Iron Lore (Titan Quest) closes; Developer vents frustration with PC market.

[brawndolicious]

ILE Closes
Posted on Feb 27 2008

It is with great regret that we must announce that as of close of business Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Iron Lore Entertainment has ceased active game development. Several unrelated events occurred which resulted in Iron Lore being unable to secure funding for its next project.

We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who has helped us in the last seven years – our team who moved mountains to create such great games, our publisher THQ who has been a great partner through three product development cycles, and most of all our customers and fans. We owe all of the success we’ve had to you, and our greatest satisfaction has come from creating games that have given enjoyment to the community.

While Iron Lore will not continue, the talent of the team is embodied in the individuals now available for other opportunities. If you are a developer or publisher looking to hire top-notch experienced developers, please send an email to pchieffo “at” ironlore “dot” com and we will be happy to facilitate recruiting with you.

Iron Lore also owns it’s powerful and flexible engine and tool set, and is actively pursuing licensing opportunities. If you are interested in further information about the technology and licensing options, please contact pchieffo “at” ironlore “dot” com.

http://www.ironlore.com/

On piracy:

Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game.

[...]

So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

[...]

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1.

[...]

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today.

[...]

On PC hardware vendors:

Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a shit what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of shitty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

On the audience:

Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs.

[...]

There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

On the game reviewing press:

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game.

[...]

When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score.

[...]

With friends like that...

Read whole rant here.

Things like this make me think only MMo's will be PC-exclusive 5 years from now.

[demi]

nintenho extremely late with news, crawls back in dirt hut in embarassment

[brawndolicious]

..was there a thread here or something?

[MrAngryFace]

I dunno if the first thread highlighted quotes or anything, this was still news to me

[Eric P]

it was announced but there wasn't this rant, which is an interesting read.

[MrAngryFace]

It IS nice to see what devs REALLY think

[The Fake Shemp]

As evident by stuff like this, the PSP/DS software sales and such - piracy is a big problem in our industry.  We're really going to have to come to some kind of middleground with publishers.  I know folks hate paying sixty hard-earned dollars on shovelware or well marketed crap, but here was a dev that didn't deserve to go under.

[MrAngryFace]

I think game retailers are a bigger problem, honestly. HAW HAW

[The Fake Shemp]

Because everything should be digital distribution?

[Eric P]

i support digital distribution for pc.

last physical copy of a game i bought was witcher

before that, burning crusade

[MrAngryFace]

Because everything should be digital distribution?

Used games are a racket, talk about the fleecing of american am i rite

[Phoenix Dark]

I'm going to buy Titan's Quest. Looks sort of like WoW to me

[Himu]

Fuck digital distribution I like physical copies

I want Titan Quest but my pc sux and I was holding off on buying it for when i get a better pc this year.

[MrAngryFace]

Titan Quest is nothing like WoW, save for the talent trees. Titan Quest + Expansion is the best Diablo Clone ever. Titan Quest without expansion is about as good as Diablo II was before its expansion

[The Fake Shemp]

Used games are a racket, talk about the fleecing of american am i rite

There aren't any used business models for the PC market, so you can't blame GameStop for that.  As for publishers not getting a cut on the console end, that's a legitimate issue.  It's a problem with both GameStop and publishers, though.  But it has no bearing on piracy, which is the real reason Iron Lore went under, the PSP has no games coming out for it and even publishers complain about poor DS sales.

[Phoenix Dark]

Titan Quest is nothing like WoW, save for the talent trees. Titan Quest + Expansion is the best Diablo Clone ever. Titan Quest without expansion is about as good as Diablo II was before its expansion

An even more convincing reason to get it then

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Because everything should be digital distribution?

Used games are a racket, talk about the fleecing of american am i rite

just steal games and play them for free

that's the new EB business model

piracy = try HAZE free for a week

[The Fake Shemp]

 

*Canada only, sorry no real markets apply

[Eel O'Brian]

[Himu]

(Image removed from quote.)

holy crap

[MrAngryFace]

Gamestop is a blight upon the industry

[brawndolicious]

where is that from Eel?  it's awesome.

I think digital distribution at a lower price than the retail copy would be the best solution.

[Eel O'Brian]

I just google-searched "happy pirate"

[brawndolicious]

ah, it seems it might be custom made for a myspace.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

[Eric P]

that's a great read as well

[ToxicAdam]

I highly recommend you non-PC gamers pick up the combo pack of this game for 20 bucks. At that price, this game is incredible and will easily eat up 30-50 hours of your life.


Aside from that, TQ suffers from a horrible name, bad advertising, unknown Devs and a genre that is getting pretty crowded.

Very superficial stuff .. but that's what the casuals (the people who still BUY PC games) pay attention to.

[Van Cruncheon]

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

great read. makes me wonder if there's a real business opportunity making a game or software product targeting psp owners, as opposed to psp pirates, as well. i'd love to see a demographic breakdown of who owns a psp minus the hardcore set.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

great read. makes me wonder if there's a real business opportunity making a game or software product targeting psp owners, as opposed to psp pirates, as well. i'd love to see a demographic breakdown of who owns a psp minus the hardcore set.

I actually got into a big argument/discussion about this with a dev friend a while back. He and I both agreed that if you want to make whatever the fuck game you want, then do it on your own dime. As a designer, the moment you are using somebody else's money to make your game--somebody else's $30 million--you have lost the final say in what the game Is and Isn't about.

But the bigger issue, we agreed, was way too many developers just making what they think is AWESOME and it's SO AWESOME, and nobody ever stops and asks, who is the audience for this? And, would a player actually want to buy this? There's no Distinguishing Characteristics.

A lot of game devs are smart, clever people, but a lot are overgrown manchildren, too.

[Van Cruncheon]

"you would dare argue with a god? give them shotguns, pentagrams, demons, and serbian tits!"