No more Black Isle Studios....

[Luvian]

Originally posted by uss: 50 X 1 000 000 = 50 000 000

No companies sell that much games. Look at my stats for Ubisoft. They expect to sell about 2 millions prince of persia, and the game look extremly good, they had lots of publicity, and it's chrismas, so that's really the best conditions they could wish for. I doubt they would have been able to sell much more even without piracy.

[Bahamut]

i am with Harkoliar...

so from what i see in piracy is... because of piracy, their potential consumers are lost. i mean with the numbers shown here, they seem to have no prob EXCEPT to boom their shares...

i love sports... i bought nba live 2003 and recently 2004 without question. if the game is great people would to have it too. sucky games deserved to be pirated

[uss]

Originally posted by Luvian: quote: Originally posted by uss: 50 X 1 000 000 = 50 000 000

No companies sell that much games. Look at my stats for Ubisoft. They expect to sell about 2 millions prince of persia, and the game look extremly good, they had lots of publicity, and it's chrismas, so that's really the best conditions they could wish for. I doubt they would have been able to sell much more even without piracy. [/QUOTE]Ah yes, of course, but I wasn't talking about that - I found the calculator and solved Styhe's dilemma :

Originally posted by Sythe: People we are talking millions here! Multiply 50 dollars by a million. I don't know how big but I know it's a large number.

[ 12-14-2003, 03:31 AM: Message edited by: uss ]

[WOLFGIR]

Piracy is bad, bad games are bad but crappy custom relations are worse.

I agree with Luvian here. I buy all of my games, all to often lately I have been disapointed after awhile with bugs and crappy mistakes that makes some games near unplayable. Some developers do something about it. Se Blizzard, Bioware as good examples. PLayable games that still gets updated.

Black Isle made, "MADE" good games but I never got passed the demo of Lionheart. That game got bad reviews, and played badly in the demo, so no sell. I wouldn't want to waste time and the effort to download it from whatever to get a faulty copy of it anyway, so no piracy act. And if the game was good, I would have bought it to be able to get the patches that is a standarsd procedure now adays for every game.

Also, the new market is streamlining everything, they release two or three car games inthe same month, different developers and releas houses. Competition. The one with the best game wins the crowd. Also many games are developed for both console and PC simultanosly now adays. And lets face it, console style games are best played on consoles. They are bleak copies of games PC users are customed to. Tougher competition and tougher companies that see the big sell as the most important thing will do what? Britney Spear games so to speak. A selling star that sounds the same, looks the same and is so shallow the only difference to it will be the track number or the version of the game.

Someone mentioned HALO here. I will not loose sleep over some kids downloading it for free over the net, this X-box exclusive crap buisness. I will not get near the game at all. They told us fair and square that they don't give a rats ass for us, until we open our wallet big and plentiful for them. Have a nice life, and I hope that it sells wonderfully for the PC to learn the MS that PC is a viable gaming platform, but out of shear anger, I will not touch the damned thing.

If people treats you bad, you treat them bad. Another factor that has made some bad blood over the last years are the faulty products shipped everywhere. CD protection software being unplayable. Pirate copies? Oh works perfectly. See the fault here? Legal paying customars are treated as pirates, gets all the problems and hassle and have to pay for some criminals tendancies. THIS is the worst effect of piracy.Because this created a bad downward cycle of both trust and public relations. The consumer should feel "happy" to be oblieged to spend money on something that is worse then a beta game. Take ToEE, noe there will be no more official patches, no more money for that game to become a real game. Do I like Atari? I spend alot of money on both ToEE and Enter the Matrix, I like dboth games but the frustration of not neing able to play neither ina satisfactory style made shaving with a butterknife in a tornado seem like a sane idea. So pirate software sometimes actually work better then the real thing. Duh? Why make it a better option to wait for the cracked version then the retail version? Developers, make better products and you will sell more games.

It is a shame that BlackIsle had to close down. It is a shame they didn't do good money on their latest releases, but it is a natural effect of what to expect when they have released lately poor games IMHO. IWD2 had serious bugs that lagged down the game to near intolerable speed, CTD's and crap. One or two patches? Did they solve this issue? No!. Some hardcore fans made their own patch to fix that. Who do I want to send my money to? Take a wild guess.

I will feel sorry that Black Isle didn't get the chance to make Fallout 3, but if they had followed their latest trend, I might just have saved some money and some frustratin to take out on the next ATARI game instead.

Finally in the name of piracy, take another good look at the price tag and the shear volume of games out there and take a good loo at the market.
Most "pirates" are teenagers. Statisticly it is so. Most reports will show this. Not that older people are that much better or more legaly attuned, teenagers know more about computers and internet
If the teenagers have like here in Sweden the money to buy one game and one CD every month and no money to go to the cinema's, to a show, a concert or get some clothes now take two wild guesses:
1. Will they download some of the cool things that are marketed to them 24/7 as must haves to be "in" or will they stand in the corner with a perfect conscious?

2. If they had to pay less for all these things, would they then buy more of it and would the company loose more money then? Apparently the industry would loose more money. Or so they say. They have to make up for the piracy by increasing the price tag. Logicly.

Alot of things considering most ins't about BlackIsle really.
I hope the people at Black Isle ends up at good jobs and have a great X-mus, it is a shitty deal to fire people before X-mus. And thoose guys we pay money, so they can do it to some other team.
Wonderful.

[Dreamer128]

More on Black Isle
A former employee reveals more details on the closure.

December 16, 2003 - "Black Isle Studios is dead." So says a source formerly employed by the developer. We've already brought you the initial details based on a post on the Interplay forum, but we've now confirmed that Black Isle now exists only as a brand under the Interplay umbrella. Digital Mayhem, the other development division within Interplay, has also "been dissolved and combined under Interplay Production," according to our source.

The dissolution was prompted by an apparent political "ass-kissing battle" within the separate divisions of Interplay. Black Isle Studios' director quit in frustration, leaving Black Isle unofficially under the management of Digital Mayhem's director. Citing disharmony with the new management, Black Isle Studios appealed to Interplay to adopt a more hands-off approach.
Interplay agreed and the team continued work on Baldur's Gate 3. The title was cancelled after management failed to retain the license for the D&D system, so Black Isle decided to focus development exclusively on Fallout 3. The design was finished, the engine was written, and the work on the maps had begun when Interplay asked for a playable demo of the game.

By Black Isle's account, the demo as delivered was 95% done, including all game functionality but only one finished demo level. (Work on the rest of the levels was approximately halfway complete; all that remained to be done was to populate and script the maps.) The next day Interplay began laying off people at Digital Mayhem. Since the Fallout demo was so polished, employees at Black Isle felt (relatively) secure.

Two weeks later, all but two members of the Fallout team were laid off and the project was cancelled. Interplay apparently believed the game could not be finished by 2004. Interestingly, the two members of the team not laid off were those who were previously working for the head of Digital Mayhem on a separate console title prior to moving to Black Isle Studios.

The financial outlook for Interplay is still a bit grim. Millions of dollars in debt with less than a million in the bank, Interplay's decision to cancel the nearly complete (by Black Isle's estimation) Fallout 3 was followed by a green light for the console games Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2 (a sequel for a game that hasn't even shipped yet) and Exalted (which doesn't yet have an engine).

Interplay still owns the Black Isle Studios brand and employees were told, "Interplay will continue to produce titles. If we feel that a title is worth of the Black Isle Studios' name then it will be released under that brand." Though you may still see new games with Black Isle on the box, given the closing of the studio, no such titles will have actually been developed by Black Isle. Ditto for Digital Mayhem. At this point, Interplay also still owns the Fallout franchise but, given the company's financial outlook, it's doubtful they'll maintain it if prospective buyers start calling.

We'll bring you more details as they surface.

-- Steve Butts

[Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/446/446379p1.html?fromint=1]

Thanks to Arundor on TSR for providing the following article.

[ 12-18-2003, 09:44 AM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

[The Fallen One]

3DO went out of business? [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img] didnt know!!....was wondering why thier website was down tho

[Gnarf]

Sooo... anyone seen this?

[Xen]

Originally posted by Gnarf: Sooo... anyone seen this?

Well i really hope so !

[Gnarf]

Ahwell... wouldn't get my hopes up... http://ps2.ign.com/articles/446/446889p1.html

[Stratos]

Originally posted by johnny: Something good will come forth out of this, it always does. It's Bioware that fell, not the people behind it. Some of them will team up with other talented developers and come up with an unexpected brilliant game. If there were any plans for a BG3, it WILL come out sometime. The team behind it is dead, but not the plan itself.

Actually it was Black Isle Studios and not BioWare that threw in the towel. Black Isle are the ones that made the Fallout games and the Icewind Dale games, while BW are the makers of the BG games, KotOR and NWN.

Aren't some of the people at InXile former BIS employees?