Schilling’s company, 38 Studios of Providence, will have to carve a niche for itself in a market that is already crowded with quality games, said Billy Pidgeon, a video game industry analyst for M2 Research in New York. “It’s going to beg the question of how big the audience is’’’ for role-playing games, Pidgeon said.
Kingdoms of Amalur’s competition includes such heavy hitters as Activision Blizzard Inc.’s online role-playing game World of Warcraft, which is played by 10 million people worldwide, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from Bethesda Softworks LLC, which last year, sold 3.5 million copies in its first two days of release.
Rather than saturating the market, Schilling said, the success of Skyrim and World of Warcraft is good news for 38 Studios. “I hope they do phenomenally well,’’ he said, because each success increases the total audience for role-playing games. “You can’t be successful preying upon other people’s failure or loss,’’ Schilling added.
The Kingdoms of Amalur rollout has already run into problems. A free demo edition of the game, released to the public in mid-January, was riddled with software bugs. The problem was so serious that Schilling publicly apologized on NeoGAF, an online forum popular with hardcore gamers. “It is way way WAYYYYY more buggy than anything ANYONE should ever release, much less a demo,’’ Schilling wrote at the time, adding that he had urged Electronic Arts not to release the demo software, but to no avail.
However, Schilling also said that early release ultimately increased advance interest in the finished game. “The awareness for Reckoning has gone through the roof,’’ he said yesterday, “and that is something I’m ecstatic about.’’
