Quote:
Originally Posted by Maxxius
Why?

We had to agree to a launch date, or there would be no money to continue. This was unfortunate, but we will and are recovering. This game was expensive -- probably second only to WoW, although WoW cost more than double. I don't want to sound jealous, although I probably am to some degree to be honest, but Blizzard put $80M into development. No one else is willing or able to do that. Not Microsoft, not Sony. EA perhaps, and they're now back in the MMOG business with the Mythic acquisition (but at the time we started Sigil, they were still in a lot of pain over Sims Online, which is rumored to have been around $25-30M -- so at the time they were not interested in a game like Vanguard. And certainly not smaller publishers -- they definitely don't have that kind of money.

The reality is that Blizzard has been a fantastic company for many years, known for it's quality RTS games. They've been very profitable and pride themselves in taking whatever time they need. This allowed them to take the time and spend like I said more than double what Vanguard cost, EQ 2 cost, etc. They also, because of how popular the Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games were and are in Asia, have a great name there, a great sales force that understands and thrives in a very different market (where you sell to PC Bangs as much as you do individuals). They are even making great in-roads into China. The result? The money they put into the game was well worth it and the game is doing incredibly well.

But in a sense, I can't really complain. That Sigil, a start-up company, was given the money we were is probably unheard and totally unprecedented. If it wasn't for our EQ heritage it never would have happened. We also set out to make a very ambitious game. In 20/20 hindsight, we could have scaled things back, but we didn't know that we'd need to launch a couple of months early. Also, WoW has exposed people to MMOGs who likely wouldn't have tried them -- back when we were pitching Vanguard the general belief was that the MMOG market was saturated and only about a million or so people were interested in MMOGs. WoW blew open the gamespace, destroying the theory that the gamespace was saturated. This is good for all MMOG developers, especially those who began development after WoW.

So I'm not upset in anyway with SOE or Microsoft -- again, what they did give us in terms of funding and support is unprecedented. The vast majority of developers would kill for such a budget as we received. It's just a financial reality that is hurting us short term a bit, but something I know we can and are recovering from. Also, launching around the same time as Burning Crusade wasn't optimal either, but again, nothing we can't recover from.

What are we going to do about it? Well, the team is continuing to crunch and kick ass and are quickly making up for what happened. We're killing bugs, tweaking content, adding polish, etc. And, at the same time, putting in new content as well. We're patching often and the game is getting better every day. That, combined with the hooks and planning we did early on, makes me really excited. I'm loving the game now, and I'm just as excited about the future. We have 5+ years planned out in terms of expansions, live updates, new game mechanics, etc. We'll be able to take advantage of new technology, implementing it relatively easily because of the way the game is architected.

So that's it in a nutshell. A little frustrating short term, but the game is out, it continues to sell well, churn is very low, and the word continues to spread that the game is fun. Also, hardware is becoming cheaper and faster and as people upgrade their machines for Vanguard and other newer games either already out or on the horizon, the performance issues will go away. EQ 1 had a similar issue, but it paid off as well -- we were one of the first hardware only games (remember the Voodoo 1?). People needed to upgrade, but within 6 months or so after launch, Voodoo 2s were out, etc. and performance issues all but went away. In fact, performance past us up and we were able to create zones more detailed in our first expansion (Kunark) without any problems. This will happen with Vanguard as well.

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