Slashdot Mirror
Irrational No More
An anonymous reader writes "Cory Banks at Gamers With Jobs has an interesting look at Irrational Games becoming '2K Boston'/'2K Australia' on the eve of the Bioshock release. It's not just about 2K and Irrational, publishers re-naming independents to generic studio names has obviously been going on for a long time. 'Rockstar Games is often credited with the Grand Theft Auto series, but the games were developed by Scottish developer DMA Designs, who were bought by Rockstar in 2002, shortly after GTA III came out, and quickly renamed Rockstar North to build up the brand recognition associated with the mega-blockbuster. Rockstar isn't even a development company at all, but a collection of development studios owned by Take-Two, sharing one brand name. The general public hardly knows the difference.'"
How dare you say I'm no longer irrational!
The general public hardly knows the difference.
/., and anyone reading this should be observant enough and analytical enough to gather the information in this article that the general public missed, at least on games they play.
This is
Oh, wait, we don't even read TFA, and sometimes even TFS.
The people who do the work, and the people who get the credit, are rarely the same people.
This usually goes for the money too. For example, the company that wrote the original Thief game went out of business while the company that published it made enough net to justify funding a sequel.
...another great developer studio getting swallowed up into a publisher, like Bullfrog or Origin or countless others.
Irrational Games was especially impressive to me because they produced some very diverse and excellent games, besides Bioshock they also made the spiritual precedessor System Shock 2 and they also developed the awesome and (IMO) underrated Freedom Force games.
So goodbye Irrational Games, I hope 2K Games will be better to you than EA was to Bullfrog and Origin.
Its currently a sad fact that the game's industry is becoming more and more anonymous in many ways. There are so incredibly few "superstar" game developers - Miyamoto, Carmack, Wright, Kojima, Itagaki... If I spent some time thinking, I could probably come up with 10 or so names that have some notoriety outside of very small circles. Smaller devs are being assimilated by the big players, team sizes are growing nearly exponentially with each new generation. Its becoming a commodity business, where faceless masses simply provide a product; and it takes a great deal of personality out of the industry.
On top of that, the publishing model works much like the music industry -- The publisher fronts money to the devs, and they don't see a profit until their royalties have paid off the development in full, sometimes with interest. Thats why there's so little innovation, and thats why a single bad title can fold a studio.
Not only won't the general public notice the swallowing of small developers, they wouldn't care if they did. Why should they?
After the singularity, that won't matter. Extremely powerful and intelligent beings will produce outstanding games by themselves. No publisher. No companies. Awesome, but true.
Take-Two is the parent company of Rockstar Games.
In 2002, all they did was rename DMA Designs to Rockstar Studios.
(see: March 19, 2002)
The overall issue: companyA is now called companyB.
From my experience, the biggest impact of a company name change is that a lot of stationary needs to be replaced.
From the article:Maybe I'm crazy but perhaps they'll re-brand it because they pay for everything.
This is not my sig
DMA before they became Rockstar North - Creators of one of the best puzzle games ever, which crossed sex and age barriers, Lemmings. Those green guys with the purple wavy hairdos truly rocked.
Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I say we print up some cute stickers with the irrational logo and go on a rampage and stick it over the Take-Two logo on every package of Bioshock.
Of course if you really want recognition, stick it on copies of Madden '08 too!
A small game development company/indie developer cannot afford all this publicity and ads. Not to mention they are unknown and new to begin with. A large company with a recognized brand will get more buyers and will spend much less effort to launch a new game. If Indie Game developers would cooperate on advertising and concentrate their games under single brand people would recognize and buy these games.(Yeah, they wouldn't be "Indie" anymore in the strict meaning of term.)
I wonder if this move is related to the fact that Bioshock is crippled with an internet registration scheme that is required to unlock the game. Or that the game does not run under Windows 2000?
As some others here have said, its largely not about the name. It's not like 2K didn't already own Irrational Games. They've had the option to change the name if they so wished for awhile now. The Dev team at Irrational is not physically changing in any way. All the guys are still there. So it really doesn't matter unless they fire everyone on the team from Irrational, which is quite frankly, completely irrational. Why would you rename a studio and then just dissolve it?
If there is one thing slightly upsetting about this situation, it's that Irrational Games is a much more awesome studio name than 2K Games.
I've seen a few people compare this to movies, but the comparison is kind of wrong. What's happening here is that we are hiding the true creators of the game (the folks from Irrational), and just lumping the credit for the creation to the financers (2K) by hiding their name under 2K Boston/2K Australia.
This would be the same as if we never knew who directed Lord of the Rings other than "New Line Cinema New Zealand". In movies, people still associate the product with it's creator (usually the director and an actor or two) and not the company that financed it.
Jack Thompson quote "By the way, since Dennis McCauley has proven once again, by this thread, his Jack Thompson obsession, please note that big trouble is on the way for Take-Two re BioShock. Hooah! "
Hiring a backup band so you can sing a song you wrote does not make it any less your song.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It's not quite that bad. Any good teacher will teach "programming" not "language X". So anybody with half a brain should be able to learn something new (I started programming in Fortran ;)).
But you're right, Microsoft isn't doing this out of kindness. They want to get as many people hooked on C#/XNA as they can in hopes that most of them stick with it into the professional world.
Apple tried the same thing with their computers in the 1980's. It didn't work too well, and I think most people equated Apple with "school PC" and IBM was for "real work". Unless C#/XNA starts being used for "serious projects", Microsoft may learn the same lesson (XNA is used for school projects, Cx0 is for real games).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!