And I don’t feel too sorry for Swofford. When the Korea Times reported the whole truth about the “financial disaster” in Feb 2008 the PR department at NcSoft Austin called the paper and reporter quite a few unkind names, and insinuated that the reporter was dishonest and incompetent. The gaming community did their share of jeering at the reporter at Swofford’s example.

Maybe you don’t have the answers because you’ve got blinders on.

The game cost about $50M to create, and they currently have 30,000 players. Just for grins, let’s say for each subber currently playing, FIVE other people bought the game at the full $50 each, but lost interest & stopped playing.

So that’s 180,000 boxes at $50 each or $9m in box revenue, trying to offset $50m in dev costs. If TR charges industry standard rate of $15 per month, the small subscription base would only generate $5.4m per year in revenue, not profits.

So even if they had ZERO operating costs, the sub revenue would need over 7 1/2 years just for the project to break even. If it was *your personal* money at stake, you’d pull the plug too.

the weird thing is of TR had killed NCSoft or AC2 had pushed Turbine into bankruptcy, both games probably would have still been up and running in some form today. When a MMO closes it is normally that it is a cost that exceeds that which the developer/producer/owner wishes to bear.

It’s all relative, you don’t have the magic truth wand.

Consumers should not be expected to get heart broken about what the devs are gunna do after they lost their jobs. It does not relate to them at all.

Also, from memory, TR was giving NCsoft negative royalties, meaning they had to pay out more money to licensees than they were getting in return from player subs. TR cost a bomb to develop, a bomb to run and was a bomb of a product.

However, as a question: which is sadder? An unsuccessful MMO that is quickly killed (TR), or a borderline successful MMO that is kept in zombie status and not a particularly large player base (SOE’s stable, particularly MxO)?

Finally – it really depends on who at Massively is writing the article as to if the PR guy gets a blowjob or not.

Should assumes that was the case.

Mostly though, I see nothing false about what Dave wrote. He said the earlier layoffs didn’t impact TR (true), that Operation Immortality was in full swing (true), and that the team was dedicated (very true) and still working on the game (true).

Where is the lie again?

Companies can’t talk about decisions that *might* get made in cases like this. If he said “we’re considering shutting down TR” that would have torpedoed any chance the team had of recovering it. It would have been flat out stupid to say that. And expecting them to do anything else is unfair and just setting yourself up for disappointment.

–Size of the sustained development is just one frequently mentioned here… sure, you can shrink to a skeleton crew if your code is hardy and running well, but if your game is showing stress fractures and will need an investment to even sustain its current population, you’ve got problems. U

–underlying tech might also play a factor. TR has a kind of pseudo-shooter feel that’s far less tolerant to issues like what the client displays than your typical system, meaning more frequent positional updates are needed, meaning more of the subscription $$ going to bandwidth costs.

–contractual obligations are often a big one. These companies don’t operate in a vaccuum- there are partnerships and various service providers. Many of these may have been minimum-set-fees that could only be escaped by the total termination of the service…

–finally, there’s also a gamble that when you lose the player, you might just be gaining the player elsewhere instead. They may bet that a good share of the typical TR’er will use the subscription $$ for another NCSoft game instead.