Tabula Rasa Failure Retrospectives
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Our response was to keep our heads down and do the best that we could at our jobs. From what I gathered from hallway conversations with others, that was a fairly universal take. It's what you CAN do.And an excerpt from Adam's article:
Unfortunately it wasn't enough, for our project, and ultimately, for Tabula Rasa as well. There's nothing that you can point to and say (here was the big mistake). There were a lot of tiny mistakes, and they built up.
Would delaying Tabula Rasa's open beta have saved it? Probably not.
Would delaying Tabula Rasa's release have saved it? Probably not.
In the end, some games - most games, actually - just fail. Tabula Rasa was one of those. There wasn't anything obvious or magical to it. It just wasn't a game that very many people got passionate about. The biggest failing, though, was that it was in development about twice as long and spent twice as much as it had any right to. And that's what promotes it, in this snarky outside blogger's view, from understandable failure to extinction-level company-slaying train wreck. That took precedence over any design failure or engineering failure or art vision or whatever your personal opinion on why it failed might be.
It wasn't ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so. How privately they said it, in many cases I don't know. However, I am aware of plenty of people that said it pretty loudly internally at NCsoft (I saw the emails, or sat in the meetings).Thanks, Blue's News.
NB: I said (wasn't ready for beta(. We're not even discussing (launch) yet.
But it was never going to be as easy as simply saying (hey, I'm not that busy for the next fortnight; howabout we launch TR next week? Or do you want to wait another year or two?). On a project that had already burnt through tens of millions of dollars with almost nothing concrete to show for it (not necessarily a (fair) judgement; but if you were *literal* about it, which by that point many people were, then technically there was (nothing) to show), and had on the order of 100 people employed full time working on it every day, there was a lot of money at stake even just delaying launch by a single week.
(do the math; you're already counting in the (hundreds of thousands of dollars) each time you prolong development by a single week there)
And then there were the political issues, for instance the fact that NCsoft North America had never developed a game internally in their long years of existence (all the internal games were developed by studios that NCsoft acquired during development). That means that the core business for the USA wasn't making any revenue *at all* (publishing and development are usually seen as different divisions). Again, I'm not defending this perspective, or claiming it's fair - but it was technically true, and was mentioned a lot.
