Camelot Too Popular?

I noticed a very interesting post on Camelot Vault that Dark Age of Camelot might actually be *too* popular and sell out immediately when it hits store shelves. Here’s the scoop:

From the day we began work on DAoC we have had a few rock solid principles. First among those was that our game’s capacity was geared to handle 100K subscribers during its launch phase. We have been very clear about this from day one both with the community and with our distribution partner Vivendi Universal. Based on both of our estimates, the decision was made to have an initial run to match that number. This would allow us to have the correct amount of bandwidth, servers and CS people to have a great launch. Even up to last week nobody at VU (who of course relies on the numbers coming from the retailers) had any reason to think that we would exceed that expectation. I asked them on almost a daily basis how the pre-orders were going and it was always the same. However, then something changed…

Over the last two weeks (especially this past week) pre-orders and reserves in the various retailers have gone through the roof. While I can’t reveal actual numbers, the fact is that we are have more pre-sales than any other game in this genre has had to date (at least that is what the retailers are telling us) and since these numbers are so high, the retailers are now very concerned that they will sell out their stock immediately. They are asking VU to manufacture more copies immediately. Now, under normal circumstances the manufacturer would be happy to do that but in this case, there is one big problem and that is that this is a MMORPG and that the infrastructure has to be in place to support it. Thus, a phone call took place on Friday between VU and us…

It is in VU’s interest to sell more copies. It is in our interest to sell more copies. With another publisher it is possible that they would have turned the pressure on to “take a chance” and sell more copies, fully expecting that the stores will not sell 100% of their stock. They could have begged, pleaded, etc. but they didn’t. They were total professionals and partners and earned my respect for that. We didn’t need to tell them that we needed two weeks to get the servers that are the backbone of DAoC (we can’t just run down to Compusa to get them) and to get them installed, configured and ready to go along with our CS people. They were right there with us. Short-term projections (in this case it would have been called greed) have never been a priority of Mythic and our folks at VU were right there with us. They simply asked us when we could have more servers online and we told them. We talked numbers for the second print run and we came up with a nice number. We then proceeded to order 10 more servers from Dell…

So, the long and the short of it is that some retailers have been caught unawares. Folks like Amazon obviously didn’t order enough copies but that is not the fault of Mythic nor VU. Some retailers may be a little low on stock. The good news is that we will have the capacity to support all of the boxes sold at every point in the game’s life. Both VU and Mythic could have taken a different route at this point and gone for the short-term profit while making an excuse when we couldn’t support the additional load. We could have done so and hoped to keep the players by spinning stories and begging for patience (most players are qite forgiving). All I have to say about that kind of approach is: Not a chance…

Thus, for those of you who may not be able to get your copies right away, please accept my apologies on behalf of the everyone involved. Another run will be done very quickly (even with VU’s capacity, it still takes a little time) and will go out to the stores. Our capacity will match the new numbers and all will be fine.