We Do It To Ourselves, We Do – Why MMOs Are as They Are

Meridian 59 - one of the first modern MMOs, but often forgotten in the face of Ultima Online and Everquest.

Psychochild made an interesting post recently – why haven’t MMOs lived up to their early potential? Why hasn’t the early potential of games like Ultima Online or Meridian 59 with all their freedom and player-driven worlds been built on? Why have more controlled experiences like Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft dominated the genre?

Some people like to blame game designers as having some kind of failure of imagination, or publishers for only looking at the size of WoW’s player base and forcing designers to create clones. To some extent, this is a truth in this, but there is another, less frequently commented issue: it is what the majority players’ want. MMOs are as they are due to an issue of gamer culture.

It might not be what ex-MUD players want, who were used to having more control over their characters / the world among a small community of other, mostly friendly MUDders. It might not be what ex-UO and / or ex-SWG players want, who get to view those experiences through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and ignore macro-grinding out skills or badly designed character advancement systems or being a sheep among PvP wolves. But it is what the mass of players want.

When EQ came out, it unseated UO as the most popular MMO not only by being shinier and newer (and 3D), but by offering clear direction in how to progress. It lacked the depth and potential of UO, but EQ provided something more important: signposts for the way forward. When WoW was released, it polished those signposts even further. Comparatively Everquest 2 arguably tried to take a step back towards sandbox and this (along with many, many launch issues) saw players not hang around.

Or even compare Star Wars Galaxies with WoW. On one side, the spiritual successor to UO and holder of one of the best known geek IPs all backed by major MMO and entertainment companies. On the other side, a first-time entrant to the MMO market based on the respected RTS output of one studio. I don’t believe there is one single factor for WoW’s success, but it proved how big the MMO player base could get if offered the right features, with one of these features being gameplay that was easy to play solo or in short bursts.  SWG might have done okay in terms of sub numbers, but it never met management expectations, which was why the New Game Experience (NGE) was foisted onto players. A big difference was the time commitment required to play and advance in WoW versus SWG.

Ultimately there are more casual players (or: players who aren’t going to commit a lot of time to a game) than there are hardcore players (or: players who are going to commit a lot of time to a game). In the short-term, both will pay the same amount in sub fees to play, so it becomes a sensible business decision to aim that multi-million development budget at the larger number of casual players. Over their play lifetime, hardcore players might end up being worth more, but it isn’t necessarily much more – hardcore players might lock in long-term sub payment plans to take advantages of discounts while casual players might pay from month-to-month. This means a casual player who pays $15 a month for 8 months is worth the same as a hardcore player who pays $10 a month for 12 months, plus the casual p(l)ayer can end up costing less in terms of bandwidth and data management (although admittedly these costs aren’t as high as they used to be).

So, why isn’t there a next-generation-with-a-big-budget UO on the way? Quite simply its because there isn’t the market size to support it. Look at the MMOs that are currently being developed – I can’t think of one that is really trying for sandbox. Darkfall and Fallen Earth have tried – make your own decisions about their success in achieving it – but these are both indie projects. Currently leading the MMO hype train is Star Wars: The Old Republic which would appear to be the most theme park-oriented  MMO you could possibly imagine – a sharp contrast to the open- and player-driven structure of SWG.

Where Is Your Sense of Adventure?

One of Psychochild’s points is that recent MMOs lack a sense of adventure. This is also mostly due to the focus on short-term gaming – casual players aren’t going to have time to explore, so it isn’t worth developing ‘hidden’ content that most won’t see. This becomes even more true as MMOs get older, where even ‘unhidden’ content can be completely ignored by the mass of the player base if it is superseded by more recent additions.

Alternatively, if hidden content is attractive enough, it becomes a major destination pretty quickly – being a tourist trap is pretty much as far from hidden as you can get.

Another aspect to adventuring is a sense of the unknown. If someone has been playing MMOs since UO, it is going to be pretty hard to surprise them with something new. Especially if they can (and will) go to the game wiki and read up on any content they want prior to setting out. Being new and surprising is scary. Being surprised is a good way of running into failure, which is something that most players try to minimise. There is also the chance of going out to explore an area and find absolutely nothing of note, which is wasted time. So either the developer has to have enough hidden content that means players can explore with a high probability of finding something, or else only the truly dedicated explorers will ever be likely to see it (without using the wiki, of course).

Lord British discovers that player freedom has a smokey flavour.

Blaming the Victims

Also, let’s realise that pretty much every MMO experience that hands freedom to the player ends up being a lesson in why players should never be given too much freedom. UO’s early potential was perfectly summed up by a player killing the lead designer in-game while he was giving a speech: if you open the door to the possibility, players will take advantage. And that advantage ends up with dead monarchs.

The other issue with freedom is that the more options you give someone, the more paralysed by choice they can become. It’s the paradox of choice – by giving players multiple goals, you end up seeing them freeze in case they make the wrong decision and pick the wrong goal to aim for. Much easier to be told to kill ten rats and know that is exactly what you have to do – at least that way you have direction and purpose.

Of course, most players say they are bored with killing ten rats and I’m sure a lot are. But it certainly isn’t seeing players stream back to sandbox titles seeking something different. Nope – they go to the next MMO with familiar game mechanics. (Being bored with killing ten rats is actually more of a presentation of that goal than the execution of that goal, but that’s another issue entirely.)

I Walked Into A Door, Honest

The next wave of major MMOs certainly aren’t returning to sandboxes for inspiration either; instead they are looking at the FPS genre (such as APB) or single-player RPGs (Star Wars: Old Republic). The reason for this is simple: that’s where the players are. EQ, followed by WoW, pretty much beat down the entire sandbox genre. Although there are a few out there – EvE being the biggest – they really are a niche in the market. Plus operating a sandbox pretty much guarantees a studio has to be prepared for players looking to manipulate the system wherever possible – CCP’s policy of letting players scam and deceive each other nearly unhindered is a part of letting players have their freedom.

Putting down rules to “play nice” is the antithesis of sandbox play, which should be equally open to everyone working together to create a utopia to every high level player ganking every n00b they see, desecrating the corpse and driving the unworthy from the game. Certainly MMO players will try to exploit mechanics within theme park MMOs, but the impact there is generally less and people are more accepting in those titles of being bound to play by certain hardcoded rules provided they generally don’t block their characters’ forward advancement.

EvE Online does a lot of things differently, all of which contribute to what it is. Being a sandbox is only one of those features.

At the end of the day, MMOs are as they are because that’s what the player base has shown there is a demand for. It’s not just “everyone copies WoW”, it’s that there hasn’t been a sandbox game that approached being a breakthrough success for a very long time. EvE was a gradual success as a sandbox after starting out as an abject failure, but EvE also does so many things differently it is arguable how much you can cut ’sandbox’ out from ’single server’ and ‘high drama’ and point at it as a singular reason for success.

Other sandbox MMOs haven’t attracted the same kind of attention – Darkfall and Fallen Earth might both be the most sandbox-y titles for a long time, but neither shifted a huge number of box copies at launch. Sure, they might be profitable as indie titles and grow, but conventional wisdom is that MMOs get their largest player bump from launch and box releases – starting small might be the quickest way to bankruptcy.

Going back to the original question, MMOs haven’t lived up to their original, virtual world promises because the audience has changed and indicated that online game > virtual world when it comes to what they will buy. Building a virtual world is an immensely difficult task and current experience shows that you won’t attract the same size audience compared to a new theme park MMO.

Ultimately if players want a new sandbox MMO, they’ve got to prove there is a demand for it. This hasn’t happened in recent history, which is why the future belongs to the MMOFPS (FPS being major unit shifters) and theme park MMOs with geektacular IPs like Star Wars and Star Trek.

Truisms in Game Development: Someone Always Loves The Status Quo

Chris Bruce, Senior Lead Animator/Visual FX artist on City of Heroes / Villains and frequent forum poster made this observation the other day:

“And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the time I’ve been here it’s that any change will be perceived by some people as a good change, others as a bad change, and most as the wrong thing to mess with entirely.”

His point is being made about changes made long ago to the Hamidon raid – it was CoH’s sole original raid and offered a unique reward for defeating the Hamidon. Despite having an odd 100 players show up to do these raids, the actual combat was done by a small sub-set of those players while the rest only had to attack the target once or twice to get tagged as part of the raid and get the reward at the end. The change reduced the number of players who could take part to 50 and increased the overall participation required. It’s not perfect – repeating the same thing three times is dull – but it doesn’t let nearly as many players stand to the back and chat amongst themselves in order to receive their rewards (and those rewards, the Hami-Os, are no longer as comparatively powerful as they once were anyway).

His point is worth noting. No matter what a game designer does, there will always be a group of players who prefer the old way or the status quo, as well as those who think those resources would have been better spent elsewhere. Sometimes these preferences are for very good reasons and sometimes they are just white noise (or worse, posts that look like they could be a good reason but are actually white noise to the discussion) but resistance to change is something that appears in every MMO from its player base (at least – I’m sure design teams are resistant to changing content as well!).

Cryptic’s 100k Plan?

This could just be an interesting coincidence, but I also think it answers a number of questions about Cryptic’s MMO development strategy.

Jack Emmert

In July 2009, G4TV asked Cryptic’s Chief Creative Officer (and fan favourite punching bag) Jack Emmert how many players Champions Online needed for success:

G4: Speaking of it being successful, when you’re launching an MMO, like how many subscribers do you need in order to survive or thrive?

JE: Well, I think that number is the number for success is over 100,000 for us. If it’s over 100,000, I’m skipping the light fantastic. The break-even point is somewhere below 100,000. And that’s obviously depending upon – every MMO is different – depending on how much money is spent on it. But, clearly, we mark 100,000 as success.

More recently, in November 2009, MaximumPC asked Cryptic’s Executive Producer on Star Trek Online Craig Zinkievich about STO’s business model and the number of players it needs to attract:

Craig Zinkievich

MPC: Is it a chicken-and-egg scenario where you need to have enough subscriber revenue to make new content to attract new subscribers?

CZ: Definitely. There’s a barrier. From our experience, if you don’t break 100,000 subscribers at any point in time, your game tends to just go away. Most games that don’t break that 100,000-subscriber mark tend to just be flashes in the pan. But once you do, you tend to get a really solid fan base with enough revenue to keep adding to the game, and things go pretty well.

It is interesting that both men mention that 100k figure as a key subscription point for their MMOs. It could just be a nice round figure they both plucked out of the air, but I think the potential also exists that Cryptic is aiming to build MMOs that break even at around 100k players, with development budgets to match. In an industry where MMOs need 500k players for success or might spend over $100 million developing a MMO, aiming to be successful at the lower end of six figures might seem like a lack of ambition. However, I see such a plan as a very intelligent given the number of high profile, big budget launches that have since failed to find and keep a sizeable audience.

If Cryptic is going down this path, it explains the reduced development time (2 or so years for STO, 3 or so years for Marvel Universe Online / ChampO), the reduced time given to open betas / testing (expensive to operate), the reliance on an evolving internal development engine (cuts down development time and costs) and the introduction of official microtransaction channels (the C=Store increases per-player revenue over just the subscription fees, meaning a lower subscriber base is required for profitability). It also explains the multiple MMOs in production at one time – Cryptic could be attempting to avoid having all its eggs in one basket by having a number of different MMOs on offer, all profitable at a ‘low’-yet-substantive active subscription figure.

This isn’t to say that Cryptic wouldn’t want to develop a MMO that attracts 5 million players and sees everyone rolling around in cash. It’s just that they aren’t betting the entire studio on only one title to do it.

But What Would Atari Do?

If this was Cryptic’s plan, would Atari have signed off on it? Doesn’t every publisher want to create the next World of Warcraft?

Maybe not Atari. Going back to the original press release of Atari’s (then Infogrames) acquisition of Cryptic, a key focus was on Cryptic’s lower development costs and in creating “unique, high quality MMO games on 18 to 24-month cycles“. It would be impossible to create the next WoW in 24 months even with an existing game engine, so (unless Atari is incredibly unrealistic) they must have some kind of acceptance for the minimum 100k players per MMO for a number of different, rapidly developed MMOs. Cryptic is Atari’s MMO developer / online platform provider, so it unlikely Cryptic is operating completely free of its owner’s control and developing MMOs for 100k players while Atari doesn’t want any less than 1m active subs.

When Cryptic announces its next MMO – rumours of Cryptic’s Neverwinter Nights exist, although I still think that MMO market is open for a dark world / horror MMO that Cryptic’s development art has hinted about for over 2 years (or longer) – it will be interesting to see if they follow the same pattern of rapid development and release (next title due in 2011, according to those same rumours).

Or the 100k figure could just be a coincidence and I’m reading too much into it.

Looking Back At Advice on a Star Trek MMO

Way back in the dark mists of January 2008 Eric Heimburg, who was Perpetual’s Lead Systems Designer on Star Trek Online back before that company folded, wrote a few points out to Cryptic / whoever might get the Star Trek MMO. With Cryptic’s STO launching just a few short months away in February 2010, I thought it was interesting to compare that advice with what has since been announced. Please read his article – and it is an interesting one, as is its follow-up – for a better perspective on Eric’s experience than I’m going to cover here.

This Star Trek uniform is non-canon and thus an affront to the every true Trek fan.

Advice #1: Don’t try to be too true to the license. and Advice #4: Ignore the fans.

Reading into these points of advice, I see this covering some “remember that you are making a MMO, not a Star Trek simulator, so don’t abandon MMO conventions too easily” territory. And this is good advice.

A lot of people have the attitude that since STO is using the Star Trek IP, it needs to follow it exactly. This just isn’t true. The highly successful new “Star Trek” film basically threw out every bit of existing Star Trek lore barring the character names and it didn’t hurt the franchise at all. (Side note: personally I thought the film was over-rated, but that’s another issue.) Instead, “Star Trek” just focused on making a fast-moving action film with a clear story and the box office was very good, so dumping decades worth of lore had little impact on its success.

So, although there have been some complaints of terms like “tanking”, “DPS” and “support’ appearing in STO trailers, the reality is that STO has to appeal to existing MMO players as a whole, not just Trek fans who might also play MMOs. Love or hate the holy trinity terms, they are basic role definitions for combat in MMOs, so not having them is a red flag to all those players who want to better understand the game. Now, an STO ‘tank’ might not be the same as a World of Warcraft ‘tank’, but simply having the concepts there make it more acceptable to a lot of MMO players.

To date, it appears that Cryptic is following this advice. They certainly want to give the title a Star Trek flavour, but they are setting out to make a MMO first. How well it all plays is only going to be known during open beta, but this is going to be more important to the title’s success than if the lore is followed 100%.

Also, regardless of what Cryptic did, there would always be a group who felt that it “wasn’t Star Trek enough”. This isn’t an area where everyone can be satisfied with the outcome.

Advice #2: Make a fun game loop first.

The ‘fun’ won’t be known until the title hits open beta, but Cryptic has indicated that they have episode missions and procedurally generated content. This at least seems that they are trying to make the core of the game feel Trek-ish in its game loop.

Advice #3: Don’t try to make the ground and space games at the same time.

Cryptic is making the ground and space games at the same time, as seen here. Advice ignored.

Advice #5: Don’t go public too soon.

Is an extended testing period really an expendable for STO?

Although STO has probably spent two years in development at Cryptic, here is where I feel the need to go, “Hmmm … yeah … well …” as this would seem to be a large trap that Cryptic are heading towards. STO’s closed beta looks like it is going to only run for about 3 months while open beta is going to be 1 month (January 2010) and then STO launches. That’s an awfully big rush out the door.

I’m going to write a longer piece on Champions Online’s beta, but a key thing it needed was longer server up times and longer testing. If anything, STO is getting a shorter testing period than Cryptic’s other MMO and it would be hard to say that ChampO didn’t have a good number of issues to deal with at launch that more testing would have helped smooth out. STO could easily fall into the same hole. Regardless of when STO is launched, there will always be players who will say it needed more time, but only having such a short beta period limits the ability to actually change game features according to testing feedback.

Of all the pieces of Eric’s advice, it is this last one that was probably the most important – launch it right and spend the time required to get there. Unfortunately, it appears to be the piece of advice that Cryptic isn’t paying attention to.

Guess we’ll see at launch if this was the wise thing to do… or not.

How Many Players Bought Champions Online At Launch?

Champions Online's box art: The 80s called and they want their pen and paper RPG cover back.

Massively.com recently asked the question about how important subscription numbers are to consumers. On an immediate level they probably aren’t vital, but longer-term they point to a game’s survival and potential to be a success. This is especially true for MMOs launched since 2008 – their typical active player numbers have seen sharp declines since launch, more resembling ski slopes than healthy growth potential.

Which is why I’m interested in how many copies Champions Online sold at launch. Cryptic didn’t say how many copies they’d sold, possibly because they’ve seen how trumpeting that you’ve sold huge numbers when three months later your retention rate is less than 50% works out for you. In short: badly. It could also be because they didn’t want to be compared to Aion, who was releasing in the same month and had more pull as a title. Or maybe they are pulling a Turbine and not getting into announcing their player numbers on principle. Instead, what Cryptic did reveal is that about two months post-launch over 1 million characters had been created in ChampO – a pretty meaningless statistic when it comes to assessing active player numbers.

Guesses Follow Below

So, apart from that 1 million characters figure, what other data is there? Atari won’t be releasing any financial reports that include September 2009 for a while yet, so that’s unavailable at this point. What is known is that Champions Online was the third most purchased PC box title in September 2009. Now, the PC monthly sales charts are a sad place to visit, given that sales numbers aren’t given out probably so that PC box sales don’t look so pathetic next to console box sales (Case in point: Wolfenstein launched in August 2009 on multiple platforms and bombed, selling just 106k boxes. 17k of those were on the PC, which still got it to #7 for that month’s top PC box sales – by comparison, the #7 selling non-PC title sold 130k copies, while the 59k sales for the Xbox 360 version of Wolfenstein got it to a non-PC chart #18).

Aion was the most popular title in September 2009 and NCsoft has indicated they sold 970k boxes in Western markets – since it launched end of September 2009, all of those sales would have been launch sales. It gets tricky to compare ‘box sales’ to ‘copies’ because of digital downloads, but NCsoft’s own financials refer to those numbers as box sales. However, even that 970k isn’t so straight forward, given that there was also an Aion Collector’s Edition at #5 in the PC box sales chart. So, what kind of proportion of ‘normal’ to collector’s editions might there be?

Age of Conan released those kind of figures when 111k Collector’s Editions sold out along with 700k normal editions when the title launched, while eventually about 1 million boxed versions of AoC were released. That’s about 11% of all boxes being the more expensive collector versions. Although that kind of proportion makes sense to me, it is also the only kind of data I can see on collectors versus normal edition sales for the PC – if anyone has any further data / links, I’d be interested in seeing them.

If AoC’s experience is similar to Aion, about 11% of that 970k box figure were collector editions, which is about 107k. This would mean that about 863k normal boxes were sold for Aion, putting ChampO’s box sales somewhere between 108k and 863k. Free data on sales for The Sims 3 (#2) and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King  (#4) for September doesn’t seem to be available, so right now we move from “trying to take an educated guess” to “throwing a dart while blindfolded”.

Even Guessier Guesses

I know it's a guess-timate. I'll be interested to see how right (or wrong) I am.

If there really are about 1 million players just waiting to jump into the Next Big Thing MMO, then ChampO certainly attracted some of them. But probably not to the same extent as for Aion’s launch – for one, there were quite a few MMO players saving their money for Aion to launch in the same month and secondly because ChampO was trying to do something a bit different for a MMO (different genre, different server structure, different character creation, etc – final quality of execution is up for you to decide). Difference is a barrier to entry, so it probably kept some players away.

Given how top loaded most sales charts are – the top few titles can often sell more than the rest of the list combined – it’s likely that ChampO sold closer to the 863k figure than the 107k figure. As a stab in the dark, I’d say that ChampO was looking at 400k – 500k box sales at launch, which isn’t bad at at all. If I wanted to be optimistic, I’d go as high as 600k boxes, but I think that would be pushing it.

On top of this, ChampO also was #1 for digital distribution sales by revenue in its launch week on both Steam and Direct2Drive. So for launch, ChampO did pretty well for itself.

Player retention to this point however is probably another story for this title, but that’s a different topic to cover.

Money Money Money

Here's what it is all about.

One of the things that was noticed is that it didn’t take long for discounted ChampO box offers to start appearing. This led some to assume that ChampO’s box sales weren’t that hot so they’d started slashing prices to move them. There are two potential reasons I see for this:

1) ChampO’s box sales weren’t so hot so they started slashing prices to move them. If someone at Cryptic / Atari had 1m boxes printed, or if negative word of mouth after the launch day patch was really that bad, then this is possible.

2) Someone realised that ChampO had about 20 days at which to charge a price premium before Aion launched and stole their thunder.

Discounting box costs towards the end of the month could have been a driver towards ChampO’s overall position in the PC games sale chart, but ultimately post-September 21 Aion was the hot seller. So most of the sales would have been made during the early launch period, before Aion came and the discounting was applied.

Game Devs Don’t Understand Players – Aion and Medals

Recently announced in Aion is a new reward system. A player distributed reward system. Taken off the announcement:

“3) The most recent patch notes for 1.5.1 show that defending legions can now gain medals for successfully holding a fortress but many people feel this will not be enough incentive for fortress defense. Can you clarify if only the controlling legion gains medals for defense, or is it the entire race? How can one legion be expected to defend against an entire race?

• For the medals, once a fortress has been successfully defended, the Brigade General of the fortress will receive the medals via in game mail, and will be responsible for distributing accordingly. This allows the Brigade General the ability to award those who actively participated in defending the fortress, both inside and out of his/her own legion.”

I’ve bolded the important parts. After a successful fortress defence, medals are sent to one player to distribute to other players based on their contribution. How does anyone not see the potential abuse of this mechanic? Of Brigade Generals distributing medals based on guild affiliation and personal favouritism rather than actual participation?

Obviously any kind of reward system can be gamed, but a system that actively hands the rewards to one single player and then tasks them with handing them out ‘fairly’ seems to ignore everything game designers should know about how players behave: with self-interest.

“2012″ – Roland Emmerich Destroys America

Saw a preview screening last night. Excellent destruction porn – should be called “Roland Emmerich Destroys America”. Has a quite a few disaster movie cliches and ultimately you want to see the Russian twins die just because, but it keeps going at a fair enough clip that you generally get over it. Well acted too from some roles – John Cusak delivers his everyman persona, Chiwetel Ejiofor is solid despite some awful dialogue. Oliver Platt phones it in (he used to be so good in my opinion, but that seems so long and so many kilos ago) but although he’s meant to be the ‘evil’ guy, it is hard to argue with a lot of what his character says about how things have to happen, so he delivers it well. Some of the accents are terrible though.

Biggest problem? Length. It’s 2.5 hours. It’s also got every single disaster film in it – a ship overturns, volcanoes erupt, things fall in sinkholes, etc, so no disaster category is left unturned. Past a certain point I started to suffer disaster burnout.

Probably the best role in the film is Woody Harrelson’s nutball. He’s just fun. Also I don’t know who the American Captain is, but I got a kick out of his Grand Admiral Moff Tarkin vibe.

If you want to you could pick the movie to pieces, but I just enjoyed things falling down / blowing up.

The First One Million Customers

That's a lot of people.

I’ve noticed a trend worth commenting on in Western MMOs. It is only based on limited data points, but it’s worth codifying. The trend is:

If you launch a AAA MMO in Western markets, you are going to attract about 1 million players at launch.

My evidence:

Age of Conan shipped 1.2 million boxes at launch, sold 800k of them and saw about 700k active subscriptions.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning shipped 1.5 million boxes at launch, sold 1.2 million copies and saw about 800k active subscriptions.

Aion has just launched in Western markets and NCsoft’s Q3 2009 financial figures reveal that Aion 970k copies. Even assuming that 10 – 20% of these copies are never activated, that still sees a pretty sizeable population for Aion in the West at launch.

For the top two games (and we’ll see for Aion) retention of those players turned into a big issue. That aside, it would certainly seem that there are almost 1 million Western players looking to get in on the next big MMO on the ground floor (and I know I could say ‘800k’ and be closer to actual figures, but ‘1 million’ has a better ring to it!).

Were I a publisher, I’d say that shipping anything over 1 million boxes is overkill. Were I a developer, I’d know I’d have to prepare my launch servers to deal with that kind of attention (even if it trails off after that). Indie MMOs work on a smaller scale than this, but AAA-titles who launch in multiple Western regions need to be able to deal with these kind of number, or at least plan for them.

So, why this post? It’s the lead-in to a look at how many players Champions Online attracted at launch.

The Economy Is So Bad, Even The Dead Are Hard To Find

A shortage of suitable cadavers is hampering medical education and training. Fortunately (?), private enterprise is coming to the rescue.

Let’s hope they don’t get too proactive.

EA To Slash Staff; Starts By Cutting WAR Down

There is a good chance these two are now joining the unemployment queue.

As part of its third quarter financial announcements, EA has posted a significant loss and has indicated that up to 1500 jobs are going to be cut. The full cuts won’t be made until April 2010, but some studios were hit quicker than others, including Mythic, developer behind Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR). There are indications that effective immediately 80 people have been let go from Mythic and that this is rumoured to be the majority of WAR’s live team.

This isn’t a surprising announcement at all – WAR has been on a long downhill run since launch, from about 1.2 million box sales / 750k odd active players at launch in September 2008 to around 300k players in February 2009 to rumours of less than 200k players by June 2009. With the launch of other big name titles in September 2009, those player numbers are probably even lower than that. I will be very surprised if WAR lasts long enough to see its second birthday, while the end of WAR might be the end of Mythic.

This move also potentially puts the future of Ultima Online at risk. Mark Jacobs, the former President of Mythic who EA fired in a previous wave of cost cutting, indicated that he was the one who convinced EA not to cancel UO. It’s fairly obvious that Mythic has no more pull within EA, so the next time EA goes looking for projects to cut, UO could easily be put on the chopping board.