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

Another Sad Adieu

[ackthpt]

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."

Meanwhile the ruthless prosper while throwing breadcrumbs to their employees. Seems one more failure ensures the continued trend.

It's a hard world.

New form EA: Mail Order Monsters: John Madden Edition! Listen to John's witty repartee as your monster slugs it out for survival!

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.

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...

Temple of Excremental Evil.

[dameron]

I've enjoyed several Troika games and plan on playing Vampire soon, but the incredibly unfinished Temple of Elemental Evil was a huge black mark on their reputation. Entire levels were only partially furnished. There were parts where you could wander for half an hour opening empty chests in unfurnished empty rooms.

I wish them the best 'though. Good luck guys.

-dameron

Saving throw

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess they failed the saving throw.

This is sad

[apharov]

It really is quite sad to see how the people who have made two excellent computer RPG's (original Fallout and Arcanum) cannot succeed in the current computer game market.

Fallout was undoubtably one of the very best computer RPGs and Arcanum is not far behind IMHO. I was actually really looking forward to perhaps one day seeing Arcanum 2 with the same great world and especially atmosphere as the original.

It would be really nice to see these people succeed in what they are really good in doing, especially as this (making excellent computer RPGs) produces some additional happiness to other people. The closing of Troika Games is sad in the sense that there is little hope for the same magic atmosphere to appear again soon in computer games.

Yet Another Developer Buried

[kiwidefunkt]

The game industry is looking more and more like the music and movie industries every day. Soon EA and all the other big corporate names will have eliminated competition, formed an RIAA/MPAA style ruling body, and then actively attack piracy. And thank god, because look at how good popular music is today! I can't wait for game quality to keep sliding as huge companies buy up as many licenses they can and flood the market with crap while companies like Troika can't even pay the rent...

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.