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Take-Two Acquires Firaxis
eToyChest reports that Publisher Take-Two has acquired Firaxis studios, developers of the Civilization franchise. From the article: "At this point I'm not sure what to think. If Take-Two takes a hands-off approach, and lets Firaxis do their thing, then I'm all for this. I just don't want this to become a matter of "too many cooks in the kitchen", and somehow negatively impact future titles that spring from Sid Meier's genius. Your thoughts?"
Take Two has already published two successful Sid Meier's games. This may simply be a way of ensuring that they have permanent control of those franchises.
I don't think it's very good. If Take-two wants to regularly invest (and thus) profit off the games Firaxis makes, then that's fine. If they want to sign an agreement for them to do a certain number of games this way...that's fine. But, there's no reason for all these publishers to keep gobbling up all the developers. We're gonna get to a point where there are very few companies that autonomously create games, and thus less innovation I'm afraid.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Well, I'd expect that if Mr. Meier feels pressured or put upon in any way he can always go start "Firaxis Studios II" and have no problem finding investment capital. No issue here, the franchise is safe.
Take2 previously handled much of the marketing etc for Firaxis. Take2 doesn't deal so much with the development aspect of game publishing... that's done by the subsidiaries IIRC. Not to say that the parent co doesn't have input, but I imagine it's similar to the original Take2/Rockstar setup. Rockstar devlops games, Take2 publishes them.
Where this worries me is that the Civ franchise will probably need to be dumbed down a bit in order to do well in a larger market -- especially the console market (and you can bet they'll be pushing it there).
I'd like to see the top of the org chart for Take2's new acquisition -- will Sid continue in his current role?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That's what happens when Sid Meier isn't involved anymore. Pirates! and Civ IV were great games, but we won't be seeing the likes of them until Sid creates another firm 10 years from now.
Granted, 2K has not been heavyhanded with Rockstar, but then Rockstar makes pretty much the #1 game franchise in the world. A smaller firm like Firaxis will be easy to meddle with and fuck up irreversibly.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
Civ4 is amazingly good, a real resurrection of what was great about the first one. It makes no sense for them to be selling out now, unless Civ4 isn't doing well... is it not selling well?
If PC gaming has bitten the dust to that degree, perhaps they're letting themselves be bought out just to survive?
they already published some of their games and as publisher were entitled to some input because they really didn't agree with an aspect of the game, they would just drop it unless the dev would fix it, but as it seems take two is as opposite of EA as you can get so perhaps this will just increase the amount of capital Sid Meier will have to work with in his future games. Off-topic slightly: And to one of the other people posting, take two won't move the civ franchise to console simply because it will suck. It doesn't matter how big a name or how great a game it is, a controller just can't compare to a mouse/keyboard for a strategy game of any type so I would just doubt I'd see any of the civ series ported over until at least revolution comes out with a controller that might be a bit more intuitive with those games.
In this turn-based game, you will create brothels, build slaveships, create drug cartels, research ways to refine cocaine, harvest opium fields, and assasinate political leaders, and it'll have a story line.
=)
I develop sports games for a company owned by Take Two under the 2K Sports label. I have worked here before, during, and after the aquisition. I will be the first to say that the acquisition has been nothing but positive for our company. Take Two has not pushed us to do anything we wouldn't have done otherwise and has only provided us with larger pockets from which to draw resources.
I am confident that the acquisition will not negatively impact Firaxis' great line of games.
My SIG is a SG-552 Commando
Sid must want to retire.
There really is no need to sell to a big publisher, if anything, Sid should of pushed Firaxis into becoming more independent - using digital distribution direct to the players via the internet - instead of getting sucked into a big bloated publisher tied to the big bloated retail world.
Guys like Sid, established guys like him should be leading the charge for the 'artists' of the game industry to become more independent. Instead, he just cashed out.
Oh Sid, why oh why? Did they offer you that much cash?
Well that's that for Firaxis and probably Civ too.
Dave
First off, Take Two isn't that bad. Its reputation as a publisher is fairly clean.
Second, Sid did not sell himself into slavery. Sid sold his company. Sid could very well create ANOTHER startup, make another awesome game, then get bought up again, each time pocketing a pile of cash. So long as Sid kicks out some kick ass games, good for him. That guy deserves a big firgging pile of money. Sid just lined his pockets, lined the pockets of Fraxis, and can still merrily jump ship if he wants to. It seems like win win for everyone.
"and somehow negatively impact future titles that spring from Sid Meier's genius."
Yea, making a run of the mill pirate game that didn't acually let you be a pirate was such a great idea. Wouldent a pirate dancing with a woman be the rough equivilant of an oil CEO paying his taxes?
I'll stop being cynical when the world allows
For people who've been watching the Civ IV release with interest (anyone who paid money for it probably is), this is clearly another bad thing.
For people who don't know, Civ IV, while mechanically a great game, was rushed out of the door unfinished. I would suggest that the *majority* of people who bought it had technical difficulties with the game, from rendering, XML, ATI initialisation, crash to desktop, restarts, bluescreens and all manner of other problems (just take a look at the forums at Civfanatics to see).
The reason for this is, presumably, that Take 2 forced Firaxis to release the game in an unfinished state.
Take 2 aren't offering any support for the product apart from rumours that a support person once said there may be a patch released. They're not answering emails and the telephone support is quite bad as the call center staff don't have much information.
Take 2 directly owning Firaxis now means that this kind of shoddiness is now something we should expect in future.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Sid has left companies before, and I'm sure if things get too far out of control, he'll drop off, regroup, and start over. I wouldn't worry too much. The worst that will happen will be some crap games in the interim.
What if the folks at Take Two are huge fans of Sid Meier and merely want to pump enough cash into his company to help him make the game he really wants to make?
Games are getting expensive to make these days, and a competitive, next-gen experience is even more expensive. Besides, some folks like to concentrate on creating things and leave business to the business folks.
So while were all speculating on shit we know nothing about, I'll do a little speculation of my own: what if Take 2 will pay for the development of a fully 3D, full featured Alpha Centari 2 with 30 times more content and the greatest, most intuitive interface ever seen in a strategy game?
Can't do that without cash, folks.
Look at it this way... Maxis sold out to EA and got The Sims greenlighted, which is a tremendous step up to everything they did while they were a publicly traded company.
Downside of that was the 6 months release schedule of 7 Sims expansions, followed by a sequel and more expansions... in typical EA fashion.
The nice thing about being acquired is that they are not pressured to produce and publish x number of titles per year (if you read anything about the times when Maxis was publicly traded, this was the case). Right now Maxis is doing about one major title every two years and then supplies expansions on an ~6 month release cycle. The benefit is that the lead designer can be off loaded to create fresh titles while an auxilary team works on the expansions (read content development). Same thing applies to sequels. Will Wright had little to do with the design of SimCity 4 since all the design was done with the original SimCity. I think the same might be true with Sims 2.
If T2 works the same way as EA, the worst that'll happen is that there will be several EPs for Civ 4. Then again, Civ 3 had at least two expansions, so I wouldn't be surprised if a few get released. On the flip side, this should give Meier and other creatives at Firaxis the opportunity to create something fresh for a change.
All in all, I don't think it should be a problem for Firaxis. As long as they can bring money in for T2, there's no reason my T2 should mess with them.
Insert Sig Here
Does this mean we can expect a turn-based sex minigame to be available if we make small adjustments to the game?