Blizzard - Titan MMO Cancelled & A $50 Million Loss

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Aubrielle sent me a link to an interesting article on PC Gamer that has news Blizzard has cancelled the Titan MMO, and might have taken a $50 million loss doing so.

We all know that is chump change to Blizzard anyway.
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Industry analysts say the decision to pull the plug on Titan cost Blizzard a lot more than just seven years of time: The studio may have sunk $50 million or more into its development before finally deciding that it simply wasn't going to work. But in spite of that eye-popping price tag, the consensus is that it really didn't have much of a choice.

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said yesterday that despite putting the better part of a decade into Titan, it "didn't find the fun" in the game, which eventually led to the decision to kill the project completely. It was an "excruciating" decision, Blizzard's Chris Metzen added, and probably not just because it represented the end of a long and ultimately unfulfilled creative endeavor.

Industry analyst Billy Pidgeon estimated that the development cost of Titan may have topped $50 million, while Michael Pachter of Wedbush Security went even higher. "My guess is 100 to 200 people at $100,000 per year, so $70 to 140 million sunk cost," he told GamesIndustry International. "It's pretty sad that it took so long to figure out how bad the game was. I expect them to go back to the drawing board."

Another analyst, David Cole of DFC Intelligence, said the decision was likely prompted by the need for a subscription-based MMO to be "out-of-this-world unbelievable" in order to succeed in a market dominated by free-to-play games, which includes Blizzard's own Hearthstone. "I am expecting to see them continue to focus on high quality products but also focus on products with shorter development cycles and less cost," he said. "The market is just not in a place where you can have games with seven-plus year development. It is changing too fast."

Blizzard, of course, is one of the few game companies in the world that can absorb that kind of hit, and it's not a complete loss: Pidgeon noted that the benefits of the Titan experience "can include invaluable training, IP and technology that can be applied to other games." Even more interesting from the perspective of gamers, a Blizzard-connected source told Kotaku that "a good handful" of the Titan development team is still together despite the game's cancellation. Titan is dead, but it clearly isn't going to be forgotten anytime soon.
More information.
 
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The concept sounded interesting, but if it can't hold its own in a rather crowded MMO market, canceling is the only thing that makes sense.

There are rumors that Blizzard is already working on various unannounced projects. They will hopefully announce something on this year's BlizzCon, which is in November, but I wouldn't count on it. They generally only announce games when they're well underway or even nearing completion.

I'm still waiting for Warcraft 4, but I honestly don't think it'll happen anytime soon.
 
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What a massive waste of time and resources.

Not that they can't afford it, but Blizzard have been in steady decline for years.

Maybe they should hire someone with real vision and trust it, instead of trying to iterate their way to a good game. They've always had an admirable corporate culture, but after WoW, they lost so much talent - and they're just too big for this kind of approach.
 
I have to say I admire them for not doing a cash grab and ruin their reputation, like so many other companies would do.
 
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I have to say I admire them for not doing a cash grab and ruin their reputation, like so many other companies would do.

Yeah, Blizzard has done this with a few games over the years and I'm pretty sure the playerbase is more glad than sad.
I'd rather not have a game than have a piece of garbage game.
Sadly, not many companies think like that.
 
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Starcraft.. Ghost? Was it? And some Warcraft adventure game I believe. Or RPG? I don't remember. I think it was adventure. I know I was looking forward to it, and I'm still a bit miffed that they canceled it.

By the way, is 15 years a bit much to hold a grudge over something like this?
 
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My guess is 100 to 200 people at $100,000 per year, so $70 to 140 million sunk cost,"

Er, what? Shades of Amalur I guess. Financially Blizzard may not have been in a decline but in terms of vision they certainly are. You can just look at the successful Kickstarters and see what could have been achieved with that kind of money.
 
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I was never a fan of Warcraft, or Diablo, and I played WoW for all of 5 days. One less junky mmo in the 'verse, it's all for the good. Their games really seem aimed at the lowest common denominator.
 
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Regardless of how you find their products, you have to give Blizzard credit, they've released a ton of successful games. In fact, they have a reputation of releasing games that people want to buy. I think they have some shrewd business people and it was probably a really smart move to give up on this game.
 
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Regardless of how you find their products, you have to give Blizzard credit, they've released a ton of successful games. In fact, they have a reputation of releasing games that people want to buy. I think they have some shrewd business people and it was probably a really smart move to give up on this game.

It might have been the smart move given the circumstances, but I can't give them credit for wasting so much time, so much talent (because their craftsmen are EXTREMELY talented), and so much money - and come up with essentially nothing. The world didn't create those circumstances, that's 100% on Blizzard.

They're the ONE developer in the entire world who's essentially free to do exactly what they want. They have all the power anyone could ever want in terms of creative freedom and opportunity.

How people can turn that around to something positive, I don't understand. It's a gigantic fiasco, from where I'm sitting.
 
I have to say I admire them for not doing a cash grab and ruin their reputation, like so many other companies would do.

errrr come again GG? Ruined reputation bit I can agree with but cash grab? How one performs a cash grab on a game which was reported as being in trouble in 2013?
 
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It takes a lot to get a rise out of me, but the more I think about this - the more it bothers me. I realise they don't owe anybody anything - and what they do with their time and money is their business.

But to think of what they could accomplish if they had a single creative vision and trusted in it.

Instead, they go and announce they should be making small games instead. What a fucking waste of potential.

Sigh!
 
How people can turn that around to something positive, I don't understand. It's a gigantic fiasco, from where I'm sitting.

Business people are pretty good at managing money. What they aren't always so good at are judging creative enterprises. They may not have even realized what a steaming pile they were producing--it's all about the bottom line for them.
 
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Business people are pretty good at managing money. What they aren't always so good at are judging creative enterprises. They may not have even realized what a steaming pile they were producing—it's all about the bottom line for them.

I think business and creativity sort of go together at Bliz.

But they've always been a company with heavy reliance on the iterative process. As in, they've always spent a ridiculous amount of time trying something, iterating on it - making people play it - over and over, until they came up with something that works.

Such a thing can work, but it won't produce great games UNLESS there's a powerful vision behind it.

It seems to me they lost most of their talented visionaries right around the release of WoW - and I can think of half a dozen new companies made up of ex-Bliz people.

Since then, all they've been left with is a shit-load of cash, super craftsmen, and a gigantic corporate structure where the individual creative visionary must have the hardest time staying in control.
 
This is like some fable. A small studio gets rich and successful off of a really passionate, inspired idea. They swell into a corporate monster, and they get so big and rich that they forget their craft.

Some unforgettable games could be made with a tiny fraction of what they lost on this. They just threw away some ludicrous amount of money on something they kept more secret than some creepy military research project, and they never even said what it was.

I'm still shaking my head. It's tragically absurd.
 
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errrr come again GG? Ruined reputation bit I can agree with but cash grab? How one performs a cash grab on a game which was reported as being in trouble in 2013?

There is a lot of ways to do that. For example market it and sell it as the best game ever ( Destiny anyone ? ) for a company like Blizzard to do that they'll sell millions of copies before people realize it is garbage... not hard at all in my opinion.
 
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I believe that Titan was a microtransaction and RMAH oriented game, and then when D3 RMAH colossally flopped they realized they could not release a game that went farther in that direction which left them developing just a core subscription based MMO which would cannibalize WOW and require similar development and they lost interest
 
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Blizzard has long ceased to be what it used to be, the best and ancient employees that made it what it was are mostly long gone, it will keep declining.
 
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Blizzard has long ceased to be what it used to be, the best and ancient employees that made it what it was are mostly long gone, it will keep declining.

That's actually wrong. Many of the people around from the Warcraft 2 days still work at Blizzard. In fact, if you compare the staff listings of Starcraft 2 and Starcraft 1, it's astonishing how much overlap there is, especially at the higher levels. Blizzard probably has more continuity with its early days than, say, Obsidian has with Black Isle.

The main exception to this is Diablo. Diablo was made by Blizzard North, which was a separate studio. Blizzard North died about a decade ago, and almost nobody who worked on Diablo worked on Diablo 3. But Blizzard main has a lot of continuity.

Personally, I don't get the hatred Blizzard gets. Diablo 3 on release had issues, but it wasn't half the disaster people made it out to be. And, nowadays, Diablo 3 is much improved. Starcraft 2, while having a terrible story, still had a great single player campaign, great multiplayer, and one of the best supported/most flexible map editors in gaming. Its multiplayer is, IMO, the best "classic RTS" multiplayer in gaming, even if you can rightfully criticize it for being too conservative. Hearthstone is fantastic (I'm borderline obsessed with it), and I've heard great things about HotS.

People just like to beat up on Blizzard because they're huge and popular. There's also a little bit of misplaced expectations because of nostalgia. People find themselves not being as impressed at 30 as they were at 12, and they blame it all on the developer. Starcraft 2 is a great game by any metric, even if it didn't steal my life like the original.
 
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