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Warhammer Team Hit By Layoffs
Zonk notes that Mythic Entertainment, developer of Warhammer Online, is being hit by another round of layoffs. The report estimates that between 60 and 130 staff were let go as part of Electronic Arts' reduction of its workforce. This comes alongside news that the number of Warhammer subscribers has settled to around 300,000. Mythic's Mark Jacobs was quick to affirm that while they were "resizing the team," their plans and schedule are unchanged, citing lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed. Hopefully this means that their upcoming "live expansion," A Call to Arms, will not be affected by the layoffs.
Lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed...
Kinda like the doctor who says:
I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is you've lost a lot of blood.
The good news is you lost an arm and a leg too, so you don't need as much of it.
And I love people like you, who are so eager to blame the producer (or anyone else) for not giving a team infinite funds and time.
The facts are:
1. The producer isn't some mysterious bogeyman who does nothing but set arbitrary deadlines and stop you from finishing QA. The producer is the guy who pays for the whole development _and_ QA, and each extra month is a month he'll be paying for.
2. I don't know how you imagine things to be, but any project involves some negotiations. Basically those devs said at some point, "yes, we can do it before date X and with Y million dollars." I'm not aware of any game which was pushed out before the date the devs agreed on. In fact, most blow the deadline and the budget. Some outright lie to get the contract, or are apparently unable to learn from past bad estimates.
Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.
And while I have no clue about how it went with the deadlines and budget in the final round, but at the very least, the team delivered less than they promised. See all that cut out content. That's stuff they hadn't just promised their fans, it's stuff they had promised the publisher for that money too. They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.
3. Most games actually don't even break even as it is. E.g., EA actually subsidizes a heck of a lot of games out of the profits of their sports games and such. I.e., statistically the expectation for any of those games is that it will be yet another hole to throw money down. And digging a bigger hole isn't exactly going to help.
So, yes, from where I stand it looks to me entirely fair to blame the devs. What do _you_ propose? That the publisher keeps throwing money down a rat hole until the end of times?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/10/
... but I cancelled a few days ago.
It wasn't that the game was bad - I liked it and kept my subscription up since release even though I only played it a few times.
It was that rebooting my MacBook Pro from OS X into Vista became too high a bar for entry. It was just easier to load up WoW than to reboot and play WAR. When you use OS X for everything, and you have to quit all the apps and reboot for a game...
I wanted to love it. I bought a copy for myself (collector's edition) and a copy for my wife. We played for a few hours in total (I hit level 10!), but in the end, the game did not fit our need for casual gaming.
We didn't want an easy game or everything handed to us. We just wanted a game that was accessible. Booting to another OS sounds simple (and is) but after a while it becomes too much.
I'm ready to re-subscribe one day... I did like the game.
WoW should serve as an example of how cutting edge graphics do not rule the MMO landscape the way they do in other games. It would be nice if other developers took note that WoW has initiated millions into the MMO market. Despite all their collective faults, actual or perceived, the WoW subscribers have more appreciation now regarding issues like PvP/PvE balance, bots, grouping, crafting, housing, etc. Old MMOs when in development found their forums flooded with questions about screenshots/movies. Now go look at the new Star Wars MMO in development and you have daily questions about will it be released with a native Mac client or how will it handle PvP/RvR or crafting vs looting gear. The consumers have gotten over the glitz factor being the number one selling point with MMOs and are now showing interest in gameplay aspects that before they didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss. Now we just need some developers to spend more time on the rules engine as they do on the graphics engine.