Working Designs Shuts Its Doors

An anonymous reader writes "1UP.com is reporting that publisher Working Designs has officially closed shop, apparently due to difficulties with Sony's approval department." From the article: "If I can't guarantee that the games I personally choose for us to release in the US can actually get approved and come out, there's no business to be done ... I know many of you will have lots of questions, and there will be some I can answer, and some I can't. Sony has made it clear that they do not want the details of their dealings with any publisher made public. Suffice to say that you would buy what we wanted to sell if we could sell it."

Comments

This is new?

[Threni]

Haven't Sega, Nintendo etc always had the last word with what gets released, with no guarantees?

Why does Sony care what publishers did?

[jclast]

As long as people are putting out games, why does Sony care? Even if they're not all winners and huge sellers, a variety of games is great for a console.

So Sony doesn't make as much from Working Designs as they do from Take 2. Why does it matter? They made a hell of a lot more from Working Designs when they were still publishing games than they make from WD now.

Hell, every game released here can just pad the number of games available in a commercial. Buy a PS2! We've got a library of over X games! Less is not more when it comes to game selection. People have varied taste, and if it was approved for Japanese release, why is it an issue for somebody else to do the work and release it in the US?

Cadash said it best...

[edbarrett]

"He who is strongest survives, or don't you know the teachings of Carl Sagan?"

RIP Working Designs, even though you tossed some *weird shit* into your translations...

Cadash - Popful Mail - Lunar - Dragon Force - Raystorm

Re:What Is He *Not* Saying?

[Stormwatch]

None of these is the problem. Especially not quality. In fact, WD's president Victor Ireland is a well-known purist and perfectionist. WD would delay games rather than publish anything that was not yet up to their standards. That's how they became known as "Working Delays", but that also made them respected among many hardcore RPG fans.

For example... hope I'm recalling this right... they were translating Magic Knight Rayearth for the Sega Saturn, and wanted to keep the heroes' original names (Hikaru, Umi, Fuu); but the american distributor of the cartoon tried to force them to use the translated names (Lucy, Marine, Anne). Anyone else would compromise - WD went to court, won, and eventually released the game just the way they wanted.

Sony Computer Entertainment America - SCEA - also has standards. Sadly, the wrong standards. They have a very subjective policy of not approving games that could "harm the Playstation 2's image". That means: anything 2D is very unlikely to fly, unless it's a collection package. WD's last title, Growlanser Generations, is actually Growlanser 2 and Growlanser 3; Sony forced WD to sell 2 for the price of 1, and now I'm guessing WD realized that Sony's nonsense would eventually drive them out of business anyway.

It was only a matter of time.

[softegg]

I worked for Victor at Working Designs during the Saturn and Playstation one days; I worked on Iron Storm, Dragon Force, Albert Odyssey, Magic Knight Rayearth, Lunar 1 & 2, Vanguard Bandits (Epica Stella) and Silhouette Mirage.

I left the company in the middle of Lunar 2 for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons was that I saw the writing on the wall for the localization industry and realized that I needed to get into original development or my career was sunk.

The game industry simply cannot support small developers or publishers anymore, especially not on consoles. The costs of production and marketing are too high, and it's too easy for a product to get lost on the shelf. There is way too much graft that has to be paid in the retail channel to get them to give your product decent placement, or even to order your product at all... and then they are slow to pay.

Furthermore, the Japanese companies have wised up to the value of their more esoteric games, and now either publish those games themselves, or license them out to larger publisher who can put more marketing muscle behind them.

I'm somewhat surprised that Victor was having trouble getting his titles approved, as he has always had very good relationships with his third-party liason at Sony in the past... perhaps that had changed after I left.

Victor has had a definite positive impact on the industry. Before Victor, game companies frequently changed all the art (or at least, the cover art) on Japanese games to make it more palletable to US audiences. They whipped out very poor translations ("all your base..."), and often removed dubbing and audio tracks completely. They frequently passed over whole genres which were considered too esoteric for the US market.

Victor changed all that. He raised the bar for localized products in just about every way, and proved that there was a market for all of those niche titles, games with anime art, RPGs and strategy games.

I don't think we've seen the last of Victor, although we may never hear from Working Designs again, at least not as a publisher. I suspect Victor will probably end up producing localizations on a contract basis for other publishers... assuming that such work would be satisfying to him. Once you've been in charge, it's hard to go back to taking orders. I can't ever see Victor leaving Redding and accepting a full-time producer position at any company... which is probably the only way he'd get remotely close to the power he had to make the games the way he wanted like at WD.

It's the end of an era, but really, that era ended a long time ago. I'm surprised that he hung on as long as he did.

-- Timon Marmex --