EA - Mythic and Bioware Merged

EA merges Mythic and Bioware

In another surprising twist EA has merged Mythic Entertainment with Bioware. I did not expect that.

Link: http://www.incgamers.com/News/17076/

as one reporter put it , it seems to be merge day.

basically Mark Jacobs is fired and Mythic ceases to exist

Three studios under EA's umbrella that do MMOG's are now down to two: Bioware and Originlike.

Am I right or wrong, this is what people feared would happen?

Fear had nothing to do with it!! Just wait now for Madden Football ONLINE!!!!

I never could get Fear to work..so I think you are right.

Again I call on EA to hand of the rest o' them licenses ye been hordin' and given 'em o'er to the deweleper whose kin handle dem!

I thought Mythic might be in trouble when I started getting all this email from Warhammer Online trying to entice me back. They even have bonuses if you can get 1 or more people to sign up. The more people you get to sign up the better the bonuses get. I wasn't sure if that was usual for MMOs since this is the first I actually signed up and played, but it had a certain smell of desperation.

I'm curious, isn't Dark Age still one of the big MMOs? I know WOW is the biggest kid on the block, but I kept hearing good things about Dark Age and a few others.

It's either a truly brilliant move or the dumbest of all time. Warhammer has a HUGE following, yet the game they made based on the Warhammer world felt lifeless and empty. If Mythic can't get those crazed Warhammer fans to sign up and and play their favorite race then maybe Bioware will have better luck.

I highly doubt this is the worst case scenerio that everyone imagined when EA bought Bioware. If they had done the reverse and killed Bioware to put it's people into Mythic then THAT would be bad, but this is giving another company a chance to tap into the Warhammer market. If they can make a fun game or at least fix WAR so that Warhammer nuts like me are interested in it for more than a week then I believe it has a good chance to give WOW a run for it's money. I'm not saying it would overtake the popularity of WOW, but there is so much potential with that license to be wasted on a game that is not fun and doesn't bring any of the elements that make the Warhammer world a great place to play.

What I never wil understand is why people are willing to sell their companies, instead of being independent.

The amount of greed must be really high.

I think it's about time the gaming industry realizes The One Truth:
- MMO gamers usually play a single MMO at any given time.

There's no point in releasing one MMO after the other, since the market is smaller than it seems, especially considering the development costs. Investors look at WoW and go "oooo, potential to become BILLIONAIRS!". They should be looking at WoW and go "odd one out".

I'm not saying you can't have more than one successful MMO at any given time. I'm just saying you can't have dozens. The market's just not big enough. It's nothing like the single player market where you could, potentially, buy several games per month (if enough good games got released).

Age of Conan is currently estimated to have around 100.000 subscribers. WAR has somewhere along the lines of 300.000. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, is still growing, and has passed 11.500.000 paying accounts (quite a few players own several accounts though).

Both Funcom and Mythic has made a good effort to steal some of WoWs playerbase, but as the numbers indicate, they've failed completely. I think SW: Tor will probably be a success, but it's not going to be a new WoW. Not even close. WoW is, as I've mentioned already, the odd one, and only achieved such status due to a set of circumstances that is unlikely to repeat itself (the discovery of the casual MMO market among other things- MMOs prior to WoW usually required exceptional dedication to get anywhere).

EA has restructured their RPG and MMO games development studios to form a new, yet unnamed, RPG/MMO studio consisting of Mythic and Bioware. The good Bioware doctor Ray Muzyka will be the head of this new studio, with Greg Zeschuk becoming Group Creative Officer (whatever that means). In the chain of command Rob Denton will be General Manager of the Mythic part and the Bioware part will remain to report to Ray Muzyka.

As Rob Denton has stepped up as General Manager, Mark Jacobs becomes the former General Manager of Mythic and has left EA yesterday. Mark Jacobs was also the Lead Designer on Warhammer Online and co-founder of Mythic.
The official gospel is that Mark Jacobs and EA have "mutually agreed to separate".
Thanks Steve for the lead.
More information.

can we link this thread to this news?

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7515

talk about bad timing - some of the biggest news this site has had all year and it gets way delayed.

"Way delayed"? What are you talking about? Posting the news took us only ca. 4 hours since it had been sent in. That's pretty quick.

Your post on the other hand took more than 27 hours.

Not sure if you are being sarcastic - - it was definitely not 4 hours before it was on display - at least for me.

regardless can we link the the thread to this?

Lucky Day said:

Not sure if you are being sarcastic - - it was definitely not 4 hours before it was on display - at least for me.

Click to expand...

It was 4 hours. I looked it up before I posted.

regardless can we link the the thread to this?

Click to expand...

This thread was automatically created when you posted. I don't know how it can be replaced by another one.

Gorath said:

This thread was automatically created when you posted. I don't know how it can be replaced by another one.

Click to expand...

Thread merging does the trick, befitting a topic of this nature. Done. I chose to merge the other thread to the news one, because well, it was news.

As for the news itself - while I'm curious what this will bring us, I'm also a bit scared. Too much merging hurts individuality.

Basicly this means, as I see it, that Mythic is now dead and gone, being merged and fused into Bioware's MMO-division. And that may not be a bad thing ---- pe se, I find.

Excellent news. WAR was a major disappointment. One of the worst game ever released in terms of engine performance/optimization. Not to mention the record long list of great on paper, crap in practice game mechanisms and features.

I'm confident Mythic products are in much better hands now. The bar has been so low in the past few years at Mythic that it should be an easy thing to do for Bioware.

Farewell Mark Jacobs, can't say I'll regret you though.

I'm not sure it's anything more than a chain-of-management change. As I understand, the individual studios are still doing their thing but instead of reporting to...whoever it used to be, now they report to Ray. Perhaps Ray will make changes in the long term but I don't see much in this at the moment. Rob Denton co-founded Mythic with Jacobs, didn't he? Wouldn't that mean any ill-will directed at Jacobs also belongs to Denton?