Goodbye, Mythic Entertainment (May 29, 2014)

[ChrisReid]

There's some unfortunate news out of Fairfax, Virginia today. Mythic Entertainment was closed by Electronic Arts. GameSpot suggests that the move appears to have been a sudden decision considering that new job listings having been posted within the last few weeks. However, CIC readers may have seen the writing on the wall. Their flagship Warhammer Online MMO was shut down six months ago, and the Dungeon Keeper game they released this past spring got scathing reviews due to its tedious free-to-play model. Perhaps most telling, its relatively steady revenue drivers Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot were recently shifted to a 3rd party developer as well.


If you're a recent follower of our site, you might not be familiar with how Mythic has been the carrier of Origin's torch for some time. After OSI in Austin was shut down in February 2004, much of their old material was temporarily held in California and then found a home in Mythic's storage closets. Due to their success with DAoC, Mythic was also tasked with continued operation of Origin's longest running game, Ultima Online. They even set up a classy dedication page that commemorated all the worlds that Origin created. In 2008, the CIC Staff got the lucky privilege of visiting their studio building to carefully archive and document their stored Origin materials, some of which we've been cleared to release. You can also check out our fun photos of the archiving trip here.











In recent times, there was a glimmer of hope that attention might shift back towards the Wing Commander series. Their studio lobby was redecorated with Wing Commander memorabilia and Mythic's Paul Barnett helped push into Origin's past, which resulted in the release of Ultima Forever. Alas, the next Wing Commander game will come from a different direction. Our sympathies go out to all the displaced employees. Thank you for helping protect Origin's legacy for the past decade!









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Original update published on May 29, 2014

 

[Dundradal]

Sad to see them go.

Long Live the Confederation.

 

[Quarto]

Definitely unfortunate. At times like this, I really am tempted to think that there's something to that whole Internet "EA buys studios to kill them" thing. I mean, obviously, EA does not actually buy studios with the intention to kill them. But once a studio becomes a part of EA, it can become, under the right circumstances, expendable. In that sense, there's no qualitative difference between EA and other, smaller companies - business is business, if something is causing you losses, you get rid of it. The difference is in scale, because other companies usually just fire individual employees, while EA gets to make bigger decisions.

The thing that puzzles me is that so much money goes into building up studios as brands. When EA buys a company like Mythic (or like Origin, Westwood, Maxis, et cetera), they don't do so only to get the people, technology, or even the IP. They also do so for the studio brand. There was a time when "an Origin game" meant... you know, a lot. There was a time when a new RTS from Westwood was as eagerly awaited as a new RTS from Blizzard. In such cases, it was so much easier to market a new IP, because people keep track of their favourite studios. Now, I don't think Mythic is quite in the same category as Origin or Westwood or Maxis... but it could have been. It's more the general state of things that makes me wonder - I understand why EA never liked to play up the "star developer" angle with individuals, because stellar individuals tend to leave sooner or later, and all that money spent building up their identity is worse than wasted. But why is it that they never seriously attempted to build up their studio brands, instead preferring to ultimately dissolve their unique studio identities in a greater EA corporate identity? It seems like a waste of money - they buy a well-recognised studio that had spent lots of money to establish its image, and they don't use it...

A few questions at this point spring to mind - questions that, presumably, nobody can really answer, but are worth posing nonetheless.
- Is Paul Barnett out of a job? He seems to have been instrumental in pushing for more WC, and clearly he won't be able to do that once outside of EA. Or... will he? (Of course, he worked on many things, so there's no reason to assume WC is a key interest for him in the future)
- Is there anyone else (...important) at EA that is known to have shown interest in WC?
- What's gonna happen to all those WC materials now?