D’oh. :( Occasionally ran into some of the guys in the past years and had a great time chatting with Jeff Goodsill at GDC 2006 and in Leipzig last year.So, good luck to everyone involved in the studio, I guess…
It is with great regret that we must announce that as of close of business Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Iron Lore Entertainment has ceased active game development. Several unrelated events occurred which resulted in Iron Lore being unable to secure funding for its next project.
Huh. They must be skiing down mountains of coke because I can’t imagine how else the developers of the critically acclaimed and commercially successful titan quest wouldn’t get funded. It’s got to be massive mismanagement behind the scenes.
There was this post where it was revealed that they’ve made little or no money off of TQ (post-development, anyway), so maybe sales weren’t as good as we thought. Our own enthusiasm for it (one of the longest threads on the board!) might be colouring our perception of how successful it was.
That being said, Titan Quest did have serious performance problems, and I imagine that that was probably a factor in sales.
But still, they proved they could make a good game. Not getting funding for another game just screams of publishers not wanting to be involved with the PC.
Wow, that’s very sad news. Titan Quest and Immortal Throne were absolutely wonderful games. Having just finished IT, I enjoyed TQ+IT even more than Diablo 2.
Assuming the sales were not what we would have expected - I wonder if WOW has made it harder for this sort of game to be successful. I find it hard to imagine a better Diablo clone than TQ, and if TQ can’t move enough units to be a hit, I wonder what could?
I wouldn’t necessarily take it as a PC domedness indicator when we don’t know what happened. They might have missed 5 deadlines in a row on their warhammer game or something.
That doesn’t affect a company’s ability to get funding, as anyone who’d pay for a project doesn’t actually know the employee makeup of a company, for the most part.
Seriously, if that were possible, many companies would’ve failed long long ago.