Comments on: Tabula Rasa Took Too Long

By: Project Management for Game Development « MMO Tidbits

Project Management for Game Development « MMO Tidbits — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:55:58 +0000

[...] The sad tale of Tabula Rasa is a case in point. Despite a star-studded development team and deep-pocket backing from one of the strongest MMO publishers in the world at that time (NCsoft), six years of development yielded about one year of live operation before shut-down. Some reports suggest that translated into $106 mil in development for less than $20 mil in income (see “Tabula Rasa took Too Long”). [...]

By: Devon

Devon — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:06:12 +0000

I think the reason it failed was because they launched an incomplete game. They didn’t even have the military surplus thingy up yet. Class abilities etc. were inbalanced. The ability to clone characters was way overrated. Combat was initially fun but got boring fast, probably since there wasn’t much to do except switch weapons and mash your melee-hit key.

The lack of some serious PvP system is what really killed it for me, though.

By: samuel gompers

samuel gompers — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:49:55 +0000

A niche game? Yes, Tabula Rasa belongs to that obscure, rarely-seen subgenre: “Scifi-themed games where players zap Martians with lasers.” Everybody knows those never sell.

The “problem” is simple supply & demand. Subscription fees and level grinding restrict the appeal of MMOs to the limited number of people willing to invest the time & money. That’s why the MMO landscape consists of a tiny ruling oligopoly of hits and 95% flops. The number of possible concurrent hits does seem to have slowly grown over the last decade, but nowhere near fast enough to keep pace with MMO overproduction.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:31:14 +0000

I wonder if these means they were in crunch mode for a large part of that six years…

By: Sente

Sente — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:37:10 +0000

NCsoft’s business is still mainly the home market in Korea and some of the other Asian countries. Except for perhaps Guild Wars they have not had a huge impact on the western market. Allowing to start over again was probably in the hopes that the Western equivalent of Lineage (1 & 2) could be made.

Lineage is still making a lot of money for NCSoft even after 10 years, so if they could have got it right that may still have been worth it.

I think Tabula Rasa is a quite nice game, but the strong points are mixed up with some weak spots and the setting is not one for wide market appeal IMHO. And marketing mostly seemed to be towards existing MMORPG players who had played a couple of other MMORPGs and partly missing the mark.

By: Talyn

Talyn — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:40:51 +0000

I hope you caught the followup article, however: http://www.massively.com/2008/02/18/tabula-rasa-news-not-what-it-seems/
Here’s a highlight:
According to what we were able to uncover this very same Korea Times staff writer has earned a reputation for writing sensationalized articles about NCsoft. In the last year he apparently has “reported” particulars from conferences that he never actually attended.

That said, yes, TR took way too long (sure, they scrapped Plan A and started from scratch with Plan B mid-stream) and spent waaaaaaay too much money for a game that hasn’t turned out to be quite what many of us had hoped. It’s a shame, too, I’ve always been a fan of Richard Garriott whereas I was quite pleased to see Brad McQuaid’s arrogant face slammed in the mud with Vanguard (which, irony of ironies, I’m actually enjoying now that he’s out of the picture).

By: Allen Varney

Allen Varney — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:05:07 +0000

“They could have created three mediocre games with that same amount of money, and they’d have 264,000 players (88,000 * 3) right now.” I doubt it. Three mediocre games wouldn’t get 3x 88K players; three mediocre games would each quickly crater and earn basically nothing. Rather, they could have created six or eight small-but-excellent “boutique” games with small-but-devoted audiences of 10-50,000 players apiece — in other words, six or eight more “Dungeon Runners.” You can argue whether the opportunity cost there is too high to be worthwhile, but at least the chances of survival are greater.

By: DS

DS — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:45:59 +0000

I disagree. Tabula Rasa failed because it took too long to make a clearly niche title. Anyone looking at its design at any point could have told you it was a niche title. If TR had managed to get 300K users, they’d pay off the development costs in a fairly quick period of time.

By: Swift Voyager

Swift Voyager — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:55:49 +0000

Another bonus about having three mediocre games in stead of one is that having three games increases the odds that at least ONE of them will be a hit.