Tagged with Tabula Rasa …

City of Heroes / Villains: An End of the World Event

I was surprised to see a large spike in my site traffic today, especially to older posts about how many players CoH/V had. Then I looked further and saw that NCsoft announced its intentions to shut down CoH/V and Paragon Studios. This has taken a lot of people by surprise, given that it seemed that … Continue reading →

Great MMO Collapses of Our Time – Destination Games

You can get excited now, because if you picked this option, you’ve decided to back Destination Games! Destination Games Game That Destroyed Them: Tabula Rasa Studio Launch Date:  April 2000 Studio Closure Date: 28 February 2009 Invested In By: NCsoft Estimated Money Blown: US$106m Cause of Death: Restarting the project, internal culture of fear and secrecy, … Continue reading →

Five Reasons Why SWOR Is A High Risk MMO: #2 It Is Going To Cost Too Much

Following on from reason number 1, the next big problem that Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to face is that it is going to cost too much.

Cost estimates for SWOR vary from the US$150m mark up to the US$300m mark, which is a big range, but regardless of its true cost it is EA’s self-proclaimed biggest project ever and even BioWare sees it being multiple times bigger than anything they’ve worked on before. The reason is will cost too much is that combination of profit, business practicality and ego I mentioned before, but the development costs are actually what could cause the most problems post launch.

To understand this, you have to look at how MMOs actually make money: box sales, subscription fees and real money transactions (RMT). Continue reading →

APB: Well, Since Everyone Else Is Doing It…

The failure of All Points Bulletin is a current hot topic, especially since it looks to have pretty much destroyed the generally well-regarded developer Real Time Worlds. A great look at this toppling can be seen at GameBrief – the only thing that appears wrong are claims that APB only sold around 10k copies, whereas … Continue reading →

How Many Players Does CoH/V Have Anyway?

The core metric for assessing the size of a MMO is the number of active players. It’s a simple metric that is easy to understand and compare, even if it isn’t perfect (after all, revenue and  profitability are probably more important regardless of player base size). It’s power is such that good numbers are trumpeted … Continue reading →

Nostalgia: Good. Criticism of Nostalgia: Bad.

Keen and Graev’s blog has been doing a bit of introspection about MMOs – how they are moving backwards in terms of design and how nostalgia is a great thing. It’s a common cry in discussions about MMOs – today’s titles aren’t as good as the previous ones – but the interesting defence here is … Continue reading →

Why NCsoft Doesn’t Sell Off Its Failures

Adam Martin picked up on my previous entry and expanded it in a fantastic way based on his time there – basically, NCsoft Korea has too much money to bother with small projects, so only big projects are worth considering. I am a complete outsider here – not worked for NCsoft Korea or any other … Continue reading →