Cryptic’s Bill Roper: Don’t Count Out ‘Warhammer Online’ Just Yet
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

You have to throw the aberration out. It’s like when you’re in school, and there’s the one kid that gets 100% on every single test. You have to throw him out of the curve to actually see how everyone else compares because everyone fails when compared to that guy.And the good side about that is that you can have a few hundred thousand subscribers, do great, keep the company alive, grow it over time and keep it moving. I really think that the biggest challenge maybe is that there’s a much higher expectation now for MMOs. And it’s really tracking more like traditional console sales, where if you don’t have a certain amount when you launch — you have to get that big forward momentum at the beginning.Bill Roper: I think the challenge is what genre are you in. And to be blunt about it, if you’re anywhere closely associated with a fantasy MMORPG, you’re trying to convince everyone not to play “[World of] Warcraft,” and that’s pretty tough. I think that it also depends on what your expectations are. It’s so funny, I hear half the people are saying, “Oh gosh, ‘Warhammer‘ looks like it isn’t doing so great,” because they said they had 300,000 subscribers. Those are not bad numbers. And I think people look at it and go, “Well, ‘WoW’ has got 11 million and your game only has 300,000, your game must not be doing good.”

You’ve got a base. It’s fiscally sound. We’re going to keep pouring more into it.” And that’s getting a lot of bigger publishers to realize that mindset. Everybody wants to do an MMO because they see it as having a great business model, but if they don’t understand the development side and what that means… They come out and they go, “Oh, we got an MMO. 100,000 subscribers? 300,000 subscribers? Okay, kill it.”