It has one of the highest metacritic scores of all time and you're surprised people actually enjoyed it? Bizarre.
It has one of the highest metacritic scores of all time and you're surprised people actually enjoyed it? Bizarre.
It's not the same thing, and that's not what's happened either.
Irrational is owned by Take Two, not by Ken Levine. TT pulled the plug for financial reasons, because even a multi million selling critically acclaimed game couldn't justify the money they'd sunk into it.
Ken Lavine was free to go and start up a "smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor" whenever he wanted without making Take Two close Irrational and force scores of (or more) people out of work. Even if he wanted to leave I don't believe for a minute that he'd have wanted Irrational to die.
This was a business decision, not a case of KL saing "I fancy a change, and while I'm at it, I'm going to make (somehow?) TT close a successful studio that they own and put all you people out of jobs!"
The vast majority of the folks who made those awesome games aren't going to part of the new Lavine Team.
I wish them all the best, and look forward to whatever they do next, but there's no point pretending that the loss off Irrational isn't a blow.
I guess I disagree. This happens in every industry when a company takes too long and spends too much money making a product (even a successful one). It's unfortunate, but you can't take ~5 years between games.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
Bio1 is one of my all time favorite games. Bio 2..not so much(although now that i think about it 2kmarin is also defunct :/)
Bio Infinite was an okay game i thought when i played it, decent with an alright story, but you can really see why Irrational had to close after it came out and why its not a surprise why they are doing so now.
It was 7 years in the making almost with massive amounts of money pumped into it, and the first trailer they released in 2010 and even the vertical slice they put out in 2011-2012 was nothing close to what the game eventually ended up being. Which was a series of corridors and loading screens and standard fps gameplay only held together by Ken Levine's characters, and even the script you could tell was pulled together pretty quickly in the time before release with all the retcons and supposed coincidences in place to artificially lengthen the story....
All the enemies from the earlier trailers coming out nowhere near what they were supposed to be like, the 4 heavy hitters suddenly turning into very small parts of the game when they were advertised to be actual consistent enemies in many sections. For example, the siren turning into elizabeth's mom who you have to fight 3 times just to pad out the game with nonsense, and the boys of silence being relegated to one small area near the end of the game just to put them in there somehow.
It was a combination of the previous generation hardware holding back their vision i think, as well as the actual vision constantly being in flux and taking away from the project. How many people quit the team in the months leading up to the game's release? Quite a few, and i would not be surprised to see some kind of post mortem of Irrational come out sometime later detailing the development hell that game went through.
Yeah you can't really follow up greatness like Bio1, but its a shame to see the pressure collapse the studio. Them in the months before trying to hire people who worked on games with a meta-critic average higher than 90 speaks volumes of the pressure they were probably under to make a game that surpassed the first one, but they didn't really do it.
Bio Infinite was an okay game i thought when i played it, decent with an alright story, but you can really see why Irrational had to close after it came out and why its not a surprise why they are doing so now.
It was 7 years in the making almost with massive amounts of money pumped into it, and the first trailer they released in 2010 and even the vertical slice they put out in 2011-2012 was nothing close to what the game eventually ended up being. Which was a series of corridors and loading screens and standard fps gameplay only held together by Ken Levine's characters, and even the script you could tell was pulled together pretty quickly in the time before release with all the retcons and supposed coincidences in place to artificially lengthen the story....
All the enemies from the earlier trailers coming out nowhere near what they were supposed to be like, the 4 heavy hitters suddenly turning into very small parts of the game when they were advertised to be actual consistent enemies in many sections. For example, the siren turning into elizabeth's mom who you have to fight 3 times just to pad out the game with nonsense, and the boys of silence being relegated to one small area near the end of the game just to put them in there somehow.
It was a combination of the previous generation hardware holding back their vision i think, as well as the actual vision constantly being in flux and taking away from the project. How many people quit the team in the months leading up to the game's release? Quite a few, and i would not be surprised to see some kind of post mortem of Irrational come out sometime later detailing the development hell that game went through.
Yeah you can't really follow up greatness like Bio1, but its a shame to see the pressure collapse the studio. Them in the months before trying to hire people who worked on games with a meta-critic average higher than 90 speaks volumes of the pressure they were probably under to make a game that surpassed the first one, but they didn't really do it.
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Microsoft are interested in hiring the staff affected by the closure of Irrational Games.
http://www.nowgamer.com/news/228947..._on_irrational_staff_affected_by_closure.html
http://www.nowgamer.com/news/228947..._on_irrational_staff_affected_by_closure.html
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D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Seriously man, read the articles before you post a link with your 'summary'
Oops, I find that changing the headline writing "they are reaching out" kills the shocking, impressive headline, but I will change my post to "are interested in" rather than "are hiring". Semantics, but I shall try to make them proportionate.They're just reaching out according to the tweet. They didn't say if they've actually hired them.
Edit: Done. Not to further misconceptions.Seriously man, read the articles before you post a link with your 'summary'
RenegadeRocks
Legend
Could have never guessed this happening ! Wow, gaming industry is very unpredictable these days.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
The decision to shut it down was of course done due to business reasons, but I don't think you can blame the sales of Infinite. I don't think they went bust. The sales were easily good enough. I do think that Levine leaving is largely behind the reason for shutting it down, well he and the 15 member core team. The grunts can be replaced and Take Two probably has enough people to carry those tasks, some probably will find new jobs within the company. It's not just about selling enough to cover the costs and making profit. It's about what's next, and when the core team wants to do something else, why keep huge amount of grunts on payroll if you have plenty of people anyway. Now I also think this current economic model and reality sucks (big time), but I do believe the decision by Levine and the core team did in fact play a major role here. If Levine and his team really wanted to make another Bioshock with Irrational, I think they could have.
Well if the game really cost $100M to make (pretty skeptical but let's go with it), and considering the average price of the copies sold would be around $20, they'd have to sell 5 million copies just to break even.
If most people bought it on the cheap, or second hand, then that number needs to go up even more.
Personally I played it for free from PS+, and that complicates things even further as I have no idea how much Sony would have paid them to put the game for free on PS+.
My point being... With the assumption that it did cost that much to make, money would have been pretty short indeed. I can see why Levine wants to shrink things down and keep 15 or so members to focus on smaller and potentially more profitable projects.
If most people bought it on the cheap, or second hand, then that number needs to go up even more.
Personally I played it for free from PS+, and that complicates things even further as I have no idea how much Sony would have paid them to put the game for free on PS+.
My point being... With the assumption that it did cost that much to make, money would have been pretty short indeed. I can see why Levine wants to shrink things down and keep 15 or so members to focus on smaller and potentially more profitable projects.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
It was released last March and had done 3.7 million units already on May 13th. Those should have been full price sales.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/405588/bioshock-infinite-sales-pass-37-million/
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/405588/bioshock-infinite-sales-pass-37-million/
scooby_dooby
Legend
Well short of money or not, if you're not entering into full production on a title immediately, you can't justify paying 60+ fulltime salaries each month.
If you take a average salary of around $60k, you're looking at $300,000 / month just to keep things afloat. Likely it's a lot higher of that with lots of senior positions @ a 17yr old company. That puts a lot of pressure on you if you want to enter into an R&D and experimentation phase. Not to mention morale of the 'grunts' will plummet without something to actively work on, so it's better to just let those people move on.
Sounds like Levine just wants to step out of the rat-race a bit, scale back salaries, give him and his team-leads more room for experimentation, and not be rushed into immediately starting another 3yr dev cycle.
A lot of game dev is judging your 'runway', how long you can go before you have to launch something... and in doing this Levine just gave increased the length of his runway by 3-4 times.