Rust in peace, Irrational. You were one of the greatest game studios ever created.
…and this makes me wonder if Ken is looking over at Chris Roberts and David Braben, rubbing his chin, and going, “You know…”
This is America, we don’t concern ourselves with such things here.
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.
Um, it’s not a huge success for Take Two. GTA V was a huge success. Remember that Square considered Tomb Raider a failure with 4m sales, which is what Bioshock Infinite had last time the numbers were reported - it definitely sold less than Borderlands 2, which Take Two recently said sold 8.6m (plus a crapton of DLC). And Bioshock Infinite’s total budget was almost certainly much higher than either of those, even before you take into account the huge marketing spend. I’d be pretty surprised if Bioshock Infinite broke even. I suspect the last thing that Take Two would associate the Bioshock IP with right now is “Money Hats”.
Sorry, it was implied at the beginning of the chain, by the original tweet, not by your statement.
Regardless of anything else, news is deeply frustrating. Many talented developers out of work now–just the latest of long string of layoffs in the area in past 12 months.
Obviously not all facts have come to light, nor will they, but difficult to not see development as inherently unfair to dismissed employees.
Best wishes to all affected for speedy return to gainful employment.
I think taking too long is obvious. Bioshock was later 2007. Infinite is spring 2013 so like 5 1/2 years. Way to long for whats a mostly linear single player only FPS. I liked it allot but there’s nothing in the game that made me see why it took so long.
A game that sells about 4 million is not considered a huge success and may have only broken even? Wow. This industry has really changed in the last 10 years. Not for the better.
When Jon Chey, Rob Fermier and I founded Irrational Games seventeen years ago, our mission was to make visually unique worlds and populate them with singular characters.
In time we will announce a new endeavor with a new goal: To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable. To foster the most direct relationship with our fans possible, we will focus exclusively on content delivered digitally.
To me these two statements are in direct opposition. Infact “highly replayable narrative-driven games” is a paradox, in my mind. (Also the first statement pretty much confirms to me that the team were only interesting in thematic-style over gameplay-substance).
Q: Why would they make this announcement? Do they think it’s positive PR in someway? To me, as an outsider of the AAA games industry, it looks very negative. Maybe conditions there are so bad that this is some kind of amazing announcement? “Hey look, we’re not just firing everyone like other studios do, we’re giving them time to work on their portfolio!”.
Add to that 100 millions on marketing, I read.
I think taking too long is obvious. Bioshock was later 2007. Infinite is spring 2013 so like 5 1/2 years. Way to long for whats a mostly linear single player only FPS. I liked it allot but there’s nothing in the game that made me see why it took so long.
To be fair, Bioshock 2 did happen in between. Irrational/2K Boston may not have worked on it, but it’s not like Take Two would have published both of them at the same time.
A game that sells about 4 million is not considered a huge success and may have only broken even? Wow. This industry has really changed in the last 10 years. Not for the better.
Tell me about it. I think I first realised quite how messed up the whole situation was when Molyneux gave a (GDC ?) presentation on Fable 3 (ahead of launch, I think) when he said the starting point was how to make a game that could sell the 5m copies necessary. I think I posted about it here, in fact.
Q: Why would they make this announcement? Do they think it’s positive PR in someway? To me, as an outsider of the AAA games industry, it looks very negative.
This is an industry that regularly lays off (almost) entire teams right after a game launch. Ridiculous and exploitative and depressing as this state of affairs is, the Irrational announcement is actually (only just) positive spin compared to the norm.
It seems very counter-productive for employees to be on a continuous roller coaster in terms of their job security, surely this will affect the output when they will always have that voice in the back of their head that says “As soon as I finish this project I will get fired and I have to move state and start looking for work again…”. Not to mention how it will affect spouses and worst of all if they have any children who will again and again lose any friends they have made as they move around.
I suppose that new Stardock initiative for “hiring out” teams, forgot what it was called, has an opportunity here.
Yeah the game industry’s employment practices are horrible. They basically use the movie studio model of ramp-up for a project, then burn the team down; except without unionization and with employees who are overtime-exempt, so you get all of the negatives of possibly being let go at any time, with none of the upside of overtime, collective bargaining, etc.
Screw that noise.
OK, I had no idea that selling 4 million units was now considered a “failure” in the realm of game publishing. I’m not being facetious, I’m honestly shocked by that. I suppose it’s not as surprising as it first seems though, given that you can spend so much money developing a AAA title that even 4 million units sold won’t bail you out.
That brings up the interesting point that perhaps a Bioshock game could be a huge success IF it was developed in a way that didn’t require 10 million units to sell to turn a profit. In other words, perhaps 2k/Take Two and Irrational were “doing it wrong”. The IP is valuable, just because somebody shot Infinite in the foot before the race even started doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made…
Who’s passing judgement? Most people are just pointing out that Levine’s stated reasons don’t make any sense. Who knows what the real truth is.
If you do not see anyone rushing to judgement here, I do not know what to say. I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
I didn’t rush to judgment, I took Ken at his word, that his very public letter was the truth. That was perhaps naive of me.
Keep in mind that we recently had Cliff Bleszinski drop this bit of wisdom as well:
“Your game is as good as how many YouTube videos it can yield,” Bleszinski says. “My wife and I are totally hooked on Rust right now. It’s not about the ‘new user experience’; in these games the new user experience is utter shit, and it’s okay. There are two lessons people have not learned from Minecraft: Get the game out there and build it. Some kid will put out a video. Players will teach each other. You don’t need the ‘press A to jump.’”
Starting his own studio is the direction in which he’s leaning, and he wants to benefit from a modern online environment that allows development teams to have closer relationships with their players and welcome them into the iterative process.
“PC is where I’m going to wind up. That’s where the community is,” he says. “The trend will always be the core. If I start a studio, I want a community manager there day one. I want weekly video or podcasts; I want task lists available on the subreddit. When my wife and I play Rust, before we play, we check the subreddit. Whenever you get a little bored with a game, someone issues an update. I feel like a game developer again, where I get to check out the build list.”
“The whole ‘old guard,’ where you get a Game Informer cover and an E3 reveal, is dead,” says Bleszinski. “I’ll never make another disc-based game for the rest of my career, and [at E3] they’re trying to woo buyers from Target and Walmart?”
You have studios dumping 100+ million into a game and they MUST sell 4-5 million in one quarter or get the axe, at the same time indie devs throw out half-finished games on Steam Early Access and start generating revenue. The business is changing.
Not sure why you quoted me since you point out yourself Irrational had nothing to do with that game, and my point was solely about their development time being way too long for the game they made IMO. Bioshock 2 had nothing to do with that.
I guess he wants to be the next Doublefine…for shooters or something.