After claims from The Korea Times that Tabula Rasa was a financial disaster, NCsoft quickly made a statement refuting the report.  David Swofford, NCsoft’s communications director penned the author of the article as “notorious for writing sloppy and sensational articles about NCsoft” and called the story as “inflammatory.”

According to him:

The TR development did not cost $100 million. I don’t know where that came from. The price tag for the product was much less…a fraction of that cost. Tabula Rasa was not restarted more than twice. It had one overhaul and that came after 2-3 years of development.

The article made it sound like the TR launch led to some sort of falling out with Robert Garriott. That is so far from the truth. In fact Robert has been promoted to work more with CEO TJ Kim on business development. Yes Robert is out of the day-to-day operations, but he’s still in the office and now travels much more for the company than he did before.

Yes there’s a possibility that there could be downsizing with the TR team. Some of that is due to the cyclical nature of game development (product is out and the team downsizes). Some is due to the fact that the product could have done a little better. But there is a lot going on with the TR team. They are working on more updates. We are planning a Japan launch later in the year. And the company is planning on investing millions into the product, so it’s not going away and in fact we have plans to grow it.

Even then, Tabula Rasa seems to be an under-performer.  Instead of the hit we all expected it to be, it just turned into another MMO.  At least we know NCsoft isn’t really going down like what The Korea Times said.  As long as they don’t go down we can happily wait for Guild Wars 2!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under Gaming News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.