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Star Trek - Elite Force II Goes Gold, Team Laid Off
Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has confirmed that developer Ritual was forced to lay off most of the team that created the PC FPS Star Trek: Elite Force II, only two days after the game went gold. Apparently, a couple of other projects fell through. Ritual's other in-development games, Counter-Strike for Xbox and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero for PC are unaffected." Fansite Ritualistic has plenty of extra information on Elite Force II, which is looking promising despite this unexpected news.
Unfortunately, if you're a developer and are receiving milestone payments from your publisher at regular intervals, then your last milestone payment will probably be at the gold master of the game.
At that point, you'd have to wait a few months to even _possibly_ get royalty payments from that title, through. So if Ritual didn't have a lot of money in the bank to pay developers until a new project came through.. issue. I think the same type of thing happened with the Myth III development team (scroll down) a coupla years ago, who were, oddly enough, ex-Ritual people, although the inside scoop on that may be a little different, and blatant speculation abounds, etc.
This is just getting out of control. When are execs going to realize that eng are not like running water or heating!?!?!? We ARE the company. We ARE the product. Not to understand the importance of marketing and sales, but people poor their hearts into this code. Their personalities come out in these projects. This is like a racing team firing drivers after they win a race. "Oh a driver is a driver, if we do another race we'll just hire another driver, his skills and experience didn't really impact this victory" INSANITY!
Not to mention that many of us "gamers" and also engineers. And I for one will do everything I can to NOT pay for this title. I don't want that company making ONE DIME off the dedicated work of a buch of coders and designers they cut.
This is just total BS and I hope they burn for it.
sorry
A friend of mine who has worked at several computer game companies explained why he joined a startup doing a massively multiplayer online game, Dransik. "When you do a standalone game, the publishers pay you until it's done, and then they fire you. When you do an online game, you work for free until it's done, and then they start paying you." If I had to choose, I'd do what he did.
don't expect a patch any time soon.
Thats IT!!! THATS why Duke Nukem Forever hasnt come out yet! Those sneaky developers. Always one step ahead of the man. Take THAT corperate dress code!!! ....orrrrr I'm just bitter about my current coding job...
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
Actually, they didn't lay off the whole team, there are enough left that if a patch would need to be written it would be so a Ritual Employee says.