Electronic Arts Retrospective
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in 2006, EA acquired Dark Age of Camelot developer Mythic Entertainment and put them to work on Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. But despite the fact that the game had been in development in one form or another since the early 2000s, it was released with many of its features still unfinished. Age of Reckoning garnered some early acclaim and had a robust launch, but the game never surpassed 800,000 users and currently is down to only three servers. A related Warhammer MMO called Wrath of Heroes was planned, but poor reception and low interest killed it while it was still in beta (Wrath of Heroes shuts down on March 31, 2013).
Likewise, the publisher faced numerous challenges with BioWare's MMO entry, Star Wars: The Old Republic. The game reportedly cost Electronic Arts and BioWare $200 million, employing more than 800 staffers across four continents to develop it. Despite such lavish costs, SWTOR has been unable to topple World of Warcraft or even significantly cut into WoW's subscriber base.
Although SWTOR initially attracted more than 1.7 million subscribers, the number has since slumped into the hundreds of thousands. BioWare and EA cited the amount of content they created for the game, saying many players were barreling through SWTOR too quickly and eventually getting to endgame content that BioWare was still working on producing. That caused a big drop-off in subscribers, as there was little reason for players to stick around.
SWTOR was profitable, but the WoW-style subscriber model was deemed unsuccessful and the game was transitioned into free-to-play less than a year after launch. At BioWare, co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk, who had been heading up SWTOR studio BioWare Austin, seemingly departed from BioWare and later announced that he and fellow co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka were retiring from games altogether.
