Wow, this breaks my heart. :(
Such a great game, and a really cool group of people.
Fuck.
That sucks.
Loved Titan Quest and was looking forward to sequel.
Like everyone else here I find this very sad and disheartening. The game ran fine on my system and I enjoyed it for quite a long time. As mentioned above, there was that quote where they said they did not sell enough to clear a profit. I hope these guys can resurface elsewhere and make other great games that turn out to be profitable.
That’s easy. Random and interesting “dungeons” with online coop & pvp. None of which I really cared about, I fucking loved TQ & it’s expansion, but I think it was the missing ingredient for it to really take off in popularity.
Or WoW could just be crushing everything under it’s heel, but I honestly doubt that.
Just to reiterate my feelings from the TQ thread: Fek. Arse.
Yeah, I can’t decide whether to play Titan Quest or Mythos. So I stick to Civ IV. Or skiing.
Very true…
I’ve been a (non-game) programmer in Boston for years and its been a fairly smooth ride. Kendall Square in Cambridge seems to be overflowing with openings…
Too bad about Iron Lore…I enjoyed Titan Quest very much.
I do think lack of secure multiplay made the game less broadly popular than it could have been, but it’s definitely surprising that they weren’t able to line up a next project. Considering how long it took for them to get things moving on TQ, though, maybe the problem was on the proposal side, rather than publishers not wanting to work with them or do PC games.
I thought their current project was multiplatform. If that’s true, then this has nothing to do with PC gaming being doomed.
Unfortunately, it looks like they were another victim of the “project-to-project” funding model that still runs many game studios. As much as I might complain about consolidation and mega-publishers buying studios, people like EA and Vivendi are at least trying to shift over to a more sustainable software development model. (Er, at least I think that’s what they’re doing… ?)
- Alan
Sad news. Quality guys doing quality games. We need more of them, not less.
This. Always hate to see a good dev go down. Hopefully the staff can find good gigs elsewhere.
It really does blow loads, I loved TQ and the expansion a lot. Hell, the huge thread here is testament to the quality of the game, not getting what it deserves from reviewers. Thanks to Qt3 though for showing me the gem that was TQ, because I almost certainly would have missed it.
And good luck to the guys at Iron Lore, I’m sure whatever they work on next will be terrific. Hopefully we’ll get to hear from Michael soon.
I feel bad their studio shut down, but I guess I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Titan Quest. It never made inroads with my locals gamers, people who liked Diablo 1 and 2 a lot.
That said, you don’t really like much of anything.
I’m predicting no Diablo III for quite a long time.
Greetings:
I cannot tell you how much this saddens and frustrates me. The guys at Iron Lore were top-notch, and I have tremendous respect and affection for them. What they accomplished was truly amazing; building a really good game is freaking hard, much less doing it while building a studio, much less a game of the scope of TQ. I’m sure that most everyone will land on their feet, just because there was so much talent in every department.
There’s lots of this I can’t talk about, due to confidentiality issues, but I did want to comment on a few pieces. First, the game dev community in Boston is alive and well, this event notwithstanding. Harmonix, Turbine, 2K Boston, and Mad Doc are definitely in heavy hiring mode, and it’s more ironic that ILE is closing in the midst of a resurgence in the Boston scene than an indicator of things going south.
Second, DoW Soulstorm did get finished. It had already gone to the replicators and been in distribution channels before they closed the studio. Post-release support will be done by Relic, as was the plan all along.
Third, there were no problems with ILE’s reliability. They never missed milestones or failed to deliver. As the announcement says, there were a number of unrelated problems that ultimately meant they couldn’t get another deal signed in time to keep the studio going.
It’s hard for me not to go off on some of the issues that I feel contributed to this, but I don’t want to derail the thread. Goodbye, Iron Lore. We will miss you.
Best,
Michael.
Hard to see how your talking about what might have caused Iron Lore to shut down would derail the thread, Michael. I think we’re all kind of starved for information here and scratching our heads about how this could have happened.
There’s also Shilling now. Ironically since he already got some of you.
Yeah, if Titan Quest did indeed sell 750k units, then it must have been a pretty crappy deal for Iron Lore w/ the publisher perhaps? (Thats a pretty good number for a PC only title) No royalties, or maybe they got screwed by the publisher for royalties. Its not uncommon.
And my sympathies go out ot Iron Lore. There are lots of good companies in teh boston area, so i hope everyone lands on their feet.
It’s going to have to be pay to play for blizz to even consider, I’d guess. So I’d say I dont even have any interest.