Ex-NCsoft Employees on Tabula Rasa's Demise2010-02-24 00:00:00NCsoft Europe's ex-CTO Adam Martin commented on his T=Machine blog about his close-up experience as a NCsoft insider with Tabula Rasa's prolonged development, and giving an excellent analysis on the reasons that led to the eventual demise:
In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?
Unlike Scott, I actually (superficially speaking) agree with this statement as to why Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Hellgate:London failed (TR, AoC, PotBS, and HL from now now...)
"No, these games failed because their developers let it happen."-Funcom *should have* learned enough lessons with Anarchy Online not to make the mistakes they did with AoC; not the precise same mistakes, but the same "class" of mistakes were made, suggesting that they tried to fix only the symptoms and failed to understand the causes.
-Destination Games knew a long long time before TR went to beta that it wasn't (going to be) ready even for beta, let alone launch. IMHO NCsoft collectively knew very well that TR wasn't ready for launch, but went ahead and launched it anyway.
-Bill Roper went on record to say that no-one understood their sales/revenue model, from the start. As I've mentioned before, that pretty much guarantees failure, and it's not rocket-science to understand why!
-Pirates ... I have no idea, actually. It's the one that I have never played (although I really wanted to) nor even *seen* (which is unusual). I'm not going to talk about PotBS any more, since I really know nothing about it.
NB: I don't happen to agree with anything else in that post. I've got nothing against it, I just didn't find anything interesting or new about the games themselves in the post, and IMHO the list of "why this happened" is too shallow and derivative to be worth saying in 2009 - the same has been said many times over the last ten years by many people, and ain't particularly insightful in the first place. Sorry, dude.
Martin's personal post-mortem generated waves with another ex-NCsoft employee, Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings, who had the following to say:
Well, Adam's a bit safer in that he's on a whole other continent...
