Raph’s Website » EA buys Mythic

EA buys Mythic

June 20th, 2006 (Visited 4381 times) Tags:

Well, it’s been rumored for months, and now it came true. Mythic has sold to EA. Congrats to Mark Jacobs & the rest of the crew!

What this means?

Well, it means that EA is once again trying to get into the MMORPG market, and they decided that they needed a reasonably sized license plus outside expertise. They did this before when they acquired Kesmai, but most of the talent subsequently fled the EA.com debacle.

One thing EA can do is apply serious funds towards Warhammer, making it into a viable competitor for WoW.

One hopes it also means that EA’s historically bad track record keeping independent studios alive with their own culture is due for a change. But we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

It also, alas, means the disappearance of yet another of the true veteran companies in the space. Virtually none of the major players from the closed services generation remain intact today; Simutronics is probably the only one left.

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Amber Night wrote on June 23rd, 2006 at 3:52 pm:

about the deal. Gamespot has some rectal smoke-blowing an interview with Jacobs and an EA bean counter. Greg echos a common theme : EA will let WAR ship before Borgifying. Kill Ten Rats is taking bets. Raph:Hopeful but laments the passing of one of the last independent studios. Terra Nova covers lots of reactions. My initial reaction was one of, er, dismay. But who knows. It certainly can’t be in EA’s long term interests to continue destroying their acquisitions, so

Faith wrote on June 21st, 2006 at 2:22 am:

[...] Comments [...]

RENEGADES - View topic: EA acquire Mythic entertainment - By us for us wrote on June 26th, 2006 at 9:39 am:

[...] This hasn’t been met with much bliss in the press, mainly because EA have a tendancy to buy up and then scrap long-term MMO because they don’t have the market knowledge to back it up (aka: Kesmai syndrome). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesmai http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/20/ea-buys-mythic/ [...]

Abalieno said on June 20th, 2006 at 11:35 pm:

It means that EA will now set too high expectations. And when Warhammer won’t reach them (and it won’t), EA will take over completely and put to sleep Mythic forever.

The only difference is that this time they’ll let it release.

Really. The only REAL change after this acquisition is that the 120-130k subs DAoC currently has aren’t REMOTELY enough for Mythic to exist. And that Warhammer must do 5x better only to be granted continued existence.

You think throwing money at it is enough. I don’t. Before this Mythic could survive with modest-sized games and still slowly building very good ones. I seriously think that they threw away a lot of potential because they had the possibility to slowly increase their market share, instead of slowly losing it.

Under EA they don’t have anymore the luxury to go on with modest-sized mmorpgs. It’s quite obvious that EA will now bet heavily on this. It’s quite obvious that they will throw a bunch of money at Mythic. And it’s quite obvious that things at Mythic will change SIGNIFICANTLY because of this.

Almagill said on June 21st, 2006 at 4:10 am:

EA Games. Buying Everything.

Am just hoping that the change of focus (smaller company, niche market over to huge company, looking for mass market) doesn’t stifle Mythic. Tho, as you say, with EA they won’t have the ‘luxury’ of being modest-sized anymore.

I got a bad feeling about this…

Amaranthar said on June 21st, 2006 at 6:54 am:

If I’m not mistaken, EA has changed course. For the last some years they’ve been living off past glory, soaking in the dough that was dropped from earlier hits from fanatic followers, such as their sports games. But I think I read that they were experiancing a slow down from that non-strategy, and that they were going back into the riskier new ideas market.

Lets remember that they did bring us many new ideas at one time. They did open up the MMO market with UO. What happens now will depend on the abilities of their developers, and their grit as a company. I wouldn’t sell them short yet, just as I wouldn’t throw blind faith at them.

MikeRozak said on June 21st, 2006 at 2:38 pm:

Which companies/MMORPGs are next? Eve online? Ryzom? Funcom?

Lobosolitario said on June 21st, 2006 at 3:30 pm:

EVE is a nice little investment. Funny that nowadays stable, decent profits are a turn-off for investors.

Tholal said on June 23rd, 2006 at 9:06 am:

hey did open up the MMO market with UO.

Kicking and screaming the whole way from what I understand.

Peekay said on June 24th, 2006 at 4:27 am:

EA didnt open up the MMO market with UO, UO was developed and published by Origin Worlds Online, once EA bought OWO UO became the shittiest game ever, same thing will happen with Warhammer Online.

Amaranthar said on June 24th, 2006 at 7:16 am:

My understanding was that Origin sold to EA to raise the money to make UO, before UO went into earnest production. It was EA’s money that made UO possible.

Whether it was a contractual obligation to EA rather than a real desire is something I don’t know. Or rather, how the scales tipped on the subject. It seems obvious from various sources that some people at EA didn’t believe in the idea of UO, but I doubt everyone was unified in their thinking.

Kristen said on June 24th, 2006 at 9:39 am:

Whoa! Hold on there… EA actually purchased Origin Systems Inc. in 1992. well before UO began as a “garage” project stuffed away in the attic in 1995.

I’d say the real decline of these types of games shouldn’t be blamed on whichever monolithic corporation is at the top of the food chain (really they’re more interested in bottom lines than lines of code or dialog). Problems arise when internal management tries to meet that bottom line and hit an arbitrary date on the fiscal calendar by any means necessary often sacrificing potential for money in hand.

It also seems to happen when the development team no longer has their hand on the rudder, and it’s turned over to a “live” team and the original vision, passion and drive is lost, diluted or just heads off in a different direction from what the playerbase originally signed up for.

Raph said on June 24th, 2006 at 9:42 am:

As Kristen says, EA bought Origin long before UO (the one we know) was even started. There had been daydreams around earlier, but none of them ever got started.

OWO was just a domain name that Origin bought to host UO servers, at a time where there were hopes of making more than one virtual world. We ran it as a rogue domain with a rogue FAQ that quite horrified the marketing department.

The initial money for UO, legend has it, came directly from EA with a “special projects” sort of check provided by Larry Probst. It was relatively little — $1m, I think — and Richard Garriott is the one who went to bat to get it.

Raph said on June 24th, 2006 at 10:08 am:

Oh, I should add that not only was EA completely clueless about what we were doing when making UO, so was most of Origin. UO really was a skunkworks thing.

Slyfeind said on June 24th, 2006 at 5:07 pm:

I’ll never forget one of the early chats you came to, Raph. There were so many questions and concerns, people were screaming about this and that, and I belive you said something like, “Guys, please! Nobody has ever done something like this before!”

We could all have lost confidence in UO at that point. But in context, it came across as rather inspiring.

Raaka said on June 26th, 2006 at 1:11 am:

It’s interesting what EA sees in this deal, hopefully they’re not expecting to go head to head with WoW. I was hoping WAR to be less for massmarket and resurrect PVP again, but I don’t think there’s hope for that now.

pantomimeHorse said on June 26th, 2006 at 4:06 pm:

I think the way to kill WoW is pretty clear: you have to out-WoW WoW, i.e. do to WoW what WoW did to EQ.

First and foremost this means reducing the time-to-end-game by at least an order of magnitude and providng people with something to actually do when they get there. In fact, leveling up should be treated more like an extended tutorial, a SP game within the game that gently exposes people to working with/against other players. If a class-based game, expect that devoted players won’t want to have to decide between classes except perhaps which to try first, and making it much quicker to max out a character helps in this regard.

Make the end-game revolve around player conflict, not gear and economy. The only hard part here is how to a)emphasize player conflict without frustrating/disinvolving the less-skilled/time-strapped players, and b) introduce an element of persistance and progress to invest players in-between playing sessions.

Don’t make players be encyclopedists/trivia-mavins, e.g. ‘What mob do I kill in what zone to farm ingrediant x to make thing-a-ma-jig y that gives me a +3 sta upgrade’.

Farming for gear is bad. Farming for quests is worse. Farming for single-use items is evil. (I mean both farming for these things directly or farming for gold for these purposes.)

Favor quest-quality/diversity over quantity. Perhaps each level can have one single quest that is class specific. Sure that means everyone ends up doing the same small set of quests, but this is no loss when the alternative is meaningless quests. Those players who want to spoil the story elements will do so, but at least this way, those players not inclined to do so might actually get a story worth not spoiling.

Fill the world with mini-games that utilize the core-mechanics (a la WoW’s battlegrounds), and make sure players don’t have to wait forever to find opponents/teammates).

Get rid of fillers (like eating/drinking and no-skill farming/gathering).

Aside from all this, obviously you must meet par with Blizzard on two things:

Shiny. (fun look/sound, but don’t require cutting-edge hardware)

Accessable. (easy to get into)

So I think the path is pretty clear, though as I admitted, discovering how to fill in that blank of ‘what to do in the end-game’ isn’t going to be easy. If EA doesn’t interfere, WHO might just do it. If not, I imagine Blizzard itself will take things along this direction, either by making a WoW sequel or changing WoW.

holysin said on June 28th, 2006 at 2:57 am:

pantomimeHorse, reduce the time to get to the end-game? If anything, WOW is too fast to acomplish that.
And, no matter what kind of end-game a game has, most people enjoy killing for experience, and not doing Instances dozens (of hundreds) of times just to get a piece of epic armor.

If anything, there shouldn’t be an end-game and no level cap. Sure, the hardcore would become very powerful in the game, but knowing that there are people with a higher level than you shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the game. The only problem would be balancing PvP (and, for fuck’s sake, NO CHAOS PVP only, like lineage 2).

Kaledor said on July 1st, 2006 at 4:19 am:

Mythics 150K subscription rate is more than enough to keep Mythic going. Go back to 2001, Mythic only needed 50K player base to make a profit… Over the past years they are doing very well. They are paying for Warhammer out of pocket.

Is Warhammer going to do well, yes, how well, only will know when the game comes out. I say it will break 1 million subscribers. If they do the subscriptions counting like WoW, they will probably break 4 million subscribers.

EA buys Mythic

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