Mark Jacobs MMORPGS, mmos, Mobile, online games, Uncategorized Apple

Folks,

Hmm, this post was supposed to be added two years ago. Since I’m back here now, I might as well put it up…

Mark

From 2013———————————————–

And that is a good thing of course. Kind of the whole point of putting up a series of teasers. Lots more info to come in the next few weeks…

In the meantime, a few quick hits for a lazy Saturday afternoon:

1) Thanks to everyone who has expressed an interest in our next project. Speaking for everyone at CSE, we really appreciate it and hope that your interest and support will grow as we release more information.

2) To those who have asked if I’m willing to “spill the beans on EA/Mythic/etc.”, no. I still prefer to take the high road as I have always tried to do when it comes to other developers/publishers. My time as CEO at Mythic and then GM at EA wasn’t perfect and while 2006-2009 were the worst three years of my life, I can’t and won’t blame EA for all that unhappiness even if it would garner me some support. Readers here know that those years included my mom’s diagnosis and death from cancer and that, to be frank, didn’t help matters one little bit. Over the years at Mythic I made some mistakes and I’m more than willing to stand up and admit that. Fortunately though I can say that I never did anything for personal gain at the expense of other people (quite the opposite as *everyone* who was part of the EA/Mythic negotiations knows). While I have never knowingly lied to the community and never will; I still won’t spill the beans other than to say the same thing that I said a few years ago and that in the end, what it really boiled down to is that EA & I split because we disagreed on the best way to move forward with Mythic/BioWare/EA/etc. While there is a lot more to the story, those details would involve me doing what I detest and unless I’m given a reason, I’ll keep those details to myself. As per above, it still boiled down to the same thing, I was unhappy at EA/Mythic and the direction EA/BioWare/Mythic were going, in my opinion, was wrong on so many levels and I made no secret about it.

3) As part of (2), a number of people have speculated/asked (in the past & currently) about whether EA & I split over what EA thought WAR was going to do in terms of sub numbers. That one makes me chuckle a little since prior to the acquisition by EA (which is why I can talk about this), Mythic’s internal projections for WAR were in the 300K per month range. That, was a number I told them several times (as readers here know EA & Mythic went back and forth on a M&A for about 5 years) to which one senior EA executive said “You’re sandbagging aren’t you?” I laughed and said a little bit but not much but I said if EA will really support us, 400K is doable. It was my belief then and now that RvR-centric MMORPGs could not attract the same numbers as PvE-centric MMORPGs and that WoW’s numbers were untouchable and back in 2005, we were making a RvR-centic MMORPG. Nothing I’ve seen since then has changed my opinion on that.

4) For those who are wondering about whether this new game is another tablet/mobile game, I’ll simply say that I’m a big believer in how tablet and mobile games have changed the game industry but I’m a also a bigger believer that PC gaming is not on the brink of death (which makes me odd man out in some circles).

That’s it for now.

Mark