Dec
2

TR: Surprise!

11 Comments

I found this article over at Massively to be quite interesting.

So, NCsoft, how does it feel to absolutely lie through your teeth to players and staff about Tabula Rasa?

I saw the warning signs, and I tried to bring it up nicely. I kept seeing the constant staff shake-ups, and continued to grin and hope for the best. I even saw Richard Garriott himself walk away from the development, a very bad omen in hindsight, and the lot of us gamers just nodded along and thought that TR was going to continue along smoothly.

There is a lesson I learned about corporate leadership culture during the high tech bust back in 2000, and I think it is relevant to the first part of the quote above. NC Soft didn’t as much as lie to you as they weren’t talking specifically to you in the first place.

I think it was back in 2001 when we were all in this communications meeting with the CEO. The setup being that significant lay-offs happened months before and, well…it was not a pretty picture. When the CEO was asked if lay-offs were done, he looked us all in the eye and said something to the effect of, “yes…the lay-offs are finished and we have a plan forward, backward and always twirling, twirling, twirling…” blah blah blah. OK…I made up the whole “twirling thing”. I realize now that the CEO was not talking to us, but to shareholders during that whole talk.

Projecting confidence, no matter how misplaced, is 90% of how business is done. Not to get too political, but remember when Al-Sahhaf (Comical Ali) was saying there were no Americans in Baghdad when, well…there were. Drastically different situation, I know…but the same principle is applied to marketing of a product. Yes…it’s the propaganda of buying time for an MMO. It creates a fiction that everything is ok and just maybe it will slow the bleeding and allow you time to recover. Sure it treats the people who really matter, ie customers, as idiots who cannot connect the dots….but if the gamble pays off, the customer will be none the wiser and will probably forget eventually anyway. Added bonus is that you come out smelling like roses because you are “committed to your customer.” Downside of course is that you look like a liar if you fail at pulling out of your nose dive.

This is why I think AoC is now in trouble and that we will probably see it closing within the next 8-12 months. We’ll see more lay-offs…ummm, sorry…”realignment of resources” within the next 4 months. This will probably be followed by positive press coverage of content (..much like the new Mammoth mount…) and promises to “continue to support and develop AoC well into the future.” After that it will be lights out. Please, please, please let me be wrong.

D out.

P.S. This “clarification” is the biggest bunch of BS I’ve ever read. They new well ahead of Operation Immortality that TR was in trouble.

Posted in Tabula Rasa
11 Comments Posted by Darren

11 Responses to "TR: Surprise!"

  • Werit says:
    December 2, 2008 at 10:02 am

    Maybe this will teach people a valuable lesson, but I doubt it. Anyone who wasn’t in denial knew that TR was in trouble from Open Beta.

  • Hudson says:
    December 2, 2008 at 10:24 am

    Exactly Darren and Werit. That “Operation”? C’mon give me a break. It really didn’t do anything for the actual GAME itself, it was more a publicity stunt. Did they even add any content to the game during that?

  • Hudson says:
    December 2, 2008 at 10:26 am

    Speaking of:

    http://simple-n-complex.blogspot.com/2008/12/age-of-conan-first-server-merges-arrive.html

    from AOC boards

    “Also after the merges are complete we will be opening up new ‘fresh start’ servers in both the US and EU territories. One each for PVE and PVP rulesets. Transfer will not be allowed to these servers after the merges. These new servers are designed to allow players to start afresh in a totally new environment should they wish to do so and forge a new community instead of joining one of the newly merged ones.”

  • Ravious says:
    December 2, 2008 at 11:04 am

    That’s the sucky thing about public MMO corporations. Their shareholders could really give a flying f’ about the gamers. MMOs are not just games; they are hobbies that we are vested in to. However, some corps do it better than others. SOE for instance let’s their “failed” MMOs die a slow, slow death with their Station Pass. I cannot even begin to understand how a horrible piece of crap like Matrix Online can still be alive while a half-way decent MMO like Tabula Rasa has to get the plug pulled.

    I don’t know if it’s the shareholders, Korean overlords, or overzealous economics interns that decide that there can be no other pricing plan than $15/month, but it’s kind of disheartening. I really thought with Guild Wars devs at the NCWest helm they could figure out something else for TR… but no. $15/month or dead. That is truly a $15 flatline.

  • Werit says:
    December 2, 2008 at 11:39 am

    Rav: Station Pass most likely.

  • Hudson says:
    December 2, 2008 at 11:44 am

    I don’t get the Matrix Online thing either now that I think about it. That is an odd one

  • Nat says:
    December 2, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    Darren is 100% on the money with this – CEO’s (and hell all executives) are required to project confidence for all the reasons he stated.

    On the topic of NCSoft it is hard to say what is going on inside that company. It is a Korean company that has had little success in the world of western MMO’s. GW is a success but not in the $15 a month world of western MMORPG’s. CoH/V appears to be their only game that is a $15 a month game that has had any success in the west.

    You have to wonder why L2 is still alive in the west when its numbers have always been very weak (outside of Asia). I would guess that this is a pride thing for them. L and L2 are the flagships of the company and closing them in the west would be too big a pill for them to swallow I think.

    I think above all NCSoft wants to crack the west and where they once pinned hopes of this on RG, most likely based on his history in creating western RPG’s and UO they now are pinning their hopes on some other guys who have a long history in western RPG’s (the former Blizzard guys who formed ArenaNet).

    Perhaps the new leadership at NCWest has a very specific business plan for making NCSoft a big player in the west and TR just didn’t fit into it. CoH/V is long in the tooth, GW is done with developing stand alone campaigns and GW2 sounds like a long way off. All the other new games are Korean developed and while they look visually freaking awesome they are still eastern games and will most likely be grindy as hell and not succeed in the west.

    If you were going to tear a company down and build it back up (speaking of NCWest) now is the right time to do it.

    One last thought on the issue of keeping it open even if it is barely breaking even. If you operate like SOE and keep old shitty games alive you run the risk of becoming known as a company with a bunch of shitty MMO’s. This can harm your non-shitty games because people associate you with shitty games, so they think all your games must be shitty.

  • Hudson says:
    December 2, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    That’s pretty shitty, but I get it!

  • Sente says:
    December 2, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    IF you listened in on earnings calls from NCSoft and it really does not come as a surprise that they are closing down Tabula Rasa, it does not matter what they may have told reporters.
    Different messages for different audiences, as Darren and Nat says.

    And NCSoft is a publically traded company which only do MMOs and their numbers are quite transparent. This is not the case for SOE really and they do not have the same issues to be directly responsible for the numbers of each of their games directly to investors. Had they been in the same position as NCSoft I think we would have seen a signifantly different SOE.

  • Exeter says:
    December 2, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    “If you operate like SOE and keep old shitty games alive you run the risk of becoming known as a company with a bunch of shitty MMO’s.”

    Or you could also be seen as a company that makes sound fiscal choices under the guise of ‘giving fans what they want’, no? I’m sure that the eggheads in SOE have crunched the numbers and have come to the conclusion that the gain in revenues from offering a bunch of games and a few value added perks under the banner of Station Access is greater than the cost savings that would be had by shutting down these “old shitty games”.

  • Nat says:
    December 3, 2008 at 9:55 am

    I’m not saying that SOE made poor fiscal decisions in keeping “shitty games” at all, I’m sure they make money off of them but that is not the point I was making.

    Quality or the perception of quality is huge in the business world. Look at the US auto industry, they have been working for over 30 years to shake the view that they make (and keep making) shitty cars compared to those made in other nations (even though many Honda’s and Toyota’s are made in the US). Hell didn’t one of them even have “Quality is job one” as a slogan for a time?

    Companies like Apple are almost fanatical in their desire to be viewed as a company that is based on quality. The list is long and touches all segments of business.

    Some companies will not accept anything that impacts this perception and I was saying that perhaps NCSoft is such a company.

    Another thing to consider is the complex way large companies handle accounting, especially publicly traded ones. They are VERY sensitive to quarterly results, earning estimates and all that other fun stuff. The decision to kill TR could have something to do with this. Hell for all we know they couldn’t write down the development cost from TR or qualify for some tax break as long as it was alive or it could be a million other factors. If anyone is familiar with Korean accounting rules or their corporate tax laws feel free to chime in.

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