EA Closes Mythic
polycounter lvl 11
Another bites the dust, sorry to all
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/29/ea-closes-mythic-entertainment
True or not this made me chuckle
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/29/ea-closes-mythic-entertainment
True or not this made me chuckle
Replies
*Vendetta against EA intensifies*
The use of player physics to block other players was actually fantastic in that game.
Get a bunch of tanks to literally block off an area and the other team could could not physically pass w/out killing them.
RIP
Original HQ in San Mateo, California, moved to Redwood City in 1998.
Origin Systems in Austin, Texas founded in 1983, acquired in 1992, closed in 2004.
Bullfrog Productions in Surrey, England, founded in 1987, acquired in 1995, merged with EA UK and effectively closed in 2001.
EA Baltimore in Baltimore, Maryland, established in 1996 as part of Origin, closed in 2000
EA Seattle in Seattle, Washington, founded in 1982 as Manley & Associates, acquired January 29, 1996, closed in 2002
Maxis in Walnut Creek, California, founded in 1987, acquired in June 1997, folded into Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games) in 2004
Westwood Studios in Las Vegas, Nevada, founded in 1987, acquired from Virgin Interactive Entertainment in August 1998, merged into EA Los Angeles in 2003.
EA Pacific (known for a time as Westwood Pacific) in Irvine, California, formerly part of Virgin Interactive, acquired with Westwood in 1998, closed in 2003
Kesmai (known also as GameStorm), founded in 1981, acquired in 1999, closed in 2001.
DICE Canada in London, Ontario, started in 1998, acquired DICE fully October 2, 2006; closed DICE Canada studio hours later.
EA Japan in Tokyo, Japan, closed due to consolidation; moved under EA Partners model
EA UK in Chertsey, United Kingdom, moved to EA UK in Guildford
EA Chicago in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, founded in 1990 as NuFX, acquired in 2004, closed November 6, 2007.
Pandemic Studios in Los Angeles, California and Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, founded in 1998, acquired October 2007 from Elevation Partners, closed November 17, 2009.
Bright Light, in Guildford, Surrey, formerly EA UK, closed in 2011.
EA Mobile in S
This is not correct. Where did you get this information from exactly?
More on topic, I'm sad that Mythic was shut down and I am utterly unsurprised by it. I'm actually more surprised that it wasn't done earlier given EA's record, but I guess they wanted to let the new Dungeon Keeper finish tanking first.
It misses out the studios that still "exist" but are effectively dead with skeleton crews too, for example Criterion in Guildford.
it's still the only MMO (apart from DAOC, to my knowledge) that didn't have a minimum level for pvp, you could literally start a new character, and queue for pvp instances or run to the rvr lake and start taking names.
i miss that =[
Sorry to everyone at Mythic, I know we're looking for some more people here at Visceral.
all of playfish closed down, seriously? or just the london studio? they had a few more, after all.
and my, what a body count...
To innovate with new and good games every 1-3 years or to die, that's the unique way to survive in this industry. All the studios have their days counted, so don't be surprised when id closes.
There are too many indie devs passing away without further notice, and i totally understand the EA move, because Mythic only represents money losses for them.
Welcome to this nice indrustry of Nomads
Playfish is defunct, so yes, all of Playfish. EA's bodycount over the past few years is frighteningly high.
Nope, it was because it was based on someone else's IP, that's why DaoC & UO are still running. People forget that Warhammer Online has a pretty good reviews from critics and players: 86 metacritic and 7.6 user score. If the economy didn't tank at the time we all would have gotten fat high rating bonuses because it was in the 90's at launch.
I really enjoyed Warhammer back in the day
Yup, it's the only MMO I've worked on that I've played for fun for any length of time. Now that I think of it, it's the longest I've played any MMO besides Ultima Online.
Anyone who lost your job at Mythic today, just remember, you've got a few friends out there in the industry:
1) EA was nothing but good to Mythic. It's been 6 years since WAR came out - 6 YEARS - and Dungeon Keeper was the only thing to come out of the studio in that time to generate revenue. How do you think Mythic stayed afloat that long? EA could have shut it down at any time and kept the live MMOs going with a small crew. EA tried for 6 years to allow Mythic to reinvent itself as a studio, and Dungeon Keeper shows that it was finally getting there.
2) Dungeon Keeper was a success. For all the hardcore gamer hate, the people that game was actually for, liked it and continue to play it. It's a successful game. Check the app annie gross charts trend if you don't believe me.
Where can I see that?
I wish I had the data to compare it to the lifespan of an independent developer, and a developer under other publishers.
I sincerely doubt places close faster with EA.
i'd argue independently run places have more of an incentive to keep the business running, even fighting tooth and nail for that since the founders are invested. they are also more likely to keep hanging on to staff, not shedding them left and right every other fiscal quarter.
lastly they seem more likely to bounce back from the grave as a reformed company should the business ever hit a wall.
i could think of some independent european studios providing dozens or hundreds of jobs which would have surely vanished a long time ago had they ever succumbed to a buyout offer and found themselves unlucky enough to work on some under-performing project.
uhm average critic score is 4.2 average user is .3 - how is that a success ? The people hat play are a small small percentage
Yea that's true they might hang on tooth and nail, yet at the same time, they often don't have the resources of a large publisher to keep self funding after launching a poor game.
Many people however, buy as much as they can in a game for little reason. Just look at some of the popular Asian F2P games, many of them are fairly "generic" in the sense that they bring nothing new to the table. Many are poorly balanced in the sense that somebody who spends even $1 has a huge advantage over somebody who plays for free, and many are ripoffs of each other.
This mindset isn't exclusive to Asia either. If you look at Valve's F2P games (or their semi-F2P games), you'll see there are people who end up spending thousands of dollars over their glorified gambling system. I recall reading a thread about how much money people spent on keys in Counter-Strike:Global Offensive and while the average user spent under $50, there were many people who spent a couple of hundred dollars, and even a handful of people that spent a few thousand, all over the course of maybe 6 months.
There's a lot of psychology to back up the F2P model but I think a lot of people end up purchasing items in order to feel like they have something that nobody else does. In Counter-Strike, knife skins are very rare and many of them sell for a few hundred dollars on the marketplace because of how rare they are, since the only way to get them other than paying for them on the marketplace is to open crates with keys (that cost $2.49 each), many people tend to make a purchase in hopes of winning the lottery.
The funny thing about the CSGO example is the fact that the alpha of the game actually contained the premium knife skins as starter content, but the beta and final release of the game removed the items and replaced them with higher quality assets. The knives that are so valuable are just re-textured alpha assets. So it's not even a question of "Are people paying for higher quality content?"
At the end of the day, a person can do what they want with their paycheck, though.
I don't like it, because it is often implemented in a way that is legitimately anti-consumer, such as the sale of completely intangible items that exist purely for the purposes of being sold ($90 'bucket of gems' in Dungeon Keeper? What's that about?). I don't know if the model is going to survive long-term, but I want to see it at least regulated. Casinos, online and offline are strictly regulated, but Valve are left to do whatever they like with their crate systems.
This is a terrible comparison.
Also, I don't think comparing Valve's crate system to gambling is too far off. A lot of people buy into the system simply because of the opening animation in CSGO. I've spent about $15 on keys because every time I open a crate, it feels like I'm closer to unboxing a knife simply because the animation makes it seem that way. In reality an item is selected at random from a list that is controlled by Valve's pre-determined drop percentages. If they wanted to make the ugliest skin in the game become the most valuable, they could do it overnight.
Valve gets more people to buy in with the low cost of keys ($2.49 as opposed to many other games which force you to buy in-game currencies in bundles) and it's readily available to kids too.
In Valve's games, you can sell your crates on the marketplace with 15% of the profits made going right back into Valve's pocket. At some point you'll have enough to purchase keys, and rather than saving the money to buy a new game or some extra content, you'll frequently see people put that money back into the game through keys because like gambling, unboxing crates is fun.
If you don't believe me, just look at some of the videos on youtube where people are unboxing hundreds of crates in a single go. More popular youtubers/streamers will end up relying on donations because they themselves don't want to waste money on this crap, but like I said, there are also many people who are addicted to this.
I'm not fully against the crate system. If Valve found a legal way to make money without ruining my own experience, good for them, but I wish there was at least a warning or something to help the addicts. I also love the fact that they allow community members to submit content that can be monetized.
The current state of submitting content for CSGO basically amounts to painting random bright colors on the UV sheet of a weapon (I saw somebody just use the UV sheet as a skin before lol), submitting it to the workshop, then spamming everybody who has a Steam account with your workshop link in hopes that they'll give it a thumbs up. I believe Valve released a pointpoint presentation on this, but for some reason people prefer having their guns look like plastic toys rather than fitting the military/realistic theme of the game.
If you want to play a Dungeon Keeper game, War For The Overworld is an actual spiritual successor.
Battle Games play like cow-clickers + sit and wait games, which are hardly games.
You're welcome to your own opinion but they made a good game, if they were independent they could continue making mobile games and make a steady income.
I think its a valid comparison, in japan gambling for money is illegal or something so they get round it by gambling for tokens or balls that can be traded for money/prizes.
same system essentially, but this whole line of discussion is sort of derailing the thread.
It's been generally and universally acclaimed as not only a bad follow up but an actual bad experience on top of something that could've been promising. It's a prime example of paywalling gone too far.
This is not an attack on the work gone into that game, this is an attack on the choices that made it into what it ended up like.
What level is your Dungeon Heart? I fell for the bad press myself until I remembered that gamers love to hate & dogpile on a percieved flaw. Try it out and then try out the current blockbuster juggernaut that is Clash of Clans. Compare & contrast.
Look, you can dislike F2P games but the constant cries for regulation or predicting failure is pretty tiring.
I don't know if any Mythic people who lost their jobs are reading this, don't worry. All this hate mirrors the Warhammer hate when I got laid off, luckily the people in charge of hiring recognize great work.
That would've required me to play further than I wanted to, hitting paywalls just for wanting to dig walls isn't a fun experience in a game like dungeon-keeper.
The amount of time and amount of money you have to pay to progress something will only escalate, and the numbers are exponential, not linear.
I don't, free to play games are great, dwarf fortress is my favorite one, didn't cost my but a voluntary donation!
Jokes aside though, I can't say I hate free to play games, there are some fantastic examples out there like TF2 or DOTA 2, and that's how I picture good free to play games.
Which is the separate issue, I've myself been involved far too many times with big teams putting fantastic work and talent into projects that in the end were bad games because of a few chosen but important things.
I still have my WAR collectors edition on the shelf, I enjoyed that one. I think I've already mentioned what the big shame is: That promising franchises like Ultima and dungeon keeper ended up in the big free to play graveyard on the app-market.
And to say that these titles were big hits contradicts EA's decision to close down mythic.
That's odd, I haven't hit a paywall at all, digging out the soft low level stone is 12 seconds for your goblins. A pay wall is a hard stop that requires you to pay to progress any further. When it suggests you spend a gem to speed them up, you've already got a starting bank of gems to spend. Since you've got no intention of paying, just burn through those gems :P. I tend to conserve them. These aren't games that you sit down and do 5 hour marathon sessions, I typically check my Battle Command base in the morning before I go to work and do some PvP when I get home and I can see myself doing the same in Dungeon Keeper.
It's funny you mention that, I've always considered the mystery box drop that you have to pay to open as a bit dirty.
They were successes, a studio of 100 people could get by on it but when it's part of EA's 9,000 employees it's not bringing in the giant, Simpsons Tapped Out money bags they require. The bright side is, F2P mobile games currently don't need big publishers. The game industry has been relying on the AAA blockbuster or bust model for so long nobody even recognized when the middle came back.
I hope we get to see the core of Mythic mobile reform as a new independent studio, it's still like the old days of development where you can make a low cost, low risk mobile game to pay the bills and fund something new.
Optional cosmetic packs are hardly dirty compared to other games. Games like League of Legends lock most of the characters behind a pay/time wall. You'll either have to put in about 8 hours or pay for a character. Other games do similar things with gun and equipment unlocks. Also doesn't Dota and TF2 give out a lot of free cosmetic items?
Anyway, when my layoff condalances thread got turned into a anti-mmo warhammer sucks thread it really made me angry and generated negative opinions of many polycounters that took years to wear off, so maybe we should stop being absolute shit heads and derailing this thread into an armchair analysis of why Mythic got shut down.