But of course that says nothing about the people who were still working there - I suspect few of them are cheering at this point . . .
Game Over für den Spielehersteller
I remember them , I played some game with a crazy chicken in it.
I didn’t see Silent Storm on the list even though my disks have JoWood on them. Anybody know who has the rights to it? I keep hoping it’ll pop up on GOG.
I liked The Guild, and have played a few other games of theirs. Overall The Guild was the best, and generally their games all often feel ‘not quite right’ somehow? I guess if they were terrible to work for it probably didn’t inspire people to do the best they could?
Didn’t they also put lots of nasty DRM on their games?(well most do these days), i think i used ‘SecuRom begone’ or some such after installing The Guild.
Actually, Runic as a company owns Torchlight and the IP. Perfect World owns a majority share in us, but the assets belong to Runic - and Runic retains the publishing rights for Torchlight and Torchlight 2.
For the record, JoWood was actually a real pleasure to work with for European publishing. Sad to see things go south for the people I met there.
Ah, apologies. You and your nuance.
They did not keep their pimp hand strong.
JoWood published the various Gothics, too, although apparently the relationship between them and Piranha Bytes was not a particularly happy one.
I associate them with bugs, which may or may not be fair.
In an attempt to find news in English : http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/218978/game-over-for-jowood/
I just wish they could have released something clean… they were worse than usual… well until some recent releases anyway.
I hate to hear of any game developer or publisher going out of business. While JoWooD wasn’t a favorite of mine, it saddens me to see them go.
I enjoyed Painkiller and Spellforce 2, and don’t remember any major problems with them.
I’ve liked a ton of games that they released, but sadly a large % of those didn’t work or were buggy and never got the post release support needed to fix them. I hated Jowood for the broken promises of good games.
I could have sworn they released Arx Fatalis, though, for some reason…now that was a flawed gem if I ever played one.
I still have nightmares about the labyrinth.
tbaldree, I guess it was ok for companies that basically only had distribution deals with them. You were lucky enough to not have a closer relationship - hardly any developer did benefit from than in the long run.
Painkiller was a Dreamcatcher production that got released before they got acquired by JW, I think. What JW then did was trying to produce more Painkiller titles through what used to be mod teams. Same for the Spellforce 2 add-on, that probably will not get released anymore, and Söldner 2, which got cancelled ages ago. Let’s not forget the turd that was the Gothic 3 add-on - a project done by some company in India.
As for Spellforce 2 - that was still done by Phenomic, and as always, the break-up wasn’t really pretty. AFAIK, the studio was essentially insolvent and in shutdown mode - until EA came along and picked them up. They then did Battleforge and are now the guys running Lords of Ultima.
4Head Studios (The Guild series) was also left in a financially vulnurable state and got acquired by dtp a year after The Guild 2 got released. They’re now known as Cranberry Production.
I’d assume that Gothic 4 was essentially JW’s attempt at a fiscal Hail Mary pass. One that did not work out, obviously. It was only possible the way it was done due to the involvement of an external investor (BVT). They couldn’t afford a project with that scope on their own.
BVT had a stake in G4, but they didn’t have a stake in the add-on that was supposed to ship in late March over here. The following is a mix of rumor and speculation which I can’t personally verify since I’ve played G4 only briefly, but hey: There’s this big city in G4, which you don’t get to explore because the guards won’t let you enter. However, it was possible to do that through a cheat. Turns out that there actually are assets in there. Unfinished, but they are there. (Some speculate that there was even more content that was removed again.)
Now that city supposedly would have been at the center of the expansion. Some tipsters from the community apparently notified BVT about what they had found. BVT again wasn’t really happy about that because it meant they had at least partially funded a product they did not receive any royalties from. So, they had their lawyers strike just a few days before the expansion was set to launch. Hoping to get at least some money out of this because JW probably had already shipped units to and received payments from retail.
I guess the story isn’t completely made up because JW had to postpone the release indefinitely due to “unclear and diverse legal positions”. Certainly a noteworthy example of how that company used to operate.
JD, you solidified my position on JoWooD.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. They will not be missed.
Silent Storm is a classic.
Silent Storm was developed by Nival Interactive, if I recall correctly.
Well they jumped out of the gate with a bit of an issue having Starforce on their freaking demo with Spellforce 2. The Guild series has never been patched up to par, and I actually like that series. It was a support issue, or lack of. But hey, maybe they went belly up at no fault of their own. I am sad to see the games go, but I’ve seen years of complaints about JoWood support in the gaming community that actually played their games… with little response from the company, other than to release expansions and more games.