On November 21st, NCSoft announced that they would be sunsetting Tabula Rasa at the end of Februrary 2009. This has led to quite an uproar in the MMO community, bringing out the usual cries of “I’ll never buy an NCSoft MMO again…I can’t trust them!” in comment sections all over the internet.

Never say never again.

In the 1980’s, Coca-Cola decided to NGE their namesake soft drink, introducing “New Coke” to the world. This drew much the same reaction from the caffeinated sugar-water consumer base that Master Creature Handlers had to SWG’s NGE, leading Coca-Cola to rollback their bottling servers to a pre-patch state, rolling out the same old thing as “Coca-Cola Classic” to much fanfare. Why did they do this? Because they knew that staying number one in their industry depended on not giving their customers a reason to switch to a competitor’s product.

Coca-Cola is still thriving, by the way.

Now, NCSoft has decided to shut down their second MMO in as many years (after Auto Assault last year), and the cries of “I’ll only drink Pepsi from now on!” have begun to echo.

Never say never again.

Yes, two months ago NCSoft answered questions about the under-performing Tabula Rasa with warm assurances that the game was a “Triple-A” title for the company, and there were no plans to sunset it anytime soon.

Yes, two months later they changed their minds; not because of a “New Coke” reaction, but instead probably because of a lack of reaction from subscribers…namely, they didn’t show up.

And now everyone thinks that NCSoft is lying slime. True, they were a bit too effusive in their praise of TR’s future, but that was a corporate decision, as was the decision to not sell the rights to Auto Assault to NetDevil when NCSoft closed the doors on AA. It wasn’t spite. It wasn’t an insane sense of glee at making sure it was dead, dead DEAD.

It was a business decision.

And why would NCSoft decide to not give up the rights to an MMO that didn’t meet their performance expectations? It could be because someone in a suit at NCSoft understands…

Never say never again.

There is one question still to be answered; if Tabula Rasa was so short on subscribers, if everyone that’s saying “I tried TR but it wasn’t for me” is telling the truth…why the outcry? If so few cared enough about the game to play it, why the outrage? I’ll tell you why.

The MMORPG community is maturing. Time after time, we’ve seen companies fail to make good on their promises, lie to our faces, and in some cases come dangerously close to committing fraud against us. What the MMORPG development community has to realize (on a corporate level) is that they are not, in fact, like other corporations. Their business model consists of creating a product that drives you to form an emotional connection with it in order for it to succeed.

You may love your significant other with all your heart, but how many times can they lie to your face before you start to lose that emotional connection with them? You don’t marry the girl you catch cheating on you…you dump her, and go out on the rebound; either to find someone as different from them as you can, or back to a previous love since she just released Wrath of the Lich King.

So to speak.

And now, after years of this type of thing, even the appearance of treating the player base in a shoddy manner leads to an uproar. True, in most cases the outcry of the MMORPG community amounts to “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but back to that New Coke story for a moment. Did you know that when New Coke was introduced in 1985, sales went up 8% over the course of the year over the previous year? If more people liked it, why did Coca-Cola have to reverse field and revert to their original forumla?

Despite New Coke’s acceptance with a large number of Coca-Cola drinkers, a vocal minority of them resented the change in formula and was not shy about making that known — again just as had happened in the focus groups.

Hnh. Where have I heard that “vocal minority” term before? Oh yes…from every development suit that was trying to blow off an irate portion of their fan base to not change their product. Obviously, though, the game development industry has things figured out much better than a 100+ year-old company…screw the vocal minority, I’m right, dammit!

If you don’t believe that not listening to a “vocal minority” of irate customers can lead to problems…well, go pick up a six-pack of New Coke and we’ll talk about it. I’m sure it’s available everywhere. But why did everyone get so upset?

“There is a twist to this story which will please every humanist and will probably keep Harvard professors puzzled for years,” said (then Coca-Cola President and COO Donald) Keough at a press conference. “The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.”

And that’s over a frickin’ soft drink. Imagine if it was a product that was designed to cause its users to form an emotional attachment to it, then go read the comments about NCSoft that are floating around the old network of tubes.

The “vocal minority” may make quite a bit of noise, but sooner or later the noise you hear may be an oncoming train. How many times will the MMO corporate community be hit by one before they say…

Never again. Period.

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Tags: mmorpg, NCSoft, New Coke, Tabula Rasa