Mythic's Mark Jacobs leaves EA

by Lesley Smith Jun 24th 2009 at 12:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Events, real-world, MMO industry, Warhammer Online, News items

Mark Jacobs, the former General Manager of Mythic Entertainment and Lead Designer of Warhammer Online, has left EA on 23rd June, the company announced today. This comes as part of restructuring plans within EA which includes both Mythic and BioWare and have culminated in the formation of a new, as-yet-unnamed, studio which will focus on RPGs and MMOs.

The new studio will be led by BioWare co-founder and General Manager Ray Muzyka, who will become Group General Manager. BioWare's other co-founder Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer while Rob Denton will succeed Jacobs as General Manager.

You can certainly expect more from us as this story develops.

[Via The Examiner]

Tags: bioware, bioware-mmo, breaking, breaking-news, breakingnews, electronic-arts, greg-zeschuk, mark-jacobs, mergers, mythic-entertainment, ray-muzyka, rob-denton

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)

primetime said on 12:02PM 6-24-2009

Probably trying to get out before he gets hit by any falling MMO debris.

...ME KIDDING! /snl

THAC0 said on 12:15PM 6-24-2009

your not kidding... we all know about his failing mmo

GRT said on 12:07PM 6-24-2009

In the RSS feed it read: "will leave on June 23rd"

Copy/paste fail.

RSS means never saying you goofed. :)

JP said on 12:14PM 6-24-2009

Actually, 6/23 was his last day. It's not a goof, it's an attempt to avoid saying he was fired.

Pretty big "holy shit" moment in the MMO community. I guess Mark's shit talking and lack of production finally caught up w/ him.

I'm hoping that Bioware walks into the Mythic office and says "Romper Room is over. Get ready to treat your job like a job"

WE might see some actual turn around for the game.

........... Or they could just play w/ WAR to learn some things about MMO development before EA shuts it down, but long enough that they get some exp under their belts for the release of TOR.

Brooke Pilley said on 12:47PM 6-24-2009

Curiously, why do you think EA would shut down WAR when DAOC and UO are still supported?

JP said on 1:22PM 6-24-2009

DAOC and UO had no development costs to EA. MJ also stated that he had to fight w/ EA not to shut UO down.

Who knows, w/ MJ out, EA may shut all three down.

ScytheNoire said on 12:12PM 6-24-2009

He was always too stubborn for my taste. Game designers need flexibility.

Putting BioWare in charge of Mythic can only be a good thing.

Mr Angry said on 12:25PM 6-24-2009

Hmm not sure this is the worst thing that could happen to WAR to be fair.

With Bioware at the helm, it does open a lot of interesting and potentially great content to be added, however, has the horse bolted with WAR, has the lackluster subscription rates for this very highly hyped AAA title peaked to early, would it be easier to make a lot more money with another IP.

I guess we'll find out in the coming months, suffice to say, not much will be happening with WAR for the next few months, and after the land of the dead content is done, I'll be parking up my account to see what happens before investing further.

Amana said on 12:32PM 6-24-2009

Good riddance, Jacobs.
Here's hoping Barnett has also been axed or 'relocated'.

Now all that's left for this industry is to see that other asshat, Roper, thrown out with the rubbish.

Happy days. (You deserved it Jacobs, and you know it..)

Scarecrowe said on 3:18PM 6-24-2009

lol, awesome!
I'm sure Roper would be tossed out if he was part of Mythic as well!

CCon99 said on 12:44PM 6-24-2009

Don't worry the trolls will be along shortly and remind us how WAR has been a "huge success" since it's launch. You know because losing 400k of 700k subscribers who WANTED to love your game and finally firing....err letting the head honcho resign is always the sign of a truly successful game.

With the Doc's taking over from BioWare, hopefully WAR will get a complete overhaul in the future and finally get the love the license truly deserves. Hell copy/paste WAR's graphic engine over top of DAoC and you'll have a 10 times better RvR game.

Amana said on 12:52PM 6-24-2009

And more interestingly:
http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=124848

Time to go take another look-see..

Abriael said on 1:45PM 6-24-2009

What's to lookie-see? With land of the dead out and working like a charm (and fun, lots of it), I'm not really up to go back being bored in the king of failed MMOs. Tarantia commons really can't compare to the quality of the work Mythic has done on LOTD (and with the flavor of the tomb kings at that).
Can't care the less about who leads the company, as long as it's competent, and the guys at Bioware obviously are.
The game has just become much bigger and more fun.

Amana said on 2:37PM 6-24-2009

"The game has just become much bigger and more fun. "
Sure Abriael, sure.
All it needs now is.. people playing it?

I'm not anti-WAR nor pro-AoC, but you should possibly go spend some time in AoC as it stands now before making an ass of yourself here. Just to be sure.

If Conan is 'the king of failed MMOs', I'm not the only one who knows who his Queen is..
Waagh?

Abriael said on 3:00PM 6-24-2009

Considering that my old dungeon master works on it I'm pretty up to date about conan, and after having been a raid leader and main tank for several server first raids until January, I have pretty much a good idea of what can be salvaged about that game. That's not enough to even get near a game that deserves my money.
Warhammer, on the other hand, it's not even near failure. It's population has been stable for the longest time at more than acceptable numbers, and it can only improve,.

"All it needs now is.. people playing it?" Lovely how you manage to throw an hammer on your own foot. You throw in misplaced (since warhammer has PLENTY people playing on it, unfortunately for your silly theories) sarcasm about WAR's population, and then you beg people to go play conan when it has just a fraction of Warhammer's subscriber base? Funny, in a pathetic sort of way.
I'm sorry if you have to play in a desert (population wise) while we play in the desert (enviroment wise), but I'm afraid tarantia Commons doesn't even come close to compare to LotD.

Venekor said on 12:59PM 6-24-2009

I have no problem with Barnett as he's great at building up hype. However everything he said just wasn't in the game and he hyped it up too much so the dev team couldn't deliver. When he talked about squig herder hitting the squig over and over again to make it bigger and angry. Then getting inside to control it's guts, thats what I expected. I didn't want disney like spell effects and instea the squig just coming from nowhere with no animation what so ever.

WAR is just a pile of **** thought it's just a generic easier WoW.

Hardy said on 1:13PM 6-24-2009

I'll never understand why people needlessly bash other MMOs that aren't WoW.

It's like theirs some weird loyalty towards it that's just ridiculous and makes no sense... Like a religion or something.

Warhammer is a really good game, and so was Tabula Rasa (Near the end of it's life. lol Pretty though)
Free Realms is amazing for what it's trying to do, and every other MMO has it's merits.

If you don't like the game, I don't see what unnecessary bashing of a game accomplishes? Does it make you feel important? Is that it?

Like the Squiq herder thing.. Yeah, that was disappointing, but every MMO has disappointing didn't do it moments.
For example. I rolled a Priest in WoW because it said they were the strongest healers with the strongest heals... then like 6 patches later, Druids and Paladins are stronger then Priests at what they do... It's WoW a pile of $%^&? No, it just has flaws, like every other MMO...

Actually, there's no point to this. Idiots will be idiots when it comes to MMOs.. There needs to be a study on this type of behavior.

crsh said on 2:22PM 6-24-2009

Kinda have to laugh at the idea that WAR is (if anything) an easier version of WoW; WoW is such a watered-down RPG that there cannot possibly be anything easier than that.

Korz said on 12:58PM 6-24-2009

Mythic is NOT merging with Bioware, they are independent studios. They are not creating a new studio. They are creating a new "group" with bioware as the head of the group, but both studios are still independent of each other according to Andy from Mythic who posted on warhammeralliance this morning.

Not sure if I believe that honestly, sounds to me like everyone recognizes how bad Mythic and co. handled the whole game from beta 1, to beta 2 through to launch. Tomorrow there is supposed to be a press release from the studio with whats going to happen now to give more insight to what is going to happen now.