How 2K Killed Irrational Games

https://hackernoon.com/how-2k-killed-irrational-games-a09d8865fd8b#.68bjzkfxw

by MBCook • 10 years ago

351 147 10 years ago

dogma11385• 10 years ago

SWAT 4 didn't sell that well tbh, Tribes Vengeance was pretty bad and Vivendi stopped supporting the game 6 months after it's release, it was primarily a multiplayer only game and received only 1 patch, and Freedom Force was a joke.

It's also should be noted that Ken Levine is somewhat known to be hard to work with, there was a fall out with Vivendi/Sierra and there were issues with employees leaving Irrational after having fights with him (you can find various posts on industry forums) which also lead to Nate Wells (Executive Art Director) leaving Irrational for Naughty Dog.

AdmiralAsshat• 10 years ago

and Freedom Force was a joke

What was wrong with Freedom Force? City of Heroes, it was not, but it was a fun little game. It also had a great modding community before the cease-and-desist orders from Marvel started.

Scored well critically, too: http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/340353-freedom-force/index.ht...

dogma11385• 10 years ago

Scored well yes, so did tribe vengeance (was 80-85%) and SWAT 4 doesn't mean they were a success.

P.S.

The link is for the original game, FF vs the 3rd Reich was released in 2005.

dleslie• 10 years ago

Scored well, but of the few people I know who owned it no one finished more than a few levels. It lacked a compelling goo, for me.

stryk• 10 years ago

I agree. It was a great VIDEOGAME. Bleeding edge graphics -- nope, but it made up for it in spades with good, fun gameplay. Reminded me (in substance rather than style) of a PC-equivalent to a first-party Nintendo game -- not everything needs to be a sweeping epic of action movie sizzle, or super dramatic story telling. Call me old fashioned, but sometimes I like playing videogames that are games.

MrZongle22• 10 years ago

I agree about Tribes:Vengeance; a pox on whoever decided the game needed a "prequel" that focused on a single-player mode and ignored all the aspects of the previous two games that made them so great. That entire franchise has suffered since it left the hands of Dynamix.

I can't get on board with you regarding Freedom Force, though. While some of the levels were a bit tedious, the character customization and feel of the game was superb. I can't think of another superhero game since (at least, outside of the MMO realm) that allows you that degree of freedom (no pun intended).

FF was a decade too early; had it come out in 2012 it could have ridden the Avengers wave.

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

ugg, how did this make it onto the front page of HN. It's been floating around the internet for a few days.

I worked at Irrational Games / 2K Australia from Freedom Force right up until shipping Bioshock 2. I was a team lead, producer, and even ran the Australian office for about year before I left to make Neptune's Pride.

To me there is nothing really controversial in this article. Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

MBCook• 10 years ago

I just saw it tonight on Twitter and thought it was interesting. I know nothing in it is terribly unique compared to what other studios have gone through, but I still thought it painted an interesting picture of the inside of the industry and what happens to the individual parts that make up the mega-studios we're all used to.

This person is obviously unhappy, but I'm not suggesting there is a major scandal here.

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

haha, yeah, I guess in my mind there were major scandals, but none of them are in the article. ;)

andrewflnr• 10 years ago

I thought it was interesting, too, for the same reasons. I'm glad it made the front page.

doppp• 10 years ago

Yeah, something has been up with HN recently. I posted the original article 2 days ago [0]. It got many upvotes but it didn't show up on the front page and there were no comments.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818109

iamcreasy• 10 years ago

Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

That statement is very generic. Could you please elaborate on this?

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

I can't speak for anybody else, but I was super passionate about my job and the team at 2K Australia, but I didn't enjoy working with my bosses. I found myself arguing with them all the time and felt that I wasn't able to do my job properly. I was burnt out. We argued about what should be in the games, and who should do what and when. There were tussles for creative control and lots and lots of political maneuvering. I wasn't making games anymore.

Rather than stay and do a bad job, I decided to leave and let others step up and have a go.

Glad I did becuase I rediscovered my passion for games and had some success in Neptune's Pride.

voltagex_2• 10 years ago

I wondered what happened to 2K Australia - mainly the office in Canberra was right up the street from my office so it was often in my mind.

I'd love to buy you a beer and have a chat at some point. Do you go to the monthly Pizza and Pixels [1] events?

Looks like they've moved it to a location that's inaccessible for me, but I'll work something out.

1: http://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Canberra-Gamedevs/

tmn0072• 10 years ago

I think it is closed now.

I worked at an isp which serviced their CBR office with a 128k isdn then upgraded to a "2 mbit" PAPL link (a niche product where you used 2 or 4 pairs of directly connected copper which bypassed the exchange).

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

Yes, next month its out at the AIE. I should be there, I want to playtest my next game. Would love you to come and give it a try.

toast76• 10 years ago

Jay hasn't done sufficient self promotion here. Neptune's Pride 2 is one of my favourite multiplayer games ever. It's a turn based "board game", somewhat akin to Risk, that can take weeks to complete.

If you work in a team you must play it. It is guaranteed to end in tears (In a hopefully good way). https://np.ironhelmet.com/#landing

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

Thanks Toast! You rock!

aerique• 10 years ago

Why had I not heard of this game before?

I used to love playing VGA Planets (and Stars!) is this in any way an evolution of that genre?

jdowner• 10 years ago

It also sounds like it was written by someone who was not actually there. Most of the content in the article is old news and there are no real personal insights that ring true. E.g. the notion that the team was ok with changing the name from "irrational games" is totally inaccurate; it was a source of tremendous tension between the dev team (at least in Boston) and 2K.

savanaly• 10 years ago

It's hard to notice or care about the fortunes of great, big, but faceless companies, and indeed I never paid attention to all these studios getting renamed and shut down. But it's eay to notice a single individual, and in this case Ken Levine has been on my radar since Bioshock as I recognized he was the one turning out video game story after video game story that could actually hold a candle to stories in other mediums.

Thus, I heard about the termination of his studio (or scaling his team back to ~15 people-- whatever) with dismay and utter confusion. As far as I knew, he made successful game after successful game, culminating in his whole team getting canned. So that's why I was interested in the story linked above, truthful that it is or not.

mnarayan01• 10 years ago

The article seems to be more lamenting the decision to shut down 2K Australia, given that (from the author's perspective) it was still a productive studio. It's far from a finely-tuned, hard-hitting, ground-breaking treatise on the topic, but "how did this make it onto the front page of HN" seems extreme. If you know of a better essay on the topic of "What happened to 2K Australia?" or "What happened to Borderlands?" I'd love to see it.

I realize that things like:

People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

and

Ken Levine got tired of it.

might well tell the whole story...but I guess it leaves me wanting more (particularly since you imply that there was more).

SadWebDeveloper• 10 years ago

Thanks for making Bioshock 2, i actually enjoyed playing that game since it felt (to me at least) that it was more story-rich than the original game.

fuqted• 10 years ago

From the comments:

"...Now to correct one thing, what keeps 2k and Take 2 afloat is Rockstar Games. They produce multimillion dollar games that go on to produce over 700 million dollars from their online mode alone. Their games are the top sellers in their years and even decades. Firaxis Games as of now is a failure of a studio. Years back yes they did develop the wildly successful Civilization 5 which went on to sell over 9 million units and Xcom Enemy Unknown that went on to sell over 3.4 million units. [1] Then they developed Beyond Earth which tanked at 1.4 million and Xcom 2 at .8 million, a game so bad by even it’s supporters admission it needs mods to be playable. Civlization VI is off to a rough start and will probably match Beyond Earth. It hasn’t even broken its first million yet.

Given how poorly they are doing, my money on the next studio closure is going to be them if they are not overhauled instead. I have no clue how their capacity to develop has declined so fiercely but sadly it has. On to your question as to how a game can sell 1.7 million units and not be profitable. I’m going to break this down for you, on console sales the publisher only gets on average $27 for every $60 sold. Digital is more profitable at 70% of total sales. For that 1.7 it turned out $45.9 million, give or take a few million. After development and marketing the fact it sold significantly less than Borderlands 2 is why it is considered a failure. You sold 14% of what Borderlands 2 did.

Worse and I am going to give you the consumers perspective on this, the game is god awful. For starters it story is loaded with virtue signaling, but that’s only a minor annoyance. What truly cans it is the fact it is either the Pre Sequel is canon or 2 and the books are canon. That’s how atrociously written the presequel was. Even the voice actor of Handsome jack sounded miserable spewing out those out of character lines. The game was received so poorly that within months it was being bundled with Borderlands 2 to desperately sell units.

While I understand that development on The bureau wasn’t your fault it also was atrocious. I must say I loved their original version of the game that was first shown off. The final red flag for the games low quality should have been the YOLO trailer, but sadly I still purchased it, much to my regret.

Autralias other projects aren’t exactly well recieved. At best they are controversial, Bioshock 2 is hated by half the community at least, CodShock was an embarassment that alienated the entire original audience for the game and came with a story only the greatest of idiots thought was intelligent that ultimately damage the continuity of any future Bioshock games going forward in the manner of public perception. It sold well on the hype of Bioshock in the Sky, instead it was Call of Duty with color. I understand that people put a lot of passion and work into those games, but that doesn’t make them by default good or profitable.

Thanks for giving us insights into what transpired though. Even if they are through tinted lenses it is always great to see insights into what transpires behind closed doors inside the industry."

ben0x539• 10 years ago

"virtue signalling" is the politically correct way to say "political correctness" these days, right?

adiabatty• 10 years ago

Not really.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Jweb_Guru• 10 years ago

Pretty much. That comment is pretty dumb (and clearly not written by an insider), so I'd like to say I'm not sure why it's on this site.

bitwize4• 10 years ago

Just the opposite. The sort of person who straightfacedly uses the term "virtue signalling" is also likely to rail about how the SJWs are ruining civilization.

partycoder3• 10 years ago

I never liked the tile system from Civ 5. Unpopular opinion, but this is what I think.

animal531• 10 years ago

I'm a huge Alpha Centauri fan, and have pretty much disliked Civ from Civ 4 onward.

AC and Civ up to 3: It felt to me like there were always multiple paths to victory, allowing me to do strange and crazy strategies that I enjoyed.

Civ 4: Felt as if they made it into a turn based RTS, it became too rigid and build-ordery.

Civ 5: I agree with you on the tiles, it felt very limiting and difficult to move units.

Beyond Earth: What a joke. I think I played it for 1-2 evenings before I gave up.

Civ 6: I'm not even going to bother.

gspetr4• 10 years ago

No surprise that XCOM 2 is a disaster.

The game runs horribly. Loading times are literally 10x+ more than that of it's predecessor, on SSD.

They've patched it since, but it is still bad. And last patch was June 30.

rospaya• 10 years ago

Bioshock Infinite is one of the most acclaimed games in the last few years and only two from 2013 are rated better. It has a 94% Metacritic rating and was declared a 10/10 game by dozens of reviewers.

No idea about profitability, but it was a great game.

Kurimo3• 10 years ago

People retrospectively don't like it because it didn't live up to some of what the trailers promised (in terms of how large or open the city was) and the dimension tearing mechanic robbed it of weight for some ("If this is just one version of how things play out then what's the point?" Missing, of course, that THAT is the point).

Personally, I really enjoyed Bioshock Infinite including the so-called "Twist" ending. I did not see it as a Twist since they very obviously foreshadowed it. But to each their own.

shard972• 10 years ago

Why is it so hard to run a tech company in Australia? Some days it feels like I either need to start my own company to find out or just leave this country to find job with a career.

girvo• 10 years ago

Why is it so hard to run a tech company in Australia

A number of reasons, I think. Our terrible internet, the lack of support from the state governments (and the lack of _understanding_ of our industry for those governments that are trying; see: QLD), an investor base that (after spending the last 7 years navigating it) appear to be desperately afraid of B2C start-ups, and don't quite get B2B start-ups either... the list goes on, really.

Not going to stop me trying, though!

jfoutz• 10 years ago

You'd think Atlassian leaving and being really vocal about it would have helped. 6 billion dollar company now.

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

What makes you think it's any harder than anywhere else?

Part of 2K Australia's problem was that we grew very big when the Aussie dollar was low, then when it came back up we were a very expensive studio. We had very little turnover and a lot of well paid, senior developers made us look even more expensive per head.

We were working closely with 2K China who were a lot cheaper per head.

femto• 10 years ago

Given this direct experience, in this instance do you personally think that the well paid senior developers provided value compared to the cheaper her head talent?

taneq2• 10 years ago

IMO the main issue is the very strong resources sector driving up salaries (there are a lot of tech companies servicing the mining industry), coupled with the comparatively low population meaning that the overall market is pretty small.

chris_wot5• 10 years ago

The resources sector is tanking, and very badly.

catmanjan• 10 years ago

You have direct access to a much smaller market, there are only just over 20 million people here.

hackits• 10 years ago

To put it into perspective Australia's population is 23.13 million. Most people live near or around the main capital cities. Flipping the coin on the other side when looking at the population for some American States/districts California (38 million), Texas (26 Million), Florida (19 Million) it's pretty easy to see why Aussie market is so much smaller.

flashman• 10 years ago

Specifically a game development company, you mean? Well, I think video game income is quite a speculative proposition, capital city cost of living is high (and that's where the talent wants to live, you'll have trouble attracting people to Dubbo), and therefore it's hard to pay people a living wage or keep a company alive.

Very similar to the Australian film industry, really.

programminggeek• 10 years ago

NOTE: Don't make the company you work for your life. It will end in sadness.

jay_kyburz11• 10 years ago

Terrible advice.

The highs and lows are what make life intresting. Be passionate about what you do and give it your all. Make it personal. Give a damn. It's the only way to live.

toomuchtodo2• 10 years ago

Terrible advice!

Unless you have equity (and even then it must be a large amount), you are a cog that can be replaced at will, trading X hours per week of your life that you won't ever get back for your currency of choice.

Give a damn and make it personal: about your growth, your compensation, and your career path. If you want passion, work towards financial security and then work on something fulfilling, where you control your destiny.

No one is looking out for you but you.

Source: 15 years in tech, also watching a friend lose everything (EDIT: friends from 80+ hour weeks, job and house when let go) when High Voltage Studios (a game studio in Illinois) started its decent into failure

smrtinsert• 10 years ago

Sounds like someone fell for the passionate bit. Translation 'work really cheap for me and really hard'. They take the passion straight to the bank and give you a pat on the back, trust me.

op00to3• 10 years ago

Companies will fire you at the first convienent opportunity. There is no such thing as loyalty for an employer. Don't take it personal, live your life.

debaserab27• 10 years ago

What does that have to do with making the company you work for your life?

If your passion is hinged on your company's success there's a decent chance that is going to end poorly for you.

Indeed - be passionate about the work you do - but that may or may not have anything to do with the company that you work for.

I've had jobs where I very much enjoy and am passionate about the work I do but did not necessarily buy into the company culture or vision. These companies were instrumental in my career growth but ultimately not the right fit for me, but I have absolutely no regrets about my time with them.

On the flip side, I still know plenty of "koolaid drinkers" that are still at these companies (or have been laid off by them) and I can objectively say that many of their careers have not progressed since I was there. I know: different strokes for different folks. Maybe they value stability over career progress and that's okay.

Let's just not pretend that the best way to grow a person's career is to attach yourself to someone else's company that doesn't necessarily have your best interest in mind.

enneff• 10 years ago

In my experience, the road to personal satisfaction at a corporation is to take pride in doing a great job, taking each day at a time. If at the end of each day you can say you did quality work of which you are proud, then you're doing it right. If, at the end of all that, you are contributing to something of substance (such as a hit game, or a product that gets a lot of users), then that's just the cherry on top.

If you pin your hopes and dreams on the actions of executives above your pay grade, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Don't get emotionally invested in stuff that you can't control.

When you're hired to do a job, do it as well as you can, and then go home with the emotional energy to spend on your friends/family/hobbies.

shruubi• 10 years ago

I disagree. At the end of the day you are nothing but a piece of meat to your employer that they are obligated to pay. Almost every employer is actively working to get as much work out of you for as little cost to them as possible. That is to say, there are those employers who aren't like this, but they are few and far between and are the exception, not the rule.

HelloNurse• 10 years ago

If you aren't a partner, "making it personal" at work means quitting when you have had enough. "Passionate" co-workers quit earlier, without another job ready and/or with some kind of unpleasant showdown.

dogma11385• 10 years ago

You can't work in a creative industry without emotional investment.

Developers are not drones, especially game developers you aren't writing tax software.

shmerl11• 10 years ago

Still waiting for Bioshock Infinite to come out on GOG (or any Bioshock games for that matter). But 2K aren't interested in more sales it seems.

gruez• 10 years ago

How much extra sales can you really get from DRM-free sales years after the fact?

shmerl11• 10 years ago

Any amount means profit. Is there any sensible reason not to release them DRM-free? Besides psychological / political ones (like 2K being scared of DRM-free conceptually), I don't see any reasons.

partycoder3• 10 years ago

Usually acquired studios pay for the mistakes of their parent companies. I don't know to which point it is a good idea to acquire a profitable company for millions of dollars, to set it for failure and then close it.

gspetr4• 10 years ago

Funny how the article mentions Bureau as the point where it all came crashing down.

I actually quite liked the game. The problem I think is that there was a market mismatch with that title.

XCOM 2012 caught a lot of flak for it being too different from the 1994 original. Only brilliant execution made it possible for it to succeed.

An XCOM TPS (Which is what Bureau is, to a degree) is just too much of a stretch, most of XCOM's audience are not that open minded unfortunately.

I believe that ultimately the aforementioned market mismatch was too difficult to overcome, even without the publisher's interference and micromanagement.

eksemplar• 10 years ago

I grew up with the original x-com and terror from the deep, and regularly play them to this day. I personally didn't mind the FPS/third person shooter bit, and I think it even felt a lot more "under invasion" and scary than the x-com remakes.

So I actually liked it, but because it was so poorly made technically I never bothered to Finnish it. Maybe I'll force my way through it one day, because of the story and atmosphere, but it's frankly one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever tried.

gspetr4• 10 years ago

The latter part of the game is tedious but in the end I think it was worth it as I was pleasantly surprised by the ending. Did not see that one coming.

violentvinyl• 10 years ago

So I actually liked it, but because it was so poorly made technically I never bothered to Finnish it. Maybe I'll force my way through it one day, because of the story and atmosphere, but it's frankly one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever tried.

I'm a bit late to the party here, but this is where "Let's Play" videos on YouTube are really great. You can get all the bits you want without any of the frustrating gameplay. The trick is just to find a YouTuber you can stand for the duration of the video (Nerd Cubed is one of my favourites, but he would be an acquired taste).

Sacho• 10 years ago

XCOM 2012 caught a lot of flak for it being too different from the 1994 original. Only brilliant execution made it possible for it to succeed.

I believe XCOM 2012 got a lot of flak prior to its release because 2K at first announced an FPS game called "XCOM". After lots of delays and a pretty cool reception from gaming press and fans, there was an announcement from Firaxis that they were also making an XCOM game, this time a TBS. The TBS, when released, got almost universal praise, and sports a heft awards list.

Matthias247• 10 years ago

I also liked the Bureau, but it took a while to do so. The start was a little bit slow and hard, so I guess if you didn't forced yourself to keep on playing it might have made a far worse impression than it actually was.

gilgoomesh2• 10 years ago

This article quotes sales numbers in the millions and asserts that this means games like Bioshock Infinite were "hugely profitable".

That's not necessarily true.

Bioshock Infinite in particular was "disappointing" compared to projections:

http://www.p4rgaming.com/take-two-in-retrospect-ken-levines-...

2K posted losses in the hundreds of millions in the year leading up to Bioshock Infinite's release (Bioshock would have been a significant percentage of that) and continued to lose money in the year of its release:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-13-bioshock-in...

People often ignore that these games may cost over a $100 million to develop and the same again to market (Bioshock Infinite ads were everywhere). Selling 5 million copies might only net $100 million back again (after taxes and other distribution costs).

throwwit• 10 years ago

Has the games industry adopted Hollywood Accounting? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

pcr0• 10 years ago

I'd say it qualifies as Hollywood Accounting if the revenue exceeds the budget and yet the project is still deemed unprofitable. I haven't really heard of this in the games industry.

Typical Hollywood Accounting is when companies make up overhead figures. But in the games industry the costs seem too transparent to be able to get away with posting fictious overheads as most of the cost is dominated by marketing and salaries.

onli• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's a parody.

The market has only a specific size. If you sell as many games as the most successful games ever you really can't expect more. Besides, Bioshock Infinite had no special message, it was utterly trivial in that respect. The article is a joke on both fronts: That the sales projections must have been overblown since they indeed regarded the millions of copies sold as disappointing, and that they thought the story with its twist was great writing.

gilgoomesh2• 10 years ago

Oops, you're right. In my haste, I really did link to a parody piece. Very embarassing for me.

I was trying to illustrate the point that Bioshock Infinite's early sales were disappointing. Early projections had 2K selling 3 million copies in the first month:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-06-bioshock-in...

But it actually sold less than a million:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/npd-bioshock-infinite-march...

and only hit 3.7 million after 3 months.

HOWEVER... Don't cry a river for 2K. Bioshock Infinite eventually sold 11 million copies, becoming the biggest Bioshock game:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-01-bioshock-in...

EugeneOZ• 10 years ago

Very strange conclusions. Was BioShock Infinite the only game they were developing in that period? Maybe some other development was too expensive. Without all numbers it's quite strange to make such conclusions.

lazyjones• 10 years ago

A minor issue: Borderlands 2 sold 12 million copies (as of 2015). Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel was quite disappointing compared to it (both sales and reviews) and it seems to be mostly based on Borderland 2's code. So at least part of its short development time and small team can be attributed to it not having been written from scratch.

Thimothy• 10 years ago

Yeah. I've been a fan of the Borderlands franchise since the first game and I couldn't believe the guy had the courage of pointing to the pre-sequel as a success. It felt over-extended, and it should have been cut to a third, at most, and sold as a DLC for Borderlands 2.

While the Borderlands 2 and most its DLCs have been really fun and great value for the money, the pre-sequel has left me wary of the 2k shenanigans around the franchise. Won't make the mistake of pre-ordering again.

yen223• 10 years ago

Starting a studio in Canberra seems like a peculiar choice. Canberra doesn't have the population, nor the standards of living needed to attract tech talent. It isn't even a cheap city to live in.

Pica_soO4• 10 years ago

Hipster on the faultline Hills, you pay so much for so little, at least you can look down on the rest of us, whose existence is worthless and brittle.

chris_wot5• 10 years ago

I'm sure they can score a nice, well paid Federal Government job if games development doesn't work out.

NumberCruncher• 10 years ago

> the team was so huge and unwieldy that he (Ken) wanted to go back to basics and build a game with a skeleton crew like in the old days

That happens not only in the gaming industry. An approach that works on the small scale may not work on the large scale. If you are small you are forced to take care about your product, customers and employees (maybe not in this order). If you are at a big corp you have to deal with people who only care about company politics and the ego-game, even if you do not care about these things.

Pica_soO4• 10 years ago

I m trying to see the other side of this whole affair. Usually buisness-leaders, expect a royal household to form around them, who is rewarded on perceived loyalty.

Now creative personal, can be "unsettling" from that perspective, it might be not that extreme in the video games industry as on the theater-stage, but from the CEO-medieval perspective, the constant fluctuation of signals might seem like betrayal and back-stabbing.

Reaction would be the exactly wrong approach- getting more involved and keeping a tighter control on everything, resulting in content, where the more "extreme" fluctuating personal is leashed. Now the resulting product would miss the extremes, which is exactly what attracts the audience in the first place.

alias_neo• 10 years ago

As much as I love the Bioshock series, I take all of the figures with a pinch of salt considering I, presumably not alone in this, own at least 3 copies of each on various platforms. I'm also about to buy the remastered for PC, just because.

The sad part is that the real people who made these great games will see none of this continued income.

ebbv• 10 years ago

Why would that make you take the numbers with a pinch of salt? It doesn't matter that you bought 3 copies, they sold 3 copies. The numbers are still accurate for copies sold, they aren't claiming active players or something, there's no subscription fees here.

Paul_S• 10 years ago

List of studios bought by ea. Orange ones are the ones they closed down officially but a lot of them exist only in name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...

Buying a studio 9/10 is the end of its existence in any meaningful way.

SXX• 10 years ago

Large publishers like EA and Ubisoft always operated differently compared to other companies. Smaller companies usually just hire contractors or use 3rd party companies to work on their projects since they can't afford to employ someone to work on concept art, audio or voice over full time.

Large publishers able to keep employees even if they have months between different projects. Still they move people around their subsidiaries and projects a lot since in game development most of staff only work on certain part of project for limited time.

So closing isn't always mean someone was fired at all and in same time any acquired studio might be soon only exist on paper since all people might be working in different studios on different projects.

skizm• 10 years ago

This was written 4 days ago and says Bioshock Infinite sold 4.3 million units, yet the Wikipedia page says it has sold 11 million copies. Where is the disconnect? Seems like a huge discrepancy.

Is "units" normalized to full price or something where "copies" just total games sold even at sale price? That is the only guess I could come up with.

Kurimo3• 10 years ago

The number cited in the article is probably limited to a certain release-based window.

How 2K Killed Irrational Games

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