Predictions: 1m+ players 3 days out; how about in January 2013?

[01101010]

Isn't this where they release some bullshit press non-sense about how the initial game needed more people to get it up and running. Since the game has been released, there is no need for these extras? I seem to recall that happening with another game not too long ago.

And remind me again, didn't Bioware absorb Mythic? Wonder how many of those guys are actually going to be left.

[Ingmar]

We don't actually know who/where cuts are happening yet, do we?

[Sky]

We don't actually know who/where cuts are happening yet, do we?

Don't question the doomcasting!

They may as well shut down the servers now!

[Mazakiel]

Not good enough.  The game failed so bad, the servers must then be disassembled, set on fire, and the remains then placed in lead caskets and buried at sea. 


I'm guessing they'll trim people from some other project not related to Bioware. 

[Sjofn]

I feel like maybe the remains of the servers should be shot into the sun instead.

[Redgiant]

The first GW2 BWE for pre-purchases is April 27-29. That will draw even more away, esp. the PvP crowd.

Since it's only BWE's until release (I expect summer), it's only temp but the impact over next weekend should be visible.

[Soln]

I repeat... it's a shame, I liked bioware.

seconded and I had high hopes for SWTOR.  But when you can buy a lightsaber on the AH or they drop off womprats, well... made me sad.

[Modern Angel]

At a development budget of US$200m, those estimates would have been big. They would have been something like 3m+ box sales at launch and 1m+ subscribing players for 12 months.

Wasn't it Lum's bit months and months ago which did the napkin math and came to some ridiculous sustained sub numbers?

I agree that the obsession with millions AND MILLIONS of players is kind of dumb but in this case it's justified because they need those numbers to make their money back. Shit, Trion might be the second most successful MMO company because of sub to cost ratio and they have what? 200k? 300k?

[Paelos]

The problem right now is that all tech companies are taking a hit on a Wall Street, and EA has walked nuts-first into a PR grinder with ME3. That brings a bad situation with their budget on this game even more scrutiny in a bad market when a normal situation would have been overlooked without cuts.

EA's stock already hit a 52 week low yesterday, but we'll see what happens over the next month when the panic wears off.

[Furiously]

The problem right now is that all tech companies are taking a hit on a Wall Street, and EA has walked nuts-first into a PR grinder with ME3. That brings a bad situation with their budget on this game even more scrutiny in a bad market when a normal situation would have been overlooked without cuts.

EA's stock already hit a 52 week low yesterday, but we'll see what happens over the next month when the panic wears off.

I think the question will be how many people they got back from the two for one deal. They must have lost a ton of subs to make losing one month of subs hoping to get more people back.

[Tannhauser]

Yeah...not Bioware/EA's greatest year.  Maybe next time write a good ending to your beloved sci-fi franchise and don't listen to Mythic when it comes to MMO's.

Self-inflicted wounds are the worst.

[Rokal]

I seriously doubt Mythic had anything to do with the success or failures of SWTOR. From EALouse, it didn't sound like much of Mythic was left after Warhammer bombed and the team that was left didn't have anything to do with SWTOR.

[Nevermore]

I feel like maybe the remains of the servers should be shot into the sun instead.

They're saving that for the Battlestar Galactica MMO.

[Lantyssa]

The BSG servers wouldn't make it off the launchpad...

[Simond]

It's a shame, I liked bioware.

Lesson one of running a dev house: Never sell your company to EA.
(Lesson two: If you've ignored lesson one you'd better hope that you never release a mediocre sequel to a fan-favourite, an MMO, or a game so controversial it makes it to Forbes and the BBC. God forbid you do all three one after the other).

On the bright side, Obsidian look like they're going to survive now. 

[Ratman_tf]

Lesson one of running a dev house: Never sell your company to EA.

Did Bioware have much choice in the matter? I'm not super-savvy on the monkey business, but did they have a board that might have voted on that, or did EA buy up a bunch of their stock or something?

A little googling shows that EA bought Bioware's parent corp, VG Holding Company.

[Simond]

VG Holding Co. was mostly run by (and owned by) Bioware & Pandemic execs. Hence why the Bioware board got nice piles of cash for selling to EA.

[Fabricated]

I have a funny feeling that the only people who care about Bioware falling apart at Bioware are the people who didn't already parachute out to other companies (or people like the guys who are making The Banner Saga) and are NOT board members who made a fuckload of money selling out.

[amiable]

It's a shame, I liked bioware.

Lesson one of running a dev house: Never sell your company to EA.
(Lesson two: If you've ignored lesson one you'd better hope that you never release a mediocre sequel to a fan-favourite, an MMO, or a game so controversial it makes it to Forbes and the BBC. God forbid you do all three one after the other).

On the bright side, Obsidian look like they're going to survive now. 

The people who sold Bioware out to EA most likely made so much money they will never have to work a day in their life again.  If they want to, they can go off and form another gaming company.  EA gets to trade on the good name of Bioware to make back the money it spent until folks wise up (which is about now), so its a win-win form everyone.  Except for the consumer, but these days you have to be a savvy consumer or you will get hosed in anything.

[Paelos]

I don't think you have to be that savvy to realize EA will incorporate any studio into their bland offerings eventually. The question was how fast.

[Simond]

Obligatory:

[Lakov_Sanite]

Actually, I doubt EA is happy at all about this.  Even if bioware was gutted into being nothing but a name, it was that name that EA cared about, it held weight.  That name has now eroded badly in value and bioware titles have gone from a must buy to a wait and see.

[Venkman]

WoW allowed money people to think MMOs were as much a hit driven business as the yet-another-sequel model. And those same money people are cut from the IP + brand equity = moneyhats mold. They're never right for long, but to them, they're right for long enough.

MMOs are services, but nobody cares after launch. Just the players blithely paying their monthly fee on the promise of as much new content going into the next year of the game as had gone into getting the game to launch. Meanwhile, the company is looking for its quickest path to automated profit so they can check out/launch the next thing/get bought up. Too bad about that live team and their ever narrowing resources.

So, financing goes into the selling, and then moves on to the next thing to finance through selling. Maybe a few keep thinking "just a bit more investment" can keep the numbers rising. But the last game to continue growing after launch was WoW as far as I can tell. While quality and timing were certainly big parts, so was the rolling series of launches that continually generated positive press. In the end, even the staunchest proponents of continued investment get shouted down. And it's worst at public companies where you're not rewarded for success, you're rewarded for growth, and your growth can't just be revenue, it needs to be growth in profit.

It would make for a lot less sleepless nights if companies would downplay their expectations. But then, they'd need to prevent themselves from hiring Marketing and PR people. Of course, that's not possible even with a beloved brand with a household name, because the reasons those come to being is because of strong Marketing and PR (and quality, but quality means nothing if nobody knows about it and rare is the company like CCP that can wait 8 years for their brand to become something all on its own).

Eh. Same story across all industries really.

[Margalis]

The people who sold Bioware out to EA most likely made so much money they will never have to work a day in their life again. 

One of those people was Riccitiello, who was both the head of EA and part of the venture group behind Bioware/Pandemic. Most of the people who got rich were probably those venture guys.

Bioware/Pandemic was bought for 800 million dollars, it's very difficult to see that being a good investment. Pandemic probably flat out lost money after being bought, which means Bioware has to bring in over 800 million of profit. Every Bioware franchise is in question to some degree - not a good place to be in. It's a lot like Microsoft and Rare.

[Kageru]

It's because they think of brands and IP as being the value but don't realise they'll smother the culture and lose lots of the people. Especially when they are forced to keep regular reiterations of the brand rolling out to feed EA's earning needs.

So I'm rather to happy to see them fail. Though the "story is the fourth pillar of the MMO" line is probably going to keep me amused for years to come.

[Soln]

So I'm rather to happy to see them fail. Though the "story is the fourth pillar of the MMO" line is probably going to keep me amused for years to come.

Particularly when they graft elaborate voice overs onto useless kill-ten-womprats quests that are the same for both factions and the same flavor on every planet/zone.  Or maybe that's what you meant...

Yeah it's a disappointment for me on every level.  Still hoping something pulls it around though. 

[UnSub]

Although EA is the convenient villain in this piece, BioWare took a lot of their money. They released SWOR, which was meant to be the jewel in EA's crown.

BioWare didn't need to sell out, but they did.

In a lot of ways I think that what happened is part "tone from the top" (i.e. EA's influence) but also BioWare buying their own hype and wanting that huge chequebook behind them. How many times did they get out in front of the press and talk about how awesome they were, how awesome SWOR / ME3 / DA2 etc would be?

EA isn't writing BioWare's stories, or coding their quests, or anything like that. There is an argument that BioWare tried to release too much at once - including SWOR, which had to take up a lot of internal focus - which may have partly been driven by EA - but a number of these issues are due to BioWare itself, not EA.

[Rokal]

WoW allowed money people to think MMOs were as much a hit driven business as the yet-another-sequel model. And those same money people are cut from the IP + brand equity = moneyhats mold. They're never right for long, but to them, they're right for long enough.

MMOs are services, but nobody cares after launch. Just the players blithely paying their monthly fee on the promise of as much new content going into the next year of the game as had gone into getting the game to launch. Meanwhile, the company is looking for its quickest path to automated profit so they can check out/launch the next thing/get bought up. Too bad about that live team and their ever narrowing resources.

This just isn't very accurate at this point, especially where SWTOR is concerned. In the past MMO companies usually downsized their work-force after launch, or had the majority of their team move onto the 'next big thing' instead of patch content. It's no longer the case, especially with the rise of F2P games where your 'next big thing' *is* going to be in patch content. Even strictly subscription-model MMOs are keeping larger live teams unless the developer is on life-support, as the days when you could keep people subscribed for months to years without any new content are over. The genre is just too crowded and competitive for that to stand.

It isn't what EA tried in any case, SWTOR retained the majority of it's dev team (according to Bioware) after launch. The speed/size of the updates they've been pushing out supports their claims. SWTOR's failure will not be due to lack of funding, DAOC developers, PVP balance, or any other half-baked pet theories from this thread. It will be because it was not well thought-out as an MMO.

Going back to EAlouse, that Mythic employee's complaint was not that EA interfered too much with the development of Warhammer: it was that they interfered too little. Mythic was left to make decisions on their own without any real guidance, and they made a lot of mistakes because of that. Given the ever-ballooning budget of SWTOR and how much it feels like a Bioware (single player) game, I'm guessing this was a similar situation for SWTOR. This is especially likely given how far along SWTOR was in development before WAR bombed, and before any feedback about why it bombed got to EA. SWTOR feels 100% like a Bioware game, complete with the fact that just like their single player games, the 'end-game' is pretty much an after-thought.

The main complaints about both ME3 and SWTOR can be placed directly on Bioware's shoulders. Things like the day-1 DLC, online-passes, the shorter dev time of DA2, or the requirement of Origin can be traced to EA.  It's unlikely they had much to do with ME3's shitty ending or SWTOR's poor design. EA didn't ruin Bioware, Bioware ruined Bioware.

[FieryBalrog]

Does the Bioware name even mean anything at this point when it's used for fucking C&C?

Even the much vaunted Bioware Austin team behind SWTOR doesn't have that much to do with actual Bioware. It's staffed mostly by MMO guys, many from various collapsed or collapsing MMO studios.

And the Dragon Age team completely phoned it in over the past 3 years, so the only "real" Bioware left out of all the various Bioware-in-names is the Mass Effect team in Edmonton.

SWTOR feels 100% like a Bioware game

Combined with excellent voice work, good writing and plot, dumbass morality meter, dumbass dialogue wheel, shitty load times, and shitty UI.

Nail on the head, yeah.

[Ashamanchill]

The BSG servers wouldn't make it off the launchpad...

Lol. Thanks Tyssa, had a bad day and that got a genuine laugh out of me.

[Kageru]

I'd say the fault was fairly clearly Bioware's but it was the access to EA money and EA expectations that motivated them to go for the big prize of being the next WoW. When it probably didn't really suit their strengths or scale all that well. Had it been their own money they probably would have been a lot more cautious.

[Sir T]

Frankly I know I'm just a dimwit customer, but I felt from the start that putting this out as a MMO was a loser. They could have put out a killer SP game, shaved at least 6 months off the development costs and would have come out with a profit.

[amiable]

Frankly I know I'm just a dimwit customer, but I felt from the start that putting this out as a MMO was a loser. They could have put out a killer SP game, shaved at least 6 months off the development costs and would have come out with a profit.

The whole game feels like someone handed a group of (pretty competent) developers who don't play MMO's a prospectus describing WoW circa 2002 and said "go make this game, but with lightsabers."  I really get the feeling that folks in charge didn't play MMO's so had no idea what features consumers would be expecting (lfg, dual-spec, less than a million loading screens).

[Malakili]

Frankly I know I'm just a dimwit customer, but I felt from the start that putting this out as a MMO was a loser. They could have put out a killer SP game, shaved at least 6 months off the development costs and would have come out with a profit.

If this has been a 60 dollar bioware RPG with online co-op and an editor ala Neverwinter Nights I would've bought it immediately.

[Merusk]

Frankly I know I'm just a dimwit customer, but I felt from the start that putting this out as a MMO was a loser. They could have put out a killer SP game, shaved at least 6 months off the development costs and would have come out with a profit.

The whole game feels like someone handed a group of (pretty competent) developers who don't play MMO's a prospectus describing WoW circa 2002 and said "go make this game, but with lightsabers."  I really get the feeling that folks in charge didn't play MMO's so had no idea what features consumers would be expecting (lfg, dual-spec, less than a million loading screens).

IIRC the guys who deved were the best of a group of shitty, failed MMOs.  So that's probably exactly what happened.  No vision no following the market to see how it had evolved.