“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. Read more
