Warhammer won't top DAoC when it was at its peak

This time the silly claims about the european market are coming from an official press release (that I lost in my "notes" file when it appeared a few days ago and recalled when it was quoted on F13) and the textual words of Mark Jacobs (that I keep for posterity mocks as I always do):

“The initial partnership between Mythic and GOA resulted in Dark Age of Camelot being the number one MMORPG in Europe for many years,” said Mark Jacobs, CEO and President of Mythic Entertainment. “With WAR our goal is nothing less than to take Europe by storm and regain that leadership position in the European market.”

It looks like talking big about the european market is the new trend.

The actual news is that Mythic is again in partnership with GOA to manage Warhammer in Europe. I'm not going to comment this as I always played DAoC on the american servers, so I cannot judge their work, but I'll say that it's a very bad decision on all fronts to keep the US and EU servers separated and inaccessible to the same account, and I'm not glad at all to see this pattern repeated. This time I'm not going on with that crusade, though.

Other vague "news" are about the release planned for "fall 07" and the contemporary release, but we knew about these already.

I don't really think they will regain "leadership position". WoW has now nearly 1.5M subscribers in Europe alone. For the first time the european market is getting bigger than the US. DAoC, when Mythic considered itself "number one" in Europe, topped in EU at around 150k or so. Come on, it's not even on the same scale.

Let's make some predictions about the numbers Warhammer will get in EU and US. Let's see who will get closer. My idea is that the reasonable goal that Mythic should take nearly as an imperative (meaning that it won't be a "success" and that they should start dancing if they reach it, but that the devs should work *hard* to reach it) is the 250-280k EU+US that DAoC had at its peak. Anything less would be a delusion (in particular with the silly claims above) and I don't think that the game will move too far away from that number (meaning that I don't expect them going far above either).

I have this theory that sequels, or semi-sequels like this one, are never able even to top the original title when it was at its peak. I always criticized "sequels" in the mmorpg genre and I think they are a total waste of money when much better *commercial* results could be obtained by truly supporting the main title (meaning giving it more and more resources, instead of less and less), like CCP is doing with Eve (which grows constantly despite being three years old and recently reached more than 100 developers involved full time with it), instead of eroding progressively the resources from the game to migrate them somewhere else and then see an obvious decline as the direct result.

So my idea is: Warhammer won't top DAoC when it was at its peak. They could go slightly above or slightly below depending on the quality of what they are doing (and I think some ideas are promising if they don't cripple them with the usual bad execution), but that's what I'd take as a reasonable goal. That's what I'd tell my devs if I was Mark Jacobs. Go for that. That's our goal.

"Regain that leadership position in the European market" is laughable. PR or not they should have never said something like that.

Maybe after launch, if they hit that 250k mark, then they could start to work *hard* to solidify and INCREASE their market share (you know, the mythical positive trends that seem a chimera for a mmorpg). Like the hard work EQ2 is doing despite being a retarded sequel. But then there's always this stupid risk that the resources will be moved on yet another stupid new project, instead of supporting the development to make the first title more solid. And just watch it passively declining and fade into oblivion (also because it HAS to be killed, as the interest and hype MUST be shifted to fed the "new").

Which was DAoC's own destiny with that foolish "Imperator" project first, and Warhammer now.