Climax Explains Warhammer Online Axing

Climax CEO Karl Jeffery explains the reasons behind the sensational axing of Warhammer Online, which was to be published by Sega.

Climax CEO Karl Jeffery today told explained to the games media the reasons behind the latest high profile cancellation. Warhammer Online was a massive undertaking for the developer, based on the Games Workshop brand and to be published on PC by Sega.

Following yesterday's announcement, Jeffery today said, "It was a deeply sad thing for us to have to do after so much hard work and commitment from the entire team but the costs involved in bringing the Warhammer massively multiplayer online game (MMO) to market meant that we were left with little choice. With new MMO's, such as Star Wars Galaxies costing up to $ 30M to launch, this is now a very high stakes business"

The statement from the company continues as follows:

Just over two years ago, Climax and Games Workshop came together to form a joint venture company whose mission it was to develop and launch a massively multi-player role playing game based on the hugely popular Warhammer table-top game.

Since then we have built an incredibly talented team in Nottingham who have developed an extraordinary game: the graphics & animation are stunning, the Leviathan tools & technology are cutting edge and the game world is gritty and realistic in a way never seen before in an MMO. The Warhammer Online game has been highly praised by the specialist press and recently won PC Zone's "online game of the show " award at the E3 expo.

During the past few months Climax and Games Workshop have been undertaking a comprehensive review of the costs to complete and launch the game. MMO's have a very different business model from traditional (boxed) games and require a huge up front investment in servers, bandwidth and customer support teams. The actual cost of rolling out the game was far higher than either partner had anticipated and we have decided that we simply cannot justify it.

This decision will not impact Climax's Nottingham studio: we have a second game already in development there and the technology team will continue to advance our Leviathan suite of MMO tools and technology. We are now exploring the possibility of bringing in another partner to assist with the roll out, a company with existing MMO experience and infrastructure would be ideal, as this would reduce costs and risk.

Stay tuned for lots more on the rest of current Climax projects including Sudeki for Xbox and Crash 'n' Burn for Eidos.

Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo.com