have to do what no licensed MMO property has done to date – you have to absolutely hit this out of the park. You probably have to sell more boxes than Dawn of War sold, and you have to sell thousands upon thousands more than any other Games Workshop-licensed computer game sold.

I don’t know what was in the language of the contract, but I can probably guess a few things. I’m wagering EA has hefty performance guarantees for WAR, and they’ll lose relatively little money to pull out for a tax deferral if WAR doesn’t blow out the barrel. And I can’t imagine that they don’t have authority as when to say WAR hits shelves – after all, that’s their job, to put it on shelves. And the shelf date has been the breaking point in more than one instance.

I’m not saying you can’t do these things or that this might be the best move. But now, if WAR is a modest success, instead of a trimmed-back office Christmas party, it will be pink slips. Now, if Mythic hits it out of the park, it’ll be champagne and caviar in the cubes…but given the license’s record, given licensed MMOs records, given market saturation, the odds are long. Real long.

Riprend really hit the kicker of this whole thing. It’s Mark that is doing the explaining. EA isn’t stepping up to say they’ve screwed up in the past and are giving Mark free reign on this one.

I find it funny that, despite the long list I posted (which isn’t even complete) of EA’s MMO failures, I am actually one of the few who seem optimistic about this deal. Maxis and Tiburon seem to be able to work in the EA system; let’s see if Mythic can do the same. I also want to point out to Riprend that 30K subs to a big company like EA *is* a losing proposition, because they can allocate those employees elsewhere on more productive projects. I don’t know if Mark got anything in writing about DAoC, but there certainly is a risk that in a couple of years, if DAoC’s subs dip below 50K or something, that EA will want to pull the plug. But I don’t think there’s anything to worry about until Warhammer comes out, at least.

EA, in many ways, is like a good-for-nothing rich man. He looks good, he’s rich and all the women of the neighborhood want to be his girl and ride in his shiny car. But when they become his girl they find the ugly side. He yells at them, degrades them, beats them and then moves on. The next girl always believes that the others didn’t deserve him. That they didn’t understand him. That they will be the one who meets his needs and whom he treats like a queen. And in the end they all wind up battered and broken in the gutter, realizing, far too late, what fools they’d been. And as they yell warnings to the next girl she just shrugs it off as the cycle repeats itself.

I would love to believe that Mythic is finally “the one” for EA. That this will be the company/game that wasn’t run into the ground. But nobody at Mythic can convince me of that. It’s a shame too because I can’t think of anyone with anything bad to say about Mythic either. It’s not Mythic’s credibility in question here, it’s EA’s commitment. I really, really, really want to believe Mythic can change EA but I fear this is just the latest in a long string of promising companies who saw joining with EA as a way to improve themselves and found that, when they didn’t meet EA’s titanic goals, they were all dumped in the gutter and their games were shut down and burned in a giant bonfire. There’s a history here and it’s apparently been ignored.

I wish you well, Mark. I truly do. And I hope WAR is everything you and EA hope it will be. Because, if it’s not, this could be Mythic’s legacy.

Microsoft was licensing it to EA for the game.

Microsoft still owns the rights, and is basically sitting on them and not doing a damn thing with it.

Your dream is going to be a -while- in the making.

Mine too, but I gave up years ago.

Uhh as to the shadowrun thing… I WISH that was true. http://www.e3insider.com/products/?productID=TK7T8OS11C

When is Dgate coming back Mark?