Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Development of Warhammer Online

Scathing behind-the-scenes look at the development of EA’s Warhammer Online MMO game, from “EA Louse”, a pseudonymous insider:

Anyway, back to Warhammer. We shouldn’t have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn’t done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out.

We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300K subs a month later. Going down every since. It’s “stable” now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade make more money than our biggest project.

He predicts doom for EA’s long-awaited Knights of the Old Republic MMO game. Take it with a grain of salt, given the author’s anonymity and the fact that it’s mostly about a single game that went bad, but it’s an interesting look at the big-ticket game industry.

★ Monday, 18 October 2010