"I don’t think there’s any other field where you can find a failure rate this high and still find people willing to invest," said Mark Jacobs, general manager of the Fairfax game studio EA Mythic. "The failure rate is unbelievable."

Jacobs was talking about his own section of the video game industry, the realm of online games where players pay a monthly subscription fee to participate as characters in a virtual world. In the past 11 years, by his count, fewer than 10 titles have met some level of financial success. The number of expensive flops is a lot larger.

Mythic’s new title, Warhammer Online, went on sale Thursday after three years of development. The sword-and-sorcery game is the 13-year-old studio’s first release after its 2006 acquisition by publisher Electronic Arts.