Right. The decision that WAR was going to die was probably made 2 years into launch, and after that there were constant if slow cuts to resources across the board. A lot of people forget that the benchmark for WAR's success wasn't just the amount of income needed to keep the servers on and the devs paid, but also the cost required to renew the license.Telen wrote:To be fair to the old devs Kevean and Kevin. There were only two of them for like the last two years and before that they were all secretly working on wrath of heroes or drafted in to finish swtor. From what I heard Kevean wanted to make changes but was blocked by bioware or GW. EA were the problem gutting the game and letting it die.
Nobody knows how much the original IP license cost, but it's not unreasonable to suggest that with the success of other MMOs at the time, and the 5-year lease duration, that the cost might have been around $50 million (and who knows what other riders were in that cost, like royalties). Mark Jacobs once said that it takes "about $100 million" to compete in the MMO market, but the amount of money that it cost to make Warhammer Online was "south of $100 million." Other AAA titles (including the Conan MMO) in 2008 hit the $20 million mark in development costs, so the gap between Mark's estimate and the average cost can be estimated as licensing costs IMO.
Mr. Jacobs also once pegged the number of subscribers they would need to succeed as an RvR-MMO at 300k, during a postmortem. These numbers were deemed too low by EA, which is why PvE was focused on near the end of development. 300k is also exactly the number of subs that were lost by the second or third month after launch. So you can imagine how demoralizing and damaging that might be, to literally have your benchmark for success be the magnitude of your failure. Let's not also forget that EA posted a loss of over $1 billion the same year WAR launched. EA was already in a terrible place, and they needed money bad.
From there it's a downward spiral of "You aren't projected to succeed, we're cutting staff to maximize profit while we can" and "we can't do X, Y or Z that we need to do to succeed, because we don't have the staff." And they did need GW approval for every change they made. SMs and BOs couldn't get a defensive leap because GW said it wasn't lore-friendly. Imagine not being able to invent a new style of ability because someone things that the same class that has a Morale leap to an enemy wouldn't also leap to help a friend? Couple all that with a negative feedback loop of bad reviews (I don't like this game -> other people don't play the game, or play with but are predisposed to disliking it too), and you're doomed.
We don't know what the costs were, but we do know that there was a team who's careers and livelihoods depended on making WAR the best game they could with what they had. I don't like hearing claims that they were lazy, or incompetent, or refused to take action the game needed - that narrative doesn't make sense. I think that in reality, they only had a window of about 6 months to be as effective as possible, and after that they were hamstrung at every opportunity.
