>>Truly inovative games will always sell well. Look at max payne. I was really pissed that it was not first person view, but after getting around the feel, the game was damn near perfect.
Tell that to the developers who go out and try to make anything other than yet another FPS or RTS and go bankrupt because they either sell poorly, or the publisher wants them to revamp the game to become more of the same.
Tell that to Bungie who had to rape the original idea of what Halo was intended to be to fit Microsoft's plans and have it be yet another FPS game.
Tell that to any developer that has to fall back onto making more of the same in order to try and bankroll something truly original, just to have it die miserably because damn it, it's not another version of WarCraft/C&C/Quake/whatever.
And then you bring up Counterstrike which is just a variation on more of the same (HalfLife meets rainbow six). Way to bury your own argument there.
The main problem I have with the article is that in the nine months I spent employed/indentured at Ion Storm Dallas, I never once saw or heard of the author coming into the building, much less working on actually developing the so-called "plot" of Daikatana. (I realize that may not be a huge deal... after all, if anything in game development can be done remotely, it's hacking together a story for the action to take place in light of, but it's still rather interesting to me to note that...)
As far as Daikatana making money, there's no way it could have without being by FAR the best selling of all PC titles to date. I remember tossing numbers around with a few other colleagues, and based on a very generous $8 per-unit-sold profit, to break even Daikatana would have had to have sold somewhere near 4.5 million units (at full launch price mind you) to have broken even, based on the amount of money fronted to IS by Eidos for startup costs and such. Those are insane numbers in the PC market as I'm sure you all know, even with the best-selling flagship titles.
As for Romero being without ego and a level-headed individual, that had a lot to do with how far you were willing to debase yourself in order to be allowed into his little inner-circle. Many of us simply weren't willing to do that I suppose.
I can say that my time there was well-spent, if only as a way of teaching myself that not all is wine and roses in the industry, and to allow myself the knowledge to look for red flags before getting into a similar situation later down the road. I'm glad to see that Ion-austin survived and flourished on its own, and didn't get mired down by the crap that happened in its brother to the north. They did it the right way -- knuckling down, being quiet, and focusing on the job at hand, rather than the celebrity that those in Dallas seemed to want. I really think if the 'Storm in Dallas had paid more attention to the way Warren Spector and Co. did things, Ion Storm would have been much different, and this article wouldn't need to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Truly inovative games will always sell well. Look at max payne. I was really pissed that it was not first person view, but after getting around the feel, the game was damn near perfect.
Tell that to the developers who go out and try to make anything other than yet another FPS or RTS and go bankrupt because they either sell poorly, or the publisher wants them to revamp the game to become more of the same.
Tell that to Bungie who had to rape the original idea of what Halo was intended to be to fit Microsoft's plans and have it be yet another FPS game.
Tell that to any developer that has to fall back onto making more of the same in order to try and bankroll something truly original, just to have it die miserably because damn it, it's not another version of WarCraft/C&C/Quake/whatever.
And then you bring up Counterstrike which is just a variation on more of the same (HalfLife meets rainbow six). Way to bury your own argument there.
The main problem I have with the article is that in the nine months I spent employed/indentured at Ion Storm Dallas, I never once saw or heard of the author coming into the building, much less working on actually developing the so-called "plot" of Daikatana. (I realize that may not be a huge deal... after all, if anything in game development can be done remotely, it's hacking together a story for the action to take place in light of, but it's still rather interesting to me to note that...)
As far as Daikatana making money, there's no way it could have without being by FAR the best selling of all PC titles to date. I remember tossing numbers around with a few other colleagues, and based on a very generous $8 per-unit-sold profit, to break even Daikatana would have had to have sold somewhere near 4.5 million units (at full launch price mind you) to have broken even, based on the amount of money fronted to IS by Eidos for startup costs and such. Those are insane numbers in the PC market as I'm sure you all know, even with the best-selling flagship titles.
As for Romero being without ego and a level-headed individual, that had a lot to do with how far you were willing to debase yourself in order to be allowed into his little inner-circle. Many of us simply weren't willing to do that I suppose.
I can say that my time there was well-spent, if only as a way of teaching myself that not all is wine and roses in the industry, and to allow myself the knowledge to look for red flags before getting into a similar situation later down the road. I'm glad to see that Ion-austin survived and flourished on its own, and didn't get mired down by the crap that happened in its brother to the north. They did it the right way -- knuckling down, being quiet, and focusing on the job at hand, rather than the celebrity that those in Dallas seemed to want. I really think if the 'Storm in Dallas had paid more attention to the way Warren Spector and Co. did things, Ion Storm would have been much different, and this article wouldn't need to exist.