Slashdot Mirror
Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies
An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"
If you consider crashing every 20 minutes, losing any save data you had, and having some video sequences prevent any further progress due to crashing.
...and that was on a console!
Something witty.
E.T. nearly killed off an entire industry. Though I'm sure that's just what history remembers as its death blow.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
once EA buys them it's game over.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was another game that killed the company. There's even an interview about it somewhere here on Slashdot.
Apparently it went way over budget, was laden with game breaking bugs, and had copy protection problems.
It's a shame, really, because the last 5 years of fan patching have made it kind of enjoyable.
The video game itself was tedious, but the that mini game off the main menu where you could hack the terminal was awesome good fun. Without checking YouTube first, I say aloud to no-one that a cut together edit of all of the cinemas would be nice to watch through. Now I just need to care enough this much later to bother looking.
"By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'""
But not before they squeezed out a cult favorite, Deus Ex.
Surprised they didn't mention Vanguard. It killed Sigil software and the only reason it's still on Life Support is SOE bought it out on the cheap. (See also: Matrix Online before that one was finally killed)
Umm, you may want to double-check your chronology there.
The AvP game (based on the DH comic) came out 10 years before the movie.
What actually killed Origin was EA. EA purchased Origin in the same year that Ultima 7 was released--and coincidentally, Ultima 7 was the last really good Ultima game. Ultima 7 part 2 was fun and a good story, but it was far too linear. It also never felt like an Ultima. Ultima 8 was rushed to keep EA's stockholders happy. Ultima 9 was simply a travesty. The constant delays, rewrites, and fighting between Garriot and EA turned what could have been a fantastic ending to the series into a pile of poo.
That said, Origin's always made some poor design choices. The Voodoo memory manager caused no end to problems, and required that the computer be rebooted in order to play the Ultima 7 games (for most people.) Later on, Ultima 9's engine was written with the Voodoo series of graphics cards (no relation) in mind, and DirectX support was tacked on at the last minute. The upshot was that the game played reasonably well, if slowly, with 3DFX cards, and had tons more bugs and horrible performance with anything else. Ultima 8 didn't seem to have any voodoo problems, but they went and changed the format of the game (iirc, at EA's behest) to include action elements in a hope that it would appeal to more gamers. This alienated the core fans, and I suspect that new players were put off by both the paganism/symbolism and the fact that this was the 8th game in the series.
Blunder's all around, but really, it's all traced back to EA.
Total Annihilation was better than a mere string of hits. It DEFINED THE STANDARD for RTS games, and is still the litmus test over a decade later.
To date, as far as I can tell, Blizzard has never made a bad (debatable, based on personal taste) or unsuccessful (not up for debate) game. They've got a perfect record. And they're raking in more money every month. If that's a recipe for disaster, sign me up!
Just about every game they do release is a hit.
Also they will be operating WoW at a profit for the next 10 years if they did nothing else with it other than supply power. Its hard to be a convincing doomsayer when they have 10,000,000+ subscribers without giving a compelling reason to believe that they would fail. You're not liking that fact does not make it less true.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Actually you cannot blame everything regarding U9 on EA (and also not everything from U8). The jumping which made the initial U8 so lousy was simply that Garriot wanted to have more jump and run elements in there and the missing content was ort of additional packs (since they worked out so well for U7). Problem simply was the everyone hated the jumping, Origin fixed that in the first patch. The missing content never appeared because EA axed further works on the game due to the financial dive it caused. As for U9 if you have followed the game then you would know there was a lack of direction. The early version was supposed to be sort of an U7 with a top down 3d engine underneath, then a programmer played with the camera Garriot saw that (according to some interviews I read back then) then suddenly it had to be full 3d with all consequences at a time where no one has done that before and no one really had the hardware to do it decently. Then the game constantly was on and off in EAs and also Garriots attention etc... it was sort of an endless story until EA had enough and gave it a last chance (after 5-6 years of on and off development)
U9 could have been good, and turned out to be lets say too much ahead of its time and mediocre in many ways, but only blaming EA is wrong in this case.
It's a hell of game and has fanatical followers. I like it myself--in fact, I was playing it just a few days ago. That's staying power. Heck, I even kinda liked Kingdoms. But it didn't define a standard.
TA introduced many features which are now standard in RTS games. It's just wrong to say that Warcraft/Starcraft and Dawn of War (wtf?) defined the standards for the genre.
For example - 3D terrain, the left click/right click interface, unit queuing, units guarding other units or structures, complex patrol paths and waypoints, polygonal units, etc etc etc etc...
I consider Enter the Matrix to have been a surprisingly good movie tie in; in fact, I'd consider the game to be the true spiritual successor to the first Matrix film. Missions like the post office and the airport missions has the feel of what you sort of expected was the kind of thing the rebels actually got up to in the Matrix. The game only fell down mission wise when it stuck too close to the film it was bound into supporting.
But let's talk gameplay.
In my opinion, Enter the Matrix gets over looked an awful lot, despite the fact that it did bullet time combat right. Yes the game had glitches. Yes the animations were not the best. Yes the game was short. But the sheer fun and depth of the bullet time and combat system give it a lot of kudos in my eyes. There was a wealth of close combat moves, weapons, takedowns, gymnastics, etc all of which took on a new depth once you pressed the focus button. If you look at the bullet time in titles like Max Payne or Bayonetta, you see its really just a slowdown button and not the "Devil Trigger"-esque upgrade it should be; your short burst of super power, called upon in a pinch.
In addition, the sheer scope of your abilities in that game is matched by very few other titles. When you find yourself thinking "Hmmmm, what way will I kill the next group of enemies", you know the developers did something right. The blending of ranged and close combat worked well, as it the ability to interact with enemies and the environment to pull off stunts and takedowns.
Enter the Matrix had its flaws, but it went on to form the core of the The Path of Neo, which was probably the definitive Matrix title, which took all the concepts from the first game and gave them the polish that was needed.
May the Maths Be with you!
Except Origin Systems was a player in a comparatively tiny niche industry. Blizzard has made money hand over fist in an industry that rivals or surpasses other popular entertainments like music and movies, and managed to expand a particular genre to an entirely new demographic.
Comparing UO and Origin Systems to WoW and Blizzard is comparing apples and oranges... or comparing Daimler Motor Company in the 1900s to Toyota and Honda in the modern world.
Blizzard is not just a developer that had a big success... they're a powerhouse. It'll take more than a couple missteps to bring them down. They'd have to MASSIVELY fuck up in ways that WoW wouldn't even factor into. They've undoubtedly got a sizable enough warchest of capital built up that they could eat a couple failures, even massive ones.
In short, any scenario where Blizzard crashed and burned... couldn't possibly be attributed just to WoW, or even mostly to WoW. They'd need massive mismanagement on a company-wide scale and consistent lack of business vision. Sure, they COULD fail, but there's nothing to this "WoW could kill Blizzard" talk but baseless speculation that has nothing actually to do with WoW.