DC Studios falls into a State of Emergency
Montreal based game developer DC Studios recently closed the doors on it's Edinburgh office due to the huge commercial failure of State of Emergency 2.
The 29 person Scotland based office closed it's doors after the sales of SoE2 were substantially below expectations.
DC Studios' primary office in Montreal, employing 55, will remain in standard working order as the company seeks to gain some of it's lost revenue back in other projects.
So, my take on this... First off, it's always sad to see a developer begin a crash. Being in the industry makes you respect the work of others and how hard it can be some times to stay afloat, especially now during the transition years. (The industry lulls between system switches) But I'm baffled as to how DC expected State of Emergency to be a flag ship for them.
The first game (State of Emergency) was utterly horrible, it's primary selling point being that it wore the "Rockstar Seal of Gold". It came out at a time when Rockstar was eyed to the consumer as the edgiest and coolest thing since sliced bread, so their new title trumping even more violence and senseless acts of violence had to be great right?
Secondly who in their right mind would purchase a sequel to a bad game that totes the impressive feature of removing all of the minutely entertaining features of the first. DC tried to push a plot-driven storyline in a license geared towards hysterical (and meaningless) violence. The story was lack luster (read: sucked) and they removed melee combat. (read: whoops)
Well lucky for Rockstar their name brought throngs of people into the stores to purchase their game which reeked of a 1 month dev cycle.
DC was of course not nearly as lucky and in turn they crashed and burned, or is it burning, seeing as how they are still probably on fire? Feh, you get the point.
\\drew
The 29 person Scotland based office closed it's doors after the sales of SoE2 were substantially below expectations.
DC Studios' primary office in Montreal, employing 55, will remain in standard working order as the company seeks to gain some of it's lost revenue back in other projects.
So, my take on this... First off, it's always sad to see a developer begin a crash. Being in the industry makes you respect the work of others and how hard it can be some times to stay afloat, especially now during the transition years. (The industry lulls between system switches) But I'm baffled as to how DC expected State of Emergency to be a flag ship for them.
The first game (State of Emergency) was utterly horrible, it's primary selling point being that it wore the "Rockstar Seal of Gold". It came out at a time when Rockstar was eyed to the consumer as the edgiest and coolest thing since sliced bread, so their new title trumping even more violence and senseless acts of violence had to be great right?
Secondly who in their right mind would purchase a sequel to a bad game that totes the impressive feature of removing all of the minutely entertaining features of the first. DC tried to push a plot-driven storyline in a license geared towards hysterical (and meaningless) violence. The story was lack luster (read: sucked) and they removed melee combat. (read: whoops)
Well lucky for Rockstar their name brought throngs of people into the stores to purchase their game which reeked of a 1 month dev cycle.
DC was of course not nearly as lucky and in turn they crashed and burned, or is it burning, seeing as how they are still probably on fire? Feh, you get the point.
\\drew
posted by Drew at 12:22 PM
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