March 11, 2009 | By David Jenkins 3 comments More:
Warhammer Online developer Mythic is to close a total of 63 servers for the massively multiplayer online game, with 43 to go in North America and Oceania and another 20 in Europe.
The closures are part of an ongoing effort to consolidate the game’s online population, which started some months ago with a free transfer offer to more popular servers. The now-compulsory moves have been completed this week and the empty servers are set to close.
Mythic was recently forced to confirm layoffs in its customer support and QA teams, although the developer insisted this was not unusual for a post-launch massively multiplayer online game.
Although Warhammer Online attracted 500,000 registrations in its launch week, current subscriber levels are now at 300,000. Both Mythic and publisher Electronic Arts have indicated they remain committed to the game.
Although the main Warhammer Online Herald news site is offline at time of writing, specific details of server closures and character migration routes should be available later.
I joined at launch, played until about lvl25, then quit. I was more curious than anything, being an old Warhammer tabletop gamer, plus I love MMOs. I thought WAR made nominal improvements over the status quo (WoW) in areas such as PvP, and world quests, but was not different enough to really stand out. Also what seemed to be lacking was a good variety of instanced dungeons (which may have changed since I've last played), which I personally enjoy more than PvP.
I really thought this title would do better than it did. The battle system was great, the art direction very good, plus it was a lot of fun. I'd love to see something that can eat into WoW's market, but unfortuneately this title was not unique enough despite the Warhammer liscense. Maybe a 40K MMO would have faired better. If they announce that (or World of Starcraft) sign me up for sure!
It's odd how many new MMOs seem to be counting on millions of subscribers, and quickly ending up with just a few hundred thousand. You'd think someone would learn something from this.
Let's see... 300,000 subscribers times $15 each (let's neglect slightly-cheaper prepayments) = $4,500,000 per month. Shouldn't that be enough to let publishers amortize development costs over a year or two, run a decent server farm and still have some profit left over? It better be, because the million-player MMO is looking less and less like the rule and more like the exception.
I really thought this title would do better than it did. The battle system was great, the art direction very good, plus it was a lot of fun. I'd love to see something that can eat into WoW's market, but unfortuneately this title was not unique enough despite the Warhammer liscense. Maybe a 40K MMO would have faired better. If they announce that (or World of Starcraft) sign me up for sure!
Hopefully Mythic learned their lesson, in this day and age you need good PvE content, you just have to have it.
That said, it will be nice to have the servers consolidated.
Let's see... 300,000 subscribers times $15 each (let's neglect slightly-cheaper prepayments) = $4,500,000 per month. Shouldn't that be enough to let publishers amortize development costs over a year or two, run a decent server farm and still have some profit left over? It better be, because the million-player MMO is looking less and less like the rule and more like the exception.