Iron Lore Entertainment: How Not To Die Quietly
A few years back, one of the big pushes I remember seeing on my regular pilgrimages to the gaming stores was Titan Quest. The game seemed decent enough, received decent acclaim and had reasonable sales. I personally did not pick up a copy, but it was not really my thing. That being said, developer Iron Lore recently closed its doors.
Michael Fitch, creative director of THQ, was more than willing to point out all the reasons that caused the downfall of this shooting star: piracy, hardware vendors, audience, and reviews.
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.If even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your God-given right and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave. Whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.
So I understand being upset about piracy, but it's something all PC developers deal with. Blaming it after the fact is kind of a cop out. He also blames that word of mouth advertisement, apparently the game was buggy initially and that really hurt them. A lot of his complaints seem to line up with poor foresight, which kills a lot of game houses. Either way, I'm all for a good rant and this one is no exception.
Issues That Killed Iron Lore Entertainment [IGN]
[via Destructoid]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 4 March 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: death throws, defunct company, iron lore, piracy, pointing fingers
It's funny. I played TitanQuest; I'd just gotten done with Dungeon Siege 2 and wanted some more 'click on things til they explode', and if that included some Patroclus, all the better. So I tried the demo, liked it, and so I pirated the game. And I still liked it... only I had constant crashes due to the mounting software or whatever (I am not terribly familiar with that whole system(teehee, I said mounting)), so I bought the game and it played fine.
The lesson game developers... don't try and make a game that won't work if pirated, make a game that won't work WELL if pirated.