It's been a bad week for budding MMO studios. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street's MMO is now officially kaput after NetEase pulled the plug in October, and now Jackalyptic Games—which was working on a yet-to-be-revealed Warhammer MMO—is the third dev NetEase has left to wither on the vine this week (as well as its sixth Western studio closure this year).
Jackalyptic CEO Jack Emmert announced Friday on LinkedIn that "after nearly three and a half years working with NetEase Games as a first party studio, our partnership will be coming to an end." Emmert did not state that the studio is closing just yet, but it's in dire straits and much of its staff are looking for new work.
Also on LinkedIn, senior sound designer at Jackalyptic Ben Dahl said "with NetEase stepping back from their involvement in Jackalyptic, myself and the majority of the studio are now looking for a new home, like so many others over the past few weeks. Honestly, devastated doesn’t even begin to cover it."
In his post, he noted he was proud of the game's two-person audio team, saying "there is no doubt in my mind that every single person from Jackalyptic who is now looking for work would be an incredible asset to your studio. Do not let them slip through your fingers!"
The studio, which used to go by Jackalope Games, was NetEase's first game studio in North America. Its CEO, Emmert, has been around the massively multiplayer block before; his resume includes a wealth of MMOs, such as Champions Online, DC Universe Online, and a scrapped Marvel MMO he led prior to joining Jackalyptic. Like Fantastic Pixel Castle, Bad Brain, and T-Minus Zero before it, the studio was dropped by NetEase before it could release a single game.
It's clear that NetEase is cutting back substantially on its investment in overseas studios, and MMOs in particular do not come cheap or quick. Stable cashflow is a holy grail in an industry full of ludicrously expensive games going up in smoke amid tens of thousands of layoffs and cancellations regardless of studio output. Any modern MMO looking to take on entrenched titans like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV will need time and steady investment as it grows; the demand is clearly there, after all. That said, it's hard to see a future for the genre if games keep going belly-up before they have a chance to even release.
