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

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.