There’s been a lot of talk about Tabula Rasa lately, including its oncoming demise. TR’s launch and subsequent failure would be an afterthought, if Richard wasn’t involved – hell, MOST game projects fail or are cancelled, and to the team’s credit, TR actually did get out the door — more than the vast majority of games in this industry. Still, the history is there, and worth discussing.
The two most interesting posts on the subject should be required reading: Scott’s view from another project in the same building, andAdam’s view from across the pond. Both are required reading, as is Eric’s take here.
The interesting thing is where Scott and Adam’s views differ. The meat of Adam’s view can be summed up as ‘the game needed more time’:
Very late, they eventually hit upon a good formula, a good core game (but) before they could actually make that game, a difficult decision was taken to push the team to the wall and force an early beta test …and then the even more difficult decision taken to push them even harder to do an insanely early live launch.
Scott’s view is more simple.
It just. took. too. much. money.
These views are, of course, the competing pressures that Tabula Rasa (and many other projects that take big chances) face. It takes time and money to find the fun, but TR’s burn rate, by the time they shipped, was enormous. It’s impossible before you launch to know whether that money will be the little bit that pushes it over the edge, or whether it will be throwing good money after bad.
My view was different. I always felt that Tabula Rasa’s primary sin was that it was too niche. What does that mean? Primarily, it means that nobody is sure that the market is there. Niche isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, you’re surprised, and the niche is bigger than you expect. Sometimes, today’s niches become tomorrow’s mainstream titles and genres. Some of my favorite games are niche games. Katamari. Ico. Rez. The future of our industry depends on these experimental titles.
City of Heroes, another NCSoft title, is to me an example of a successful niche product in the MMO space. It got good word of mouth, had a stable launch, and hovered between 100-200K subs for quite a while. Doing some back of the envelope calculations: figure 200K boxes sold in the first year, an average of 125K subs, at $15 bucks a month (all erring on the side of conservative). If your development costs are 7M and support/marketing costs are 18M per year– well, the math gets a tad complex here, but the short version is that one can see a path to financial success and profit, perhaps around a year to eighteen months after ship. City of Heroes was a niche game, but it was successful because they kept dev costs low.
My problem with Tabula Rasa, as a designer, can be summed up simply in two points.
- I felt that, even if they nailed the design they were trying for, TR would not match City of Heroes’ level of success. City of Heroes had no license and was in an untested genre, but had familiar game mechanics to lean on. TR was inventing a fiction, a genre, game mechanics – everything.
- The rumors I was hearing had it being significantly more expensive than City of Heroes. I wouldn’t have predicted an order of magnitude more, but its always been clear that that was a very large team. Making a game that no one was quite sure there was a market for.
Quick math exercise: take CoH’s dev costs and dial them up. Now take their subscriber numbers, and dial them down. The gap before the game stops paying off development debt and starts being profitable will get longer and longer. How long should it get, before the business case for the game can’t be made?
All this is a long-winded way of saying that the game probably shouldn’t have been made. And here’s the kicker: this is despite the fact that I think the game is fun.
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