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Duke Nukem For Never
PLSQL Guy writes "Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms is shutting down, according to Shacknews. They cite 'a reliable source close to the company,' who said the developer is finished and employees have already been let go. It looks like all of the Duke Nukem Forever jokes are turning into reality; DNF might turn out to be the ultimate vaporware after all."
3D Realms' webmaster, Joe Siegler, confirmed the closing, saying that he didn't know about it even a day beforehand. Apogee and Deep Silver, who are working on a different set of Duke Nukem games (referred to as the Duke Nukem Trilogy) say they are not affected by the problems at 3D Realms.
Competent managers are not required to have a product out the door in, what?, 15 years? Other companies without real managers do that in three. Example: iD Software managed several of these feats, making quality games, having some kind of time and money estimate beforehand and then actually finishing something.
When a product like this takes *umpteen* years without any kind of progress or even a measly status report, you have incompetent managers, incompetent programmers, insufficient funding, incompetent financers, inadequate workplace or ideas distant from reality. 3D Realms probably had all of it and more.
Unfortunately, badly managed companies go bankrupt. Fortunately, they're not wasting anyone's resources, money and time anymore.
But it's much much worse when badly managed companies cannot go bankrupt under any circumstances, being deemed "too big to fail" or having some other kind of socialist protection.
Loved Duke 3D back in the day, but I was 15 when I last played it and 16 when Duke Nukem Forever was announced. My computer back then was a Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM and a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee card. And now, I'm 28, typing this on a multi-gigaherz, multi-core, multi-gigabyte, multi-monitor setup. My, how times have changed.
For a couple years I eagerly awaited DN4, but after that, enough is enough. I gave up the ghost, earned a college degree, started a career, and next thing I know, I'm almost 30. I literally have not thought once about DN4 in years until I saw this headline.
What a shocker. Not.
Does 3DRealms still deserve headline space? They haven't done anything innovative in years. Their management is curt, snarky, and drunk with hubris. If anyone dares to post something anti-3DR on their forums, the thread gets locked, Siegler and/or Broussard gets the last word, and the user gets banned. But that's cool. It's their forums, they can do whatever they want, and apparently they only allow sycophants.
"When it's done," they say. "The game will revolutionize interactivity," they say. "We don't need any money, we're 100% self-funded, and can afford it indefinitely because we are rock star developers and can sell ice to eskimos," they say. Oops.
How many engine changes did DN4 go through? How much work was wasted in redesigning all the levels over and over again? And most importantly, how much money could DN4 have made if they simply instilled a little more discipline than "when it's done" into their culture? Management has to be stunningly demented to squander such a valuable franchise, and instead be content with trickling out old Duke Nukem ports and re-makes. If I were a developer at 3DR, I would be seriously pissed at having busted my ass all these years without ever seeing a dime of royalty that could've been seven figures, and instead am now laid off and have to look for another job in this craptacular economy.
Memo to 3DRealms: thanks for the good times back in the day, but good riddance to your arrogance, your lack of respect towards the industry, and your vaporware promises. You will not be missed.
Or maybe the reason for the shutdown is that they couldn't deliver a product after at least 11 years of development.
Unfortunately, HURD follows the same development methodology as DNF. They had it booting and running X11 / GNOME a few years back, then they decided to ditch Mach and switch to L4. Then they decided to switch to Coyotos instead. Then they decided to write their own game engine, uh, microkernel, from scratch.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Treating your employees decently is not what killed 3DR. Let's not pretend that they were some nice group of nice guys that just can't make it in this era.
It was poor management that ruined them. Whether a company treats employees well or not poor management can kill a company.
I read "This is a story I wrote on..." to mean it was fiction. Do you honestly believe that if these people really behaved as described, that Charlie would post the entire story with his and everyone else's names intact?
My take is slightly different: I believe they were afraid to fail. Given what little we do know about the endless delays -- that they switched the basic engine from Quake II to Unreal to Unreal Tournament to Quake III to one being built solely in-house, and had to restart level work every time, I believe that this was driven by the fear that the game would be a failure. Duke 3D was a smash it. It put them on the map. And they promised to themselves and their fans that DNF would be even better. So, they couldn't stand the thought of it possibly being a flop; it had to be a #1 bestseller, and every game reviewer had to be able to rant and rave at how much more amazing it was over D3D or any other FPS for that matter. And every year that passed, and every time they got more and more ridiculed at its "vaporware" status, it hardened their resolve that the game must not be a failure, or even mediocre, under any circumstance whatsoever. And that mentality paralyzed them, and caused them to essentially re-write and re-write the game, until the weight of it all finally caused them to collapse
It's not very usable as a real system, but it's definitely not vaporware.
LOL. I'm not sure this distinction is all that great. After all, people develop software to use it. After 15 years (whatever) of development, a reasonable expectation is that the system would be usable for something other than just rebooting.
After all, I have Windows for that task.