In what doesn’t come across as surprising news, NCsoft will be shutting down Carbine Studios (a studio created in 2005 by former Blizzard personnel who worked on World of Warcraft and acquired by NCsoft in 2007) as well as winding down WildStar. The MMORPG failed to gain traction after having initially launched as a subscription based game back in June 2014 and went F2P a little over an year later in September 2015.
Back in June 2018, nerdSlayer who creates the “Death of a Game” series on YouTube made the following regarding WildStar (a former developer also made a post in the comments section about the issues faced which added to the player facing issues).
One issue (again, not surprising) was “too many cooks in the kitchen”. To put it more bluntly, “shitty leadership” (or people in positions where they have no clue as to how to effectively lead and/or make the decisions) was a culprit in the development nightmare. His comment (the top comment made by Sam Noone) should just be read in its entirety in the above video.
NCsoft themselves have a history of quickly dropping the axe on games that do not meet certain metrics; which is why it was surprising this was not on the chopping block before Master X Master (their MOBA which was online only for a few months before they announced in November 2017 that it would be closing by January 2018).
It’s partially why I don’t put a lot of time into their titles (Blade & Soul is pretty much their only game I have time invested but not money). Don’t get me wrong, I like what they are doing to push the state of the foundations which many of their games are being built in (moving full on into Unreal Engine 4) but I also give pause to their decision making processes when it comes to pulling the plug on a title. Likewise, the leash is often times way too long where development goes off the rails (as what happened with Lineage Eternal with several design changes in 2014 and then the 2016 closed beta which led to the entire project being rebooted, the development team canned, and a new team put together for Project TL).
Regardless, I do realize there are still people who have been enjoying playing WildStar and are going to be sad to see it go. Hopefully NCsoft will give those players time to bring their in-game activities to some closure (NCsoft has already made a goodwill gesture to offer full refunds for purchases made from July 1st until in-game purchases are shut off).
