Tabula Rasa a bomb; Austin loses workers

After getting ousted from EA Origin following the cancellation of Ultima Online 2, Richard Garriott (aka Lord British) cozied up to NCSoft to create Tabula Rasa, a new fantasy MMOG in a new NCSoft studios in Austin. The game released a few months ago with little fanfare, and rumors of Tabula Rasa being a financial disaster certainly circulated about, not just in the U.S., but in Korea too. With an estimated cost of 100 million USD (which repordedly wildly inaccurrate), Tabula Rasa has managed to bring in only 5.4 million dollars. Official statement by Tabula Rasa's producer Starr Long, can be found here. A portion of his statement reads:

"I would be remiss if I don't clarify the matter of rumored "massive layoffs" within NCsoft North America and the Tabula Rasa team. While the game has not taken off as quickly as we had hoped, we also launched in an insanely competitive time frame, with several well-known intellectual properties launching follow up products at the same time. However, the fact of the matter is that we are transitioning from a pre-launch crunch-mode development team to a live service team. This is standard in our industry--you ramp up to launch a game and then ramp down once it's live. This is what we are doing over the next several weeks, and it only affects the Tabula Rasa team. Once all is said and done, we will still have a substantial live team for industry standards. As you can see by the new features we're working on, we're still planning on lots of great content and updates all year long."

Tabula Rasa launched at the end of October, beginning of November, and they were up against some stiff competition, since that marks the holiday release season; however if you're depending on seasonal sales to make your sales figures, the holiday season is not it -- it's not because of the hardcore gamers, but because the buyers out there are the non-gamers; they're the grandparents and rest of the family that don't play games, and their gut instinct is to reach for a brand they know. I've always felt that the summer months, when the kids are out of school is the best time to launch a new title.

That being said, what other massively multiplayer intellectual followup products were launching at the same time on the PC market? Just for a point of reference, November and December of 2007 were two of the biggest months for videogame sales; Novemeber 2007 raked in 2.63 Billion dollars, while December 2007 brought in 4.82 Billion. That's some big numbers, and yet of that 7 billion, Tabula Rasa managed only 5 million. A Top Ten game like Call of Duty 4, which came out a few days after Tabula Rasa has managed about 1.7 million sales, putting their revenue estimate to about 67 million in the same time frame, which means that Tabula Rasa is not doing well at all.

Starr Long mentions a ramp up and a ramp down; that would be true on some level, as artists and programmers move from one project to another, but you don't have massive layoffs to do that unless you're planning on finishing up the projects at work and shutting down the studio. If I was at the Austin studio, I might be polishing my resume right about now.