5 ms·

Games that no longer support their creators

47 points by jayeshsalvi 15y ago

shinratdr 15y ago
What about developers that left the company after developing the game, like the Diablo teams?
Argorak 15y ago
I am absolutely not sure what to make of this. A lot of those companies have sad histories (Looking Glass especially) and went bankrupt or were closed, but rarely because of piracy. Some examples: - Ion Storm built Daikatana (Romero, *, you know the history) and Deus Ex 2, 2 huge time- and moneysinks that are widely regarded as failures. Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best. - Ensemble Studios was closed by Microsoft with no specific reason, most likely due to a shift of focus, after multiple really successful releases, piracy or not. Also, Halo Wars didn't get a lot of praise. - Core Design is praised for Tomb Raider I and hated for running the series into the ground release by release. This ended in Angel of Darkness, which was bundled with some ATI graphics boards (9800) on which it didn't run (!). I still have an unplayed but not untouched version of this. - Kaos Studios made Frontline and Homefront which were... ehm... yes. Okayish at best. I could go on. Games is a tough market. Production costs are high and failures are costly. Companies surviving more than 10 years in the gaming market are great. So whats the point of this post? Should we start paying rent to developers that worked on games for dying companies? Should sales of these games be stopped because the money goes to whatever publisher that still puts these games out on the shelves? And whats the thing with piracy again?
- gambler 15y ago
  Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best. Anachronox was a damn good game. It used non-traditional narrative techniques and did a fine job of utilizing the diverse set of characters to help the storytelling. It had great writing and humor, as as well as an interesting universe with many diverse, interactive areas to explore. The locations were probably the best part. They were so dynamic. When you were on a space station there were places with displaced gravity to make you feel like you're really on a space station. When you went to a dock, you could see space ships coming and leaving. Even now there are very few games that go to that level of detail, especially on such large scale.
  - Argorak 15y ago
    I knew this one was going to bite me :). I meant mediocre in a product-market-fit way. It definitely had its high-points (and not accidentally), but it also suffered from the fact that Ion Storm Dallas was already burning when it was released. The cult following definitely showed that a lot of things were right about the game. This was strictly a personal note, I didn't enjoy the game as much as I could have and still consider it a wasted opportunity for greatness.
    - gambler 15y ago
      Ah, that I can agree with. The graphics in particular was quite outdated, even by the standards of those times.
moomin 15y ago
The saddest thing for me is how many great games and companies are on this list. The following are all games I bought, paid for and loved (one per firm): Thief Deus Ex Battlezone 2 Syndicate Wars Magic and Mayhem Planescape: Torment Startopia Hostile Waters The only one on this list I didn't play through to the end is Syndicate Wars, because it's rock hard. Seriously, how come they don't make games like this anymore? Maybe, sadly, the answer is that I'm unusual. :(
- archangel_one 15y ago
  I guess the standard answer is because games cost more to make now so publishers are less willing to risk that money on doing something adventurous. IMO this is incredibly shortsighted but I suppose I'm not quite their target market any more. Totally sympathise about Syndicate Wars too. One thing I don't miss is that most games now seem to have a better balance of difficulty - I found that one amazingly frustrating and never finished the last few missions without cheating either. Oddly, that's one game I'd love to see a modern version of (not interested in that upcoming FPS which looks to be in name only) - IMO Syndicate Wars was hugely limited by the technology of the time.
- lmm 15y ago
  If the companies that made games like that went bankrupt, that's probably why.
- teamonkey 15y ago
  Great though that list is, I think a large part nostalgia. There are loads of great games being made these days but as adults we're more cynical and don't have the time to immerse ourselves.
  - moomin 15y ago
    I quite agree that there are still plenty of great games being made, but there are very few games like the ones on the list. Hostile Waters and Battlezone were cracking first person RTSes. Sacrifice is pretty much the only other game like it, and that's old as the hills as well. Torment, again, is a game that no-one makes anymore. The storytelling in something like Mass Effect 2 is excellent, but it's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The sheer out and out weirdness of some of the story-telling in Torment has yet to be surpassed. Deus Ex and Thief/Thief 2 were vastly better than their sequels, and it seems unlikely anyone will ever make a game quite like Deus Ex again. Even with the best will in the world, a modern 8 hour game isn't going to have the same depth as a 20 hour RPG.
droithomme 15y ago
This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is making. No references are provided nor insights into what exactly is meant by saying they don't support their creators. Is it a comment about the studios having gone out of business because subsequent titles were not as popular? Is it an acknowledgment of the fact most game developers work long hours for below market rate pay, and receive no royalties for their creations? Is it a comment that distributors like Steam, or corporate fat cats take all the money? No idea.
- teamonkey 15y ago
  I think it's supposed to be a list of games where it's 'fair game' to pirate them because the creators no longer directly receive income from sales. Which is short-sighted and, in at least one case, completely wrong. LA Noire was a long, expensive project headed up by Team Bondi. TB has since folded, mainly due to mismanagement and going crazily over-budget, but they weren't the only people working on it. The project was bought and published by Rockstar/Take Two, who also drafted in their own creators to help finish the game, who didn't get laid off, and sales of LA Noire help to pay for their salaries.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    Thanks! If that is really his point he should state it because I agree with you, and if this is his point, I would like to argue against the claim. But since he doesn't say what it is he is asserting, one can't even argue against it very well because the obvious rebuttal would of course be "Well I never said that." Such a passive aggressive article really has no place here if that's the case!
- gioele 15y ago
  > This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is making. The author explicitly states that the text should be taken as an aseptic catalogue of facts: > Below I present an incomplete list of PC games where the developers no longer receive payment for their creations. I wont offer an editorial, think of it what you will. (emphasis mine)
barrkel 15y ago
This is a list of games produced by defunct studios. Whether a business closes or not may have something to do with piracy... and maybe it doesn't. It's a fairly large jump to make, but that's the apparently desired implication.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I think the desired implication is the other way around: that these are games that it's now okay to pirate (according to a certain ethical view), because buying them wouldn't help the creators anyway.
Tim-Boss 15y ago
Look, these studios/developers had the choice between retaining the copyrights themselves (thereby securing royalties for the life of sales of that particular product) leaving distribution and sales up to themselves, or selling the copyrights to a distributor for a fist full of cash...guess which option they chose! (protip: its the latter!) Almost every developer I know who works for a large studio is paid by the hour for the work they do, not paid in stock, promises of shares of future royalties or in magic beans! I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people help make one single (semi-popular) product and expect to live off it for the rest of their lives...
- petercooper 15y ago
  You might not like this story then. Guy who writes textbook that students continue to pay big bucks for has built a $30m house from the proceeds: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-that-math-built http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-that-m... .. Gotta admit, I wouldn't mind being in his position :-)
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    School textbooks, probably the worst example you could have picked as a counter point.
  - gte910h 15y ago
    You get paid a lot less per hour to write textbooks than games. Not saying that's the only way, but there IS a difference.
- ootachi 15y ago
  But that world you describe is the startup world.
  - Tim-Boss 15y ago
    I'm not saying people shouldn't be rewarded for creating/producing/developing, but anyone spending 40 hours a week for a year (or so) of your life on ONE product should not expect millions in their bank (or at least to receive royalties off it FOREVER!).
zach 15y ago
If the point is that there are no residual payments[1] for individual game creators, this list is ridiculously short. Practically all games ever on a shelf are in that category, where the individuals worked for hire with only the hope of short-term bonuses or profit-sharing for successful games. Instead, this list seems to say that sometimes the corporate entities who developed the game, and their shareholders, sometimes aren't getting money anymore for whatever possible success the games get. This doesn't seem to be riddled with moral complexities as much as business complexity. But I know this is an "abandonware" [2] apologia and so I'm not expecting this to be totally serious. I think individual residual payments are a much more provocative idea. I've programmed on games on and off this list, and when I was younger I acted in a few TV shows. I've gotten a couple dollars (literally[3]) in residuals from the Screen Actors Guild, which is 100% more than for my work on games after leaving the developer. So hmm, what can I say about this? First, the economics don't make sense for it right now. Games are like movies in the pre-TV era, where they earn 90% of all the money they will ever earn in the 12 months after their release. But I recognize that with emulation that is becoming somewhat less true. Second, the project structure doesn't support this. This was actually easier to do in the studio system when you had more free agency, movies banked heavily on their highly-visible actors and movies took a few months to film at most. Major game projects require more creators than ever and are now longer than ever, so only a few creators have individual influence over the finished product. So game developers are not in a strong position to get them. Finally, you can make an argument that a game is an work that encapsulates a performance of its creators. This is a rational basis for residual payments, because it's very comparable to acting. This is a promising angle to argue, but still, this is a very unrealistic possibility. But it was interesting to think about, right? [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_industry) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_industr... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware [3] - http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/6620_102813931789_727716789_2590928_7932573_n.jpg http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/6620_10281393...
- Fargren 15y ago
  This can't possibly be about Abandonware, since software that's still being sold is not abandonware, and a lot of the games on that list can still be gotten through legal means, even if the corporations that originally made them no longer own them or no longer exist.
tsotha 15y ago
I don't see the point. Game developers sold the rights to games, and now they don't get more money. And?
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
I don't know what the author mean by that. Of course the people that created Tomb Raider are no longer supported!(Quake, Dune, Deux Ex, Theme Park) Some of them made millions of profit in the process, that was a good reward. They don't need to receive rewards because they already did.
hythloday 15y ago
The cop-out "no editorializing nudge nudge wink wink" is a bit disingenuous. Even leaving that aside, the list is weird: you can easily argue that LGS folded because their publishers were incompetent (and therefore as an entity they "deserved" to survive), but Bullfrog were bought outright by EA--it's hard to argue that the creators of Dungeon Keeper 2 don't receive any money when in a legal sense the creators of DK2 are EA, as everyone who worked on it assigned their copyright to Bullfrog. Perhaps "no editorial" just means "I'm a bit confused about what I mean"...it would have been nice to have something a bit more substantive (even if it's a position the author doesn't believe) so one could understand the point of the list.
tete 15y ago
It's pretty sad. I had lengthy talks with friends about this. Most of the games were absolutely awesome, but had bad marketing or had to be completed under time pressure. Deus Ex Invisble War and Vampire the Masquarade Bloodlines for example are bot games that suffered from lack of polishing, performance problems and incomplete/disabled multilayer support. Both of them have great communities that still (yes, really) release very patches to fix bugs and enhance incomplete stuff. I never got what happened to Startopia. It still is a great game. I think it suffered from marketing. There have been full shelves, but I guess nobody knew what it was about. It's a bit like a mix of an RTS and a tycoon game (Theme Hospital, which sadly is on that list too (and has an awesome open source engine remake called corsix-th)) like and features a lot of references to Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, aswell as its humor. It features a good balance of micro and macro management and incorporates features from multiple genres without failing. It even has something from Dungeon Keeper, which sadly is also on this list. A öpt pf these things could also said about other games, like Populous II, Magic Carpet or System Shock. These all have been great games. It's sad that these studios died. I think it is the reason that a lot of people switched to indie games or completely stopped buying games.
njharman 15y ago
Very few, only owners founders, developers get "supported" by their creations, games or other. They are employees, making works for hire. The idea that copyright is for, or supports creators is the most successful propaganda purportrated by the rights industry.

47 points by jayeshsalvi 15y ago

What about developers that left the company after developing the game, like the Diablo teams?

I am absolutely not sure what to make of this. A lot of those companies have sad histories (Looking Glass especially) and went bankrupt or were closed, but rarely because of piracy. Some examples: - Ion Storm built Daikatana (Romero, *, you know the history) and Deus Ex 2, 2 huge time- and moneysinks that are widely regarded as failures. Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best. - Ensemble Studios was closed by Microsoft with no specific reason, most likely due to a shift of focus, after multiple really successful releases, piracy or not. Also, Halo Wars didn't get a lot of praise. - Core Design is praised for Tomb Raider I and hated for running the series into the ground release by release. This ended in Angel of Darkness, which was bundled with some ATI graphics boards (9800) on which it didn't run (!). I still have an unplayed but not untouched version of this. - Kaos Studios made Frontline and Homefront which were... ehm... yes. Okayish at best. I could go on. Games is a tough market. Production costs are high and failures are costly. Companies surviving more than 10 years in the gaming market are great. So whats the point of this post? Should we start paying rent to developers that worked on games for dying companies? Should sales of these games be stopped because the money goes to whatever publisher that still puts these games out on the shelves? And whats the thing with piracy again?

gambler 15y ago
Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best. Anachronox was a damn good game. It used non-traditional narrative techniques and did a fine job of utilizing the diverse set of characters to help the storytelling. It had great writing and humor, as as well as an interesting universe with many diverse, interactive areas to explore. The locations were probably the best part. They were so dynamic. When you were on a space station there were places with displaced gravity to make you feel like you're really on a space station. When you went to a dock, you could see space ships coming and leaving. Even now there are very few games that go to that level of detail, especially on such large scale.
- Argorak 15y ago
  I knew this one was going to bite me :). I meant mediocre in a product-market-fit way. It definitely had its high-points (and not accidentally), but it also suffered from the fact that Ion Storm Dallas was already burning when it was released. The cult following definitely showed that a lot of things were right about the game. This was strictly a personal note, I didn't enjoy the game as much as I could have and still consider it a wasted opportunity for greatness.
  - gambler 15y ago
    Ah, that I can agree with. The graphics in particular was quite outdated, even by the standards of those times.

moomin 15y ago

The saddest thing for me is how many great games and companies are on this list. The following are all games I bought, paid for and loved (one per firm): Thief Deus Ex Battlezone 2 Syndicate Wars Magic and Mayhem Planescape: Torment Startopia Hostile Waters The only one on this list I didn't play through to the end is Syndicate Wars, because it's rock hard. Seriously, how come they don't make games like this anymore? Maybe, sadly, the answer is that I'm unusual. :(

archangel_one 15y ago
I guess the standard answer is because games cost more to make now so publishers are less willing to risk that money on doing something adventurous. IMO this is incredibly shortsighted but I suppose I'm not quite their target market any more. Totally sympathise about Syndicate Wars too. One thing I don't miss is that most games now seem to have a better balance of difficulty - I found that one amazingly frustrating and never finished the last few missions without cheating either. Oddly, that's one game I'd love to see a modern version of (not interested in that upcoming FPS which looks to be in name only) - IMO Syndicate Wars was hugely limited by the technology of the time.
lmm 15y ago
If the companies that made games like that went bankrupt, that's probably why.
teamonkey 15y ago
Great though that list is, I think a large part nostalgia. There are loads of great games being made these days but as adults we're more cynical and don't have the time to immerse ourselves.
- moomin 15y ago
  I quite agree that there are still plenty of great games being made, but there are very few games like the ones on the list. Hostile Waters and Battlezone were cracking first person RTSes. Sacrifice is pretty much the only other game like it, and that's old as the hills as well. Torment, again, is a game that no-one makes anymore. The storytelling in something like Mass Effect 2 is excellent, but it's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The sheer out and out weirdness of some of the story-telling in Torment has yet to be surpassed. Deus Ex and Thief/Thief 2 were vastly better than their sequels, and it seems unlikely anyone will ever make a game quite like Deus Ex again. Even with the best will in the world, a modern 8 hour game isn't going to have the same depth as a 20 hour RPG.

droithomme 15y ago

This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is making. No references are provided nor insights into what exactly is meant by saying they don't support their creators. Is it a comment about the studios having gone out of business because subsequent titles were not as popular? Is it an acknowledgment of the fact most game developers work long hours for below market rate pay, and receive no royalties for their creations? Is it a comment that distributors like Steam, or corporate fat cats take all the money? No idea.

teamonkey 15y ago
I think it's supposed to be a list of games where it's 'fair game' to pirate them because the creators no longer directly receive income from sales. Which is short-sighted and, in at least one case, completely wrong. LA Noire was a long, expensive project headed up by Team Bondi. TB has since folded, mainly due to mismanagement and going crazily over-budget, but they weren't the only people working on it. The project was bought and published by Rockstar/Take Two, who also drafted in their own creators to help finish the game, who didn't get laid off, and sales of LA Noire help to pay for their salaries.
- droithomme 15y ago
  Thanks! If that is really his point he should state it because I agree with you, and if this is his point, I would like to argue against the claim. But since he doesn't say what it is he is asserting, one can't even argue against it very well because the obvious rebuttal would of course be "Well I never said that." Such a passive aggressive article really has no place here if that's the case!
gioele 15y ago
> This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is making. The author explicitly states that the text should be taken as an aseptic catalogue of facts: > Below I present an incomplete list of PC games where the developers no longer receive payment for their creations. I wont offer an editorial, think of it what you will. (emphasis mine)

barrkel 15y ago

This is a list of games produced by defunct studios. Whether a business closes or not may have something to do with piracy... and maybe it doesn't. It's a fairly large jump to make, but that's the apparently desired implication.

_delirium 15y ago
I think the desired implication is the other way around: that these are games that it's now okay to pirate (according to a certain ethical view), because buying them wouldn't help the creators anyway.

Tim-Boss 15y ago

Look, these studios/developers had the choice between retaining the copyrights themselves (thereby securing royalties for the life of sales of that particular product) leaving distribution and sales up to themselves, or selling the copyrights to a distributor for a fist full of cash...guess which option they chose! (protip: its the latter!) Almost every developer I know who works for a large studio is paid by the hour for the work they do, not paid in stock, promises of shares of future royalties or in magic beans! I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people help make one single (semi-popular) product and expect to live off it for the rest of their lives...

petercooper 15y ago
You might not like this story then. Guy who writes textbook that students continue to pay big bucks for has built a $30m house from the proceeds: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-that-math-built http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-that-m... .. Gotta admit, I wouldn't mind being in his position :-)
- mattmanser 15y ago
  School textbooks, probably the worst example you could have picked as a counter point.
- gte910h 15y ago
  You get paid a lot less per hour to write textbooks than games. Not saying that's the only way, but there IS a difference.
ootachi 15y ago
But that world you describe is the startup world.
- Tim-Boss 15y ago
  I'm not saying people shouldn't be rewarded for creating/producing/developing, but anyone spending 40 hours a week for a year (or so) of your life on ONE product should not expect millions in their bank (or at least to receive royalties off it FOREVER!).

zach 15y ago

If the point is that there are no residual payments[1] for individual game creators, this list is ridiculously short. Practically all games ever on a shelf are in that category, where the individuals worked for hire with only the hope of short-term bonuses or profit-sharing for successful games. Instead, this list seems to say that sometimes the corporate entities who developed the game, and their shareholders, sometimes aren't getting money anymore for whatever possible success the games get. This doesn't seem to be riddled with moral complexities as much as business complexity. But I know this is an "abandonware" [2] apologia and so I'm not expecting this to be totally serious. I think individual residual payments are a much more provocative idea. I've programmed on games on and off this list, and when I was younger I acted in a few TV shows. I've gotten a couple dollars (literally[3]) in residuals from the Screen Actors Guild, which is 100% more than for my work on games after leaving the developer. So hmm, what can I say about this? First, the economics don't make sense for it right now. Games are like movies in the pre-TV era, where they earn 90% of all the money they will ever earn in the 12 months after their release. But I recognize that with emulation that is becoming somewhat less true. Second, the project structure doesn't support this. This was actually easier to do in the studio system when you had more free agency, movies banked heavily on their highly-visible actors and movies took a few months to film at most. Major game projects require more creators than ever and are now longer than ever, so only a few creators have individual influence over the finished product. So game developers are not in a strong position to get them. Finally, you can make an argument that a game is an work that encapsulates a performance of its creators. This is a rational basis for residual payments, because it's very comparable to acting. This is a promising angle to argue, but still, this is a very unrealistic possibility. But it was interesting to think about, right? [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_industry) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_industr... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware [3] - http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/6620_102813931789_727716789_2590928_7932573_n.jpg http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/6620_10281393...

Fargren 15y ago
This can't possibly be about Abandonware, since software that's still being sold is not abandonware, and a lot of the games on that list can still be gotten through legal means, even if the corporations that originally made them no longer own them or no longer exist.

tsotha 15y ago

I don't see the point. Game developers sold the rights to games, and now they don't get more money. And?

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago

I don't know what the author mean by that. Of course the people that created Tomb Raider are no longer supported!(Quake, Dune, Deux Ex, Theme Park) Some of them made millions of profit in the process, that was a good reward. They don't need to receive rewards because they already did.

hythloday 15y ago

The cop-out "no editorializing nudge nudge wink wink" is a bit disingenuous. Even leaving that aside, the list is weird: you can easily argue that LGS folded because their publishers were incompetent (and therefore as an entity they "deserved" to survive), but Bullfrog were bought outright by EA--it's hard to argue that the creators of Dungeon Keeper 2 don't receive any money when in a legal sense the creators of DK2 are EA, as everyone who worked on it assigned their copyright to Bullfrog. Perhaps "no editorial" just means "I'm a bit confused about what I mean"...it would have been nice to have something a bit more substantive (even if it's a position the author doesn't believe) so one could understand the point of the list.

tete 15y ago

It's pretty sad. I had lengthy talks with friends about this. Most of the games were absolutely awesome, but had bad marketing or had to be completed under time pressure. Deus Ex Invisble War and Vampire the Masquarade Bloodlines for example are bot games that suffered from lack of polishing, performance problems and incomplete/disabled multilayer support. Both of them have great communities that still (yes, really) release very patches to fix bugs and enhance incomplete stuff. I never got what happened to Startopia. It still is a great game. I think it suffered from marketing. There have been full shelves, but I guess nobody knew what it was about. It's a bit like a mix of an RTS and a tycoon game (Theme Hospital, which sadly is on that list too (and has an awesome open source engine remake called corsix-th)) like and features a lot of references to Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, aswell as its humor. It features a good balance of micro and macro management and incorporates features from multiple genres without failing. It even has something from Dungeon Keeper, which sadly is also on this list. A öpt pf these things could also said about other games, like Populous II, Magic Carpet or System Shock. These all have been great games. It's sad that these studios died. I think it is the reason that a lot of people switched to indie games or completely stopped buying games.

njharman 15y ago

Very few, only owners founders, developers get "supported" by their creations, games or other. They are employees, making works for hire. The idea that copyright is for, or supports creators is the most successful propaganda purportrated by the rights industry.