Troika Games Closes

Voodoo Extreme has the story that talented development house Troika Games has closed its doors as a result of lack of funding for future projects. Rumours of their closure have circled for the last week or so, but today's announcement makes the closure official. Troika is best known for its table-top RPG adaptations, such as The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade. From the announcement: "We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years, it has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company. But we especially want to thank all of our employees - we had the pleasure of working with the some of the most dedicated, hard working, creative people in the industry, and we really appreciate all that they did for Troika."

Comments

no buy-out?

[theVP]

I'm surprised that their games didn't attract enough attention from EA and Activision to get bought out in a situation like this. There must have been more to their lack of funding than meets the eye...

Re:no buy-out?

[Alkaiser]

What was the last RPG EA made? They're essentially the same as Microsoft. They won't make any game that they can't re-use the engine for, and then turn around and flip out a sequel to in 12 months. RPGs don't do that, and so, there was no need for Troika.

Arcanum

[Lu Xun]

These people made one of my all-time favourite games: Arcanum. Too bad they didn't release the rights to it before vanishing, I guess they're held by Sierra anyway. I'd like to see an open-source version of this game, with some working multiplayer!

Re:Will they open source their code?

[eviloverlordx]

They'll probably do it right after EA changes its corporate wage-slave policies. I won't hold my breath.

Re:Another Sad Adieu

[TrappedByMyself]

This is why its more important than ever to support smaller independent studios.

Why? Support the studios that make the best games.
If everyone supports a small studio, they become a big studio, then the same people will hate them for it. People start businesses to make money. If you turn capitalism into a social cause, you're just making person A rich as opposed to making person B richer. If you want to fight a fight and feel good about yourself, go volunteer your time to disadvantaged youths or something.

It's quite sad really....

[Prien715]

Probably one of the best PC RPGs ever was fallout and its sequel. First, Black Isle closed. Many of the former employees were working at Troika. Now Troika's gone. If I could point out a single problem, it would be that the original Fallout team was split up; the closings merely show that this team was greater than the sum of its parts.

The major failing of any open-ended RPG from Arcanum to KOTOR2 was 1) an unbalanced ability system and 2) trying to make the game too grandiouse and forgetting the polish.

I wish someone would release an RPG with the polish of warcraft, the open-endedness of fallout, and the great voice acting/script writing from KOTOR. Now there's a game I would happily pay $80 for.

Free at last?

[Doc Ruby]

If they don't pass the rights to the games to some other entity, doesn't that mean the rights aren't owned by anyone? Doesn't that mean they're in the public domain? Or do they get scarfed up by the first games lawyer to register the copyright after they expire? What about the copyrights on the game code? If they're not owned by anyone anymore, what's to stop a Troika programmer from publishing the source code?

Re:Another Sad Adieu (OT)

[Bastian]

For me, it's that I consider myself a Capitalist rather than a Monopolist. The guys who thought up capitalist economic theory did _NOT_ have the USA's current economy in mind when they thought of capitalism, and many of them even wrote about the need for people to be vigilant because of the constant danger of a capitalist economy turning into a monopolist or oligopolist economy like we have now.

I honestly believe that a true capitalism is better for consumers. You don't have monopolies like Microsoft stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have cartels like the RIAA stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have oligopolies like the big cable TV providers stifling innovation and price-gouging.

I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.

As for your crap about helping disadvantaged youths, how do you think they got to be disadvantaged? Maybe because the middle class works for chicken-feed at massive companies like EA, and their relatively low income drives down the price of low-income services and such, which drives down the pay of the parents of those disadvantaged kids. Or maybe because big companies like EA like to work with as few employees as possible, which increases unemployment and competition for other jobs, which drops pay, which also leads to those disadvantaged kids being poor.

The last of the great Offline Content creators

[popo]

I'm a huge fan of a fat manual.

This might be slightly O.T. but with the passing of Black Isle and now Troika, I can't help reflecting on the fact that both of these studios IMHO were the only ones out there that spent enormous time and energy in creating beautiful offline content to accompany their games.

Arcanum was a great game. And one of the reasons I have huge respect for Troika is that they didn't just stop there:

That Arcanum manual was a work of art.

Well in this case

[Sycraft-fu]

I don't think it's the market, I think it was Trokia's extreme sucking. No not in the games they chose to make, not in how they decided to do the gameplay or anything, those were excellent. The problem was in the programming. ToEE was so buggy it was unbelievable. In it's inital state, the game was practically unplayable. After two patches it was still riddled with bugs, and they showed no intrest in updating it. Frustrated fans finally set to work on it and made an update that got the game pretty close to what release status should be.

I haven't played Vampire, but I understand it's in a similar boat.

There is a market for RPGs, and they can make money, but part of that is that they must be well developed programs. I'd say this goes even more than many other games. I can deal with a fair bit of glitches in an FPS, I mean all I'm there to do is shoot shit. However an RPG is about character and story development, so things need to work right. If I can't, for example, loot a creature (common problem in ToEE) that really fucks things up.

While I'm sad to see them go, I have no illusions of who is at fault. They produced some of the buggiest code I've seen in a long time and it's no wonder people got frustrated trying to play it and sales were bad.

Re:Another Sad Adieu (OT)

[TrappedByMyself]

Please get a clue.

In true Capitalism, there is no one preventing monopolies. Bill Gates would own countries in that world. The US system is decent in that the government wacks monopolies when they get too big. Yes, there is some bribing and crap, but its the best system that's actually been implemented so far. You do realise the EA was one of those start-ups you romanticize about. Those startups either died or grew up and ate each other. That's the way of things. Businesses scratch and claw their way to your pocket, and the government kicks them in the ass when they go too far. I know it's cool and stuff to talk of dark brooding corporate towers where the affairs of the world are secretly controlled, but seriously, you're not some freedom fighter, just some middle class Joe who's cushy life shields you from reality.

And please, there are no EA employees living in dire poverty. That comment shows how even the middle class in America is ignorant of what real poverty is. The disadvantaged I'm talking about are those who aren't equipped to play in our society. The uneducated ultra poor, both native and immigrant. Again, one of the flaws of the US is the education of the poor. It's much better than in the rest of the world, but still needs improvement. You want to fall on your sword for the rights of someone making 50k a year.

Re:no wonder

[glenrm]

It is a shame that more people don't buy direct from the developer, then there is not a bad publisher in the equation and the developers get more of the $$$ to create even better quality products.