40K MMO cancelled

[HsojVvad]

Saw this on DakkaDakka.

[url]http://kotaku.com/5876253/thq-wipes-out-games-planned-for-2014-to-ready-itself-for-sale-says-insider[/url]

Looks like the 40K MMO might be cancelled now.

[eldargal]

From an update to that story:

"THQ has not cancelled its 2014 line-up, and has not made any decisions regarding the planned MMO.

From [URL="http://kotaku.com/5876348/thq-says-it-has-not-cancelled-its-2014-lineup"]here[/URL].

[JxKxR]

Sounds like they could be taking a break from the MMO for a while. Let's just hope it doesn't get back shelved for years like the Duke Nukem game.

[Dalleron]

I can see this game getting tossed. Warhammer Online had it's +/-'s put it wasn't that good in my books. I see a 40K MMO being even harder to make. Moreso when you factor in Space Marines. In my eyes, it would be very hard to balance that game.

[eldargal]

I disagree, partly, I think WAR suffered because there are heaps of fantasy MMOs, one of them being the king of them all at present. Scifi MMOs are much less oversaturated, SW:TOR notwithstanding. Scifi MMOs do have their challenges, though, namely how to balance ranged at melee combat.

[MarneusCalgar]

Well, now all the MMO´s seem to be on a going down line since WoW (and even it): Age of Conan, WAR, are examples of this...

TOR has been very in demand, so hope it changes the situation when Dark Millenium comes

[Dalleron]

MMO's may be past their prime, it would be hard to argue to argue otherwise. But if you believe Blizz, 10 million people still play WoW. And SW:TOR seems to be doing good. I'm loving it, but that may be because of the source material.

But if you do a game right, people will play it. WoW has done well. People still play Runescape as I understand things.

I found WAR unpolished, and I wanted to love that game, but it let me down.

[eldargal]

WAR completely failed at immersion, for me at least. Even WoW did a better job of making me feel part of the game world, and SW:TOR does it better than any other mmo I've played. I never once felt part of the Warhammer world and I so wanted to. Even the environments as lovely as they were always felt like a theme park rather than actual places.

[Crackgnome]

Considering THQ's stock price plummet of nearly 90% in the last year, the best we can hope for is that they sell the company to someone else who picks the game up and does something different with it.

[TheDirtyHippy]

As a video game analyst, I have to say that THQ is probably not going to be around much longer.
Their management team doesn't know what they're doing.

They pumped all this money into licensing kids properties (Nickelodeon, Disney/Pixar, etc) then closed down the entire Kids & Family division. I'll tell you one thing about the game industry. Those cheap video games based off of the current cartoon might not make much money, but they make consistent money. You'd have to be a total moron to not keep Kids & Family profitable. The average game in that segment sells about 50 to 75 thousand units. If you know reliably how much profit you're going to take in before you even start working on the game, then you should know how to budget development costs. The marketing for these games is almost non-existent, as the movie/show is your advertising.

I know that 40k: DMO was a huge money sink for THQ. They spent a lot on an exclusive license for the 40k universe. THQ expected Space Marine to do far better than it did. Now, for the quality of the game, target audience, and the amount of marketing they spent, predicting how well that game would sell based on past performance of other games with similar qualities is pretty straightforward. Either they did no research, or they were betting on a miracle.

Here's a wonderful letter to the THQ board of directors that showed up on Kotatu:
[url]http://kotaku.com/5879436/dont-blame-udraw-blame-yourselves-rankled-staff-tells-thq-executives[/url]