I think Warhammer is a successful game if you looked in a business viewpoint. With so limited contents and quality still able to attract so many people buy the game and continuously pay for every month. Even though some people have been fired in the company, however, they were good at making money.

It seems that the global market is thirsty of mmorpg as long as there is a new mmorpg being release.  If it's true then AION going to make billions of daollars after release, and that will be very helpful to advance Korean game companies. 

It's all about the situation. If WAR was aiming for 20k people, I would say it was a huge success. But Mythic was aiming at 1 million+ for WAR, and what they have now is a terrible failure in comparison to what their goal was. That goes beyond the fact that I think the game is crap.

Mythic have invested about 100mil into this game,  the number of boxes sold and subs being paid till now  maybe barly cover the cost of it. Plus the server maint and salary of staff monthly, i dont think its as successful as you think.

I forget the numbers of subs that MJ quote to make this game substainable, so to be sucessful it must have numbers more than that... much more...

I doubt the game turned an actual profit in the overall scheme of things. Just to give some scenarios. At $50 a box multiplied by 100k subscribers your looking at $5 million. This does not include the cut the actual publisher who puts the boxes on the shelves takes. at 500k boxes sold your only looking at $25M . The game definately cost more than that and I they might have sold that many copies overall...not too sure. The also made some money from the actual month to month subs but not I think enough to make up for the development costs of the game. Right now they are attempting to keep the game alive because for every month they can keep it open they can make some money on it. Maybe they get an expansion out, but even at that with their current subs its iffy that they make their money back even on an expansion. The game will be here for at least another year just so they can squeeze as much money as they can out of it to mitigate any losses they might have suffered.

From a purely economic standpoint I do not think you can call Warhammer a success. Overall its not a bad game and I did enjoy playing it for a while....it just had no depth to it. Everything was all surface glam with nothing underneath. This unfortunately is typical for todays MMO. What I still cant believe is no company has come forward to develop an MMO engine to sell to the Game developer market. Something like the Unreal engine is/was for a base as a graphics engine. I mean if you look at all of the base content that is essentially the same in every MMO from guilds to groups to auction house to in game mail...there is a huge list of things every company redevelops everytime a new MMO is made. If you made a truly generic engine that can be easily modified to fit whatever the gamemaker wants to do and can act as a truly stable platform to develop on I think you could make some pretty good money in todays market with dozens of MMO's coming out every year.

Subscription base doesn't equal number of copies sold. It's much lower.

Where did you get the idea that Warhammer cost 100 million dollars to make?

Originally posted by Maelkor

 

What I still cant believe is no company has come forward to develop an MMO engine to sell to the Game developer market. Something like the Unreal engine is/was for a base as a graphics engine. I mean if you look at all of the base content that is essentially the same in every MMO from guilds to groups to auction house to in game mail...there is a huge list of things every company redevelops everytime a new MMO is made. If you made a truly generic engine that can be easily modified to fit whatever the gamemaker wants to do and can act as a truly stable platform to develop on I think you could make some pretty good money in todays market with dozens of MMO's coming out every year.

There are multiple mmorpgs engines on the market. There is a mmorpg engine for Torque engine, a networking lib for Unity and the Ryzom engine is open source, so thats 3 off the top of my head for indies.  Hero engine, big world engine for AAA also off the top of my head.  I know there are several more.  The reality is that even with an engine it takes years to develop the content require to fill a decent mmorpg word that will attract players.

Originally posted by jcpillars

Where did you get the idea that Warhammer cost 100 million dollars to make?

I think it was Mark Jacobs who said in an interview that the game cost just somewhere south of $100 million to make.

Here's the link:

multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/29/ea-mythic-activision-world-of-warcraft-estimate-is-overblown/

South of 100mil, though he did say he need 100mil. So i guess its quite close to it...

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by jcpillars

Where did you get the idea that Warhammer cost 100 million dollars to make?

 

I think it was Mark Jacobs who said in an interview that the game cost just somewhere south of $100 million to make.

He also said somewhere it had one of the biggest budgets of a MMO ever.

So no, in that sense it's hard to agree with the OP. He makes it sound like they only tried to make a MMO with as little resources as possible based on the 'lacking' result, when in fact the result is like that despite having a huge budget. 

The game graphics looks like made by different people. So if you hired some designers in China then it will not cost more than 3 Millions to finish it within one year. Besides, there is no class balance and very simple AI for PVE. I think Warhammer has very low production cost.

Mythic had the money.... shit look at Tabula Rasa. NCsoft forked over 100mill to the Garriott brothers, and Tabula Rasa turned out being a low grade budget game.

WAR is a flop simple as that if the subs where stable then yes it'd make money but the way it's going it could even be in danger of been shut down in the next year.

Originally posted by Newhopes

WAR is a flop simple as that if the subs where stable then yes it'd make money but the way it's going it could even be in danger of been shut down in the next year.

I think so too. There are some big games coming out in the next few months and i think Warhammer will lose what few players they still have. Its too bad too, Warhammer could have been a very good game.

My wife and I really tried to like WaR after playing DAoC for years but this game like the "it" factor for us it felt hollow.

Originally posted by Newhopes

WAR is a flop simple as that if the subs where stable then yes it'd make money but the way it's going it could even be in danger of been shut down in the next year.

Do you think Warhammer is a flop because......

A - It has less subscribers than WoW

B - Because you and 9 other people don't like it. :)

I play war and I like it.

and they sold 1,2Mill copies ,that's a load of cash... and I know for a fact that there are still new people coming into the game even today.

I agree they could have done much better, 300k is low compared to what they aimed for.

Originally posted by Ogrelin

I play war and I like it.

and they sold 1,2Mill copies ,that's a load of cash... and I know for a fact that there are still new people coming into the game even today.

I agree they could have done much better, 300k is low compared to what they aimed for.

 

Try half of that. No way does the game have 300,000 subs now.

Originally posted by arctarus

Mythic have invested about 100mil into this game,  the number of boxes sold and subs being paid till now  maybe barly cover the cost of it. Plus the server maint and salary of staff monthly, i dont think its as successful as you think.

I forget the numbers of subs that MJ quote to make this game substainable, so to be sucessful it must have numbers more than that... much more...

 

 

 

I believe MJ stated that they needed to maintain about 300k or more to make money.

Originally posted by Maelkor

I doubt the game turned an actual profit in the overall scheme of things. Just to give some scenarios. At $50 a box multiplied by 100k subscribers your looking at $5 million. This does not include the cut the actual publisher who puts the boxes on the shelves takes. at 500k boxes sold your only looking at $25M . The game definately cost more than that and I they might have sold that many copies overall...not too sure. The also made some money from the actual month to month subs but not I think enough to make up for the development costs of the game. Right now they are attempting to keep the game alive because for every month they can keep it open they can make some money on it. Maybe they get an expansion out, but even at that with their current subs its iffy that they make their money back even on an expansion. The game will be here for at least another year just so they can squeeze as much money as they can out of it to mitigate any losses they might have suffered.

From a purely economic standpoint I do not think you can call Warhammer a success. Overall its not a bad game and I did enjoy playing it for a while....it just had no depth to it. Everything was all surface glam with nothing underneath. This unfortunately is typical for todays MMO. What I still cant believe is no company has come forward to develop an MMO engine to sell to the Game developer market. Something like the Unreal engine is/was for a base as a graphics engine. I mean if you look at all of the base content that is essentially the same in every MMO from guilds to groups to auction house to in game mail...there is a huge list of things every company redevelops everytime a new MMO is made. If you made a truly generic engine that can be easily modified to fit whatever the gamemaker wants to do and can act as a truly stable platform to develop on I think you could make some pretty good money in todays market with dozens of MMO's coming out every year.

Actually, Simutronics did that. They made the Hero engine, and were supposedly working on an MMO..but I"m thinking that was just made to showcase their engine rather than being expected to launch.

We'll see how that worked out.  Bioware bought their engine, and a couple other companies too.  I forget who.

Originally posted by Crosswire

Originally posted by Newhopes

WAR is a flop simple as that if the subs where stable then yes it'd make money but the way it's going it could even be in danger of been shut down in the next year.

 

Do you think Warhammer is a flop because......

A - It has less subscribers than WoW

B - Because you and 9 other people don't like it. :)

It is a flop, because:

• EA-Mythic spent "just south of $100 million dollars" to create the game and will struggle to make that back.
• 1.2 million copies of the game sold in the first quarter of its release. 
• Nearly 70 servers have been merged/closed and the trend does not look like it has finished.
• Warhammer lost somewhere close to 500,000 players in 1 financial quarter.
• Mythic has undergone round after round of layoffs.
• The financial "break even" number for warhammer was 250,000 according to Mark Jacobs and it is doubtful that Warhammer has that many subscribers anymore.
• Warhammer online is the result of a popular IP, from an mmo company with perhaps the most PvP/RvR experience on the market and the financial backing of the largest (at the time) software publisher in the world. 

Now that doesn't mean things cannot turn around somehow.  Maybe a successful release in the eastern market?   Maybe some massive changes to improve the game?  Who knows.

I fully believe that Mythic is aware of the problems with the game and is trying to address them, but for whatever reason they have not managed to do that.  In some cases they have only made things worse. 

Originally posted by Larry2298

The game graphics looks like made by different people. So if you hired some designers in China then it will not cost more than 3 Millions to finish it within one year. Besides, there is no class balance and very simple AI for PVE. I think Warhammer has very low production cost.

 

 

Mythic had a huge budget, and no, they didn't farm out parts of their game.  They basically built upon what they did previously in DAOC...unfortunately they threw out all the good parts and instead opted for more simplistic and dull mechanics. 

They used the Gamebryo engine, which they used for DAOC also.

Originally posted by Larry2298

I think Warhammer is a successful game if you looked in a business viewpoint.

Don't ever start your own company.

Originally posted by Wintersbite

Originally posted by Larry2298

I think Warhammer is a successful game if you looked in a business viewpoint.

Don't ever start your own company.

Well, a bank or car maker would be safe, I suppose.

Originally posted by Daffid011

It is a flop, because:

• EA-Mythic spent "just south of $100 million dollars" to create the game and will struggle to make that back.
• 1.2 million copies of the game sold in the first quarter of its release. 
• Nearly 70 servers have been merged/closed and the trend does not look like it has finished.
• Warhammer lost somewhere close to 500,000 players in 1 financial quarter.
• Mythic has undergone round after round of layoffs.
• The financial "break even" number for warhammer was 250,000 according to Mark Jacobs and it is doubtful that Warhammer has that many subscribers anymore.
• Warhammer online is the result of a popular IP, from an mmo company with perhaps the most PvP/RvR experience on the market and the financial backing of the largest (at the time) software publisher in the world. 

 

Now that doesn't mean things cannot turn around somehow.  Maybe a successful release in the eastern market?   Maybe some massive changes to improve the game?  Who knows.

I fully believe that Mythic is aware of the problems with the game and is trying to address them, but for whatever reason they have not managed to do that.  In some cases they have only made things worse. 

Just wondering if you knew how many months they needed this number for the break even?