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Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story
sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project."
The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.
I'm working in the games industry for quite a few years now, meanwhile as a project manager (just for a small, independent studio) and those are some of the lessons that I have learnt so far:
- Have a plan and and be ambitious - but have realistic expectations.
- Ship it when it's done.
- Stop it when you see you will never reach your goal.
- Don't release crappy software, it will hurt you in the long term.
- Be honest to yourself and the people around you (in that order!)
So stuff like Warhammer, Age of Conan, Hellgate London, etc. should have never been released the way they got released.
The game actually is quite a lot of fun and it's finally been going in the right direction for the last 8 months or so. They've focused entirely on the PvP/RvR experience though, so those looking for updates to the PVE aspect of the game should probably look elsewhere. As for the dull keep-taking in T4, that's being overhauled in the patch that's currently on the test server. They did a similar overhaul of the end game that's city invasion which turn out to be quite good. They're definitely on the right track these days, but it be too little too late. I know me and my friends will stick around for a while longer though, there's simply no pvp experience that gets close elsewhere.
This kind of reminds me when an employee resigned and in their letter of resignation gave their reason (basically pointing out how corrupt, dishonest and incompetent our manager was). Of course, the next layer up just ignored it as "that person no longer works here, and therefore their observations will not be considered". After hearing about what was written, we all thought that it would be certainty that the manager was going to be replaced. Long story short, they just blamed the guy that left.
Needless to say, two months later the entire engineering team (all five of us) resigned in the same way. All five letters were put on this guys desk within the space of 30 seconds. The look on his face was priceless. This was years ago, and that guy is still working there.