“Rewarding” success at Mythic
As reported here and here, it looks like the folks at Mythic Entertainment will be facing layoffs. For those of you that aren’t familiar with them, Mythic was the development studio that developed little known games like Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. They also managed to release Warhammer Online, practically the only MMO hit in a year littered with the MMO walking wounded.
Having some passing familiarity of the MMO life cycle, I’m aware that once a game is released into the wilds, that game development firms cut back staff dramatically. The actual live team that keeps a game running, fixes bugs and releases new content can be tiny. City of Heroes, a similarly sized game that has 100k+ subscribers, apparently ran for a couple of years with 15 people - that includes non-technical staff such as admins, marketing people and support personnel. The actual number of people that developed the game (writers, programmers, developers, artists, QA) was less than what you could count on two hands.
The decision at Mythic could coincide with the same type of reasoning. QA, play test and customer service people aren’t needed as much once the game is stable with its first round of post release fixes (caveat: unless the production release is botched badly). Yes, there is more of a chance that when you call into a help line, the customer service rep on the other line won’t know a Greenskin from a Dwarf, but companies make these kind of financial judgment calls all the time. They know that unless customer service is truly atrocious, that bad customer service by itself won’t make you unsubscribe. Honestly, I was surprised EA didn’t cut further.
Though the financial person in me understands and can accept the rationale for the Mythic layoffs, the layoff will have negative repercussions at the division, though they can be minimized. Think about it this way. Your small-ish division manages to crank out a hit MMO that many critics (wrongly) predicted would be difficult to stand apart from the 800-llb gorilla known as World of Warcraft. Not only did your game stand apart, but the game sells over 100,000 copies and wins many game of the year and MMO of the year honors. Your reward for your hard work: your colleagues get the pink slip due to financial problems elsewhere in the company. Morale and enthusiasm at Mythic reach all time highs!
EA management has to make it clear that the layoffs at Mythic were linked with the natural life cycle of a MMO and not because it failed in other parts of its business. Yet so far, EA has not been forthcoming about the reason for these layoffs. That’s simply not a good move.
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