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The Troika Games Saga

Posted by Zonk on from the i-miss-torment dept.

GameBanshee has an interview up with Leonard Boyarksy, one of the founders of the late Troika games, describing the last days of the much missed RPG developer. From the article: "It became apparent in January when the last of our possible deals that we'd been pursuing fell through. When we started looking six or so months ago, there was a lot of initial interest but our projects could never seem to get past the marketing department."

4 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. It's not like it was a surprise. by Rallion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can't make Temple of Elemental Evil and then expect people to ever have any contact with you again.

    Really. It doesn't matter if you've also done good things. Nobody wants to look at a project and determine, based on past history, that it might be good, but it also might be freaking terrible. In fact, determining that it will almost certainly be entirely mediocre is far more pleasant than that.

    1. Re:It's not like it was a surprise. by ebrandsberg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I rather liked toee, although I think it was a little dated of an environment for the age the current games are in, but well done for what it was (once the bugs were patched).

  2. Re:Crap... by Propagandhi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think it was the delaying of Vampire, so much as it was the rampant bugs that were still present in the game even after the game had been delayed for so long..

    Whether it was Troika's or their publishers (I wanna say Sierra, but I can't remember right now) fault is debatable.. but you simply can't ship a game with that many bugs and expect it to sell well (MMORPGS being the possible exception to this rule).

  3. Marketing Department?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    THat's the problem with this f***'ing industry! Marketing types shouldn't be deciding what gets published. Sure I understand the rationale of "If I can't sell it, it's no good", but people in marketing lack imagination. They also lack a sense of risk for fear of losing their jobs. UGH! I hate this.

    This is why we need an entirely new game distribution model. This is why things like STEAM, despite its short-comings, NEEDS to work. We need the bean counters and guys who negotiate ad-space out of the equation.