Not everyone who worked with Levine has good things to say…
(designer of Bioshock and lead leved designer of Bioshock 2)
Not everyone who worked with Levine has good things to say…
(designer of Bioshock and lead leved designer of Bioshock 2)
Yikes.
He might well be an asshole but (imo) it’s still the way the trends are moving in game development regardless.
I’m not sure I ever implied, inferred, or in any way said anything that might be construed as saying anything involving the word “asshole”, so I’d rather not have you insert that meaning into my words. It’s not there.
This bums me out. And pisses me off. I have friends up there for whom this is the 3rd studio closure in 3 years.
While I agree in principle with the concerns voiced here, I think we may be a little bit premature about the reasons this happened. Speculation is all well and good, but shouldn’t we wait a bit before passing judgement?
This is an intriguing formula he’s talking about, and I’m sure he’s got plenty of ideas brewing, but I personally doubt they’re in the survival sandbox realm as they don’t strike me as “narrative-driven,” at least in the sense Ken Levine is known for. Narrative and replayability probably aren’t exactly matter and antimatter, but it’ll be interesting to see him square that circle anyway.
I have zero evidence, but I can’t help but think about the VITA Bioshock game he blabbed about at the VITA launch and wonder if maybe that was when some of the wheels started churning on this new venture.
Remember when 2kGames was bragging about how much money they were spending to advertise Bioshock Inifite? $100 million or so? I found the ads so poor I actually wrote 2k and Ken to say what a colossal waste of money it was as it actually made the game seem totally unspecial. I bet 2k set way too high expectations based on blowing more money on marketing than actual game development and ken just said, “This is insane, I’m out”
He’s acting like an Ayn Rand hero even though he made a game all about how that kind of behavior is bad.
Oh, he is “in”. He will work in a new 2K small team of 15. The fired ones are all the rest not in the group of 15.
Well they better set up those poor souls for like forever until they get new jobs. If they can light piles of cash on fire to “promote” Bioshock improperly they can take care of the people who made the actual game.
This was my immediate thought as well. 2K owns Irrational, and made the decision that this studio was no longer justifying its own existence. Whether that was a direct or indirect result of Mr. Levine’s actions or career choices is unknown.
Once the decision to shut down 2K’s presence in Massachusetts (an expensive place to live & do business in, which may have been a factor), then Mr. Levine (who likely was separated from 2K as part of the decision to close Irrational) was left with the possibility of poaching some of the talent that wanted to stay in Mass.
And of course, he took the opportunity to make it look like his idea. Which it simply cannot be in this world of contracts and corporate governance rules. So Mr. Levine and his hand-picked band cut a new deal with 2K, with new contracts and new expectations, budgets, and targets. No carry-over of the original entity, likely due to the legalities of hiring and firing in the US/Mass. It needed to stop existing for business purposes and accounting reasons.
And then there is the question of why shut down Irrational? My guess is that it took too long to make the Bioshock sequel (I thought the game’s design reflected a lot of abandoned ideas and changes over time) and that BI ultimately looked bad in comparison to Borderlands 2, which was made more quickly (and probably more cheaply) and was able to be monetized much further than BI ever was.
Funny, I thought it was a game about how people will always find a way to fuck things up no matter what their ideology. : P
If Take Two is looking to continue to ride the Bioshock money train, wouldn’t it make sense for them to simply form a new studio and cherry pick all the best employees of the “non-15” to move to that studio? I don’t really understand why Mr. Levine’s deicision to create a smaller studio within the Take Two umbrella needs to result in the layoff of all these people. I get that the Irrational Games moniker is his and thus must go defunct, but I would think the best people to make Bioshock : Money Hats (assuming another game is planned) would be the people who made Infinite a consensus GOTY and huge success.
This. Some people are confused about what happened. Just ignore the spin of Levine, he isn’t shutting down the company because “creative reasons”, the company was bought in 2006 by the publisher, most surely it’s the publisher who can decide to shut down the studio.
Not to mention that the ads did not use in-game footage and showed things that didn’t/couldn’t happen in the actual game.
That seems more likely to me. Since 2K owned Irrational, there’s very little chance Levine’s departure and closure of the studio was done without their input. It’s not like Levine went to them and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about leaving to do smaller games” and their reply was “Oh, well I guess we have to shut down Irrational then regardless of our plans.”
Well, maybe.
That there apparently exists some amount of expressed angst from people who worked there and know folks who continued at Irrational says that there may be some fairly intense internal displeasure about this. Whether that’s warranted or not, I don’t know, but from feeling out twitter at the moment, it doesn’t sound like everyone’s getting a soft landing here.
Well, obviously getting laid off sucks whether the boss says he did it for creative reasons or the publisher did it for financial ones. It has to sting more that 15 people get to keep their jobs while you scramble.