Indie-Resource.com

Here is the news story. So Blizzard has decided to permanently cancel the never-officially-unveiled "Titan" MMO project. They had been working on it for 7 years and it was supposed to be the non-Warcraft successor to WoW. They claim they "never found the fun" and realized it was not what they wanted to be working on.

As an aside, it must be nice to be a AAA developer who can afford to put 7 years into a gigantic MMORPG project and then just wake up one day and say "Nah, I don't wanna do this anymore". Most every other indie and AAA developer lives and dies by making a return on everything they invest in. Dat Warcraft'n'Diablo $$$ !!

Regardless, I wouldn't have just "canned" a project. I would turn it into some sort of money return so that you get some ROI in there. But what Blizzard chooses to do is their prerogative. I think it is silly to simply throw away 7 years worth of work.

That is no doubt several million $$ worth of work they scrapped.

What a waste... didn't know much about the game, but it's a shame to see all that work lost.

On the other hand, I've scrapped more MMOs than Blizzard

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Note that the article just said the project was canned, as in they won't be releasing it. They are a big company and a lot of money was put into that. They will obviously be liquidating all assets that they can't merge into their other games.

Probally for the best. It would take players away from WoW. Its just to bad they didn't do it sooner.

Sim wrote:Probally for the best. It would take players away from WoW. Its just to bad they didn't do it sooner.

That reminds me: Turbine, the company who made Asheron's Call, one of the earlier competitors of EQ, said that by creating Asheron's Call 2 all they really did was split their userbase in half. They admitted that while the sequel did bring in some new players, they largely just created a new competitor to their own game.

Every since then, the conventional wisdom has been to only release one major MMORPG, and then follow it up when the original is on its last leg (like Square Enix has done with FFXIV, waiting to release it until FFXI was pretty much on life support). And WoW is far from being on its last leg.

Sony said the opposite about Everquest/Everquest2 ... releasing the 2nd one didn't really have a noticeable effect on Everquest. Maybe it had already been out long enough that it didn't matter by that point, who knows.

OldRod wrote:That is no doubt several million $$ worth of work they scrapped.

What a waste... didn't know much about the game, but it's a shame to see all that work lost.

On the other hand, I've scrapped more MMOs than Blizzard

Yeah, but Blizzards thing is primarily 'polish' - they can't release something that's a bit ragged, or they lose their image. Which arguably could lose them more money than that invested (and generally alot of the assets and knowledge gained could be reused behind the scenes)

Jackolantern wrote:

Sim wrote:Probally for the best. It would take players away from WoW. Its just to bad they didn't do it sooner.

That reminds me: Turbine, the company who made Asheron's Call, one of the earlier competitors of EQ, said that by creating Asheron's Call 2 all they really did was split their userbase in half. They admitted that while the sequel did bring in some new players, they largely just created a new competitor to their own game.

Every since then, the conventional wisdom has been to only release one major MMORPG, and then follow it up when the original is on its last leg (like Square Enix has done with FFXIV, waiting to release it until FFXI was pretty much on life support). And WoW is far from being on its last leg.

Good point.

Maybe back when the WOW subscription numbers were going down a bit, they set up titan in case it went into life support in the next few years. But it never did, so titan gets it's plug pulled instead!