I’ll do a follow-up post in a minute with the anecdote that lead me to this. But here’s the general opinion\/analysis first.<\/p>\n
\nHuge project (cost in excess of $50 million to develop), based on a 20-year-old IP that is known and loved around the world, the game launched last year to a big marketing campaign.<\/p>\n
Initial sales figures were excellent.<\/p>\n
First-month renewals were dire, the company lost large amounts of money, they laid off large numbers of staff, and the CEO quit\/resigned. They are now (late 2009) into the key point in such a product’s lifecycle where it has one last chance to succeed.<\/p>\n
The parent company has recently laid off 1500 staff across different countries and products, but also just bought a small studio for $400 million.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The problem with Mythic\/WAR today<\/h4>\n
Here’s what’s going on right now (based on observation, guesswork, and personal experience of similar situations at other companies):<\/p>\n
\nThey are spending large amounts of money to acquire new customers, while simultaneously erecting artificial barriers to turn away those new customers.<\/p>\n
They are running loud marketing campaigns to attract those who’ve already rejected the product, while simultaneously creating powerful negative publicity for their own product.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In other words, this is a company that has a failing product AND has a non-unified product strategy, and yet is continuing to spend heavily. This strategy is known as “pure, blind, Hope”. It looks extremely similar to what happened with TR towards the end of it’s (brief, painful) lifetime:<\/p>\n
“let’s work harder, do more, spend more! Cross your fingers, chant the secret mantra, and hope it all turns out for the best!”<\/p>\n
Hope is not a strategy. All that can happen is that they might get lucky despite all the mistakes; there might be enough good left that they can survive this foolishness long enough to ditch the deadweight and pull themeslves out of the mire.<\/p>\n
The inevitable PlayFish comment…<\/h4>\n
Maybe this would be a good project for the new hires from PlayFish to start work on? The essentials are there – and if the product could be made to succeed, it is a huge cash-cow. It could single-handedly pay-off a lot of the debt on that $400 million…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ll do a follow-up post in a minute with the anecdote that lead me to this. But here’s the general opinion\/analysis first. Project history (skip if you know all about Warhammer Online and Mythic already) Huge project (cost in excess of $50 million to develop), based on a 20-year-old IP that is known and loved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,53,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}