Another Studio gone..... Propaganda Games
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No official press release yet... but through the chain has come this info.
Propaganda games closed today.
I wish everyone who was involved a fast rebound from this. Sorry guys.
Propaganda games closed today.
I wish everyone who was involved a fast rebound from this. Sorry guys.
Replies
Unfortunately I see Radical following the same pattern.
Sounds more and more like the Vancouver Games Industry is going the way of the dodo. I hope Relic comes out of this aftermath unscathed, they're a pretty kickass group of developers.
Still... it is the season for pruning as places look at their figures from last year and set a budget for next. We'll probably see a few more studios go under or drop people for the next few weeks, then it will probably even out and places will slowly start hiring again as their projects roll along and grow.
It will be interesting to see what they do moving forward. The last I heard was that Disney was looking to get back into games and to grow Disney Interactive.
I'm just saying that it might not be all doom and gloom, it might be that there are more profitable ways for them to operate and they're shuffling things around... maybe...
Ever since the Ubisoft Toronto push, provincial government has been trying to get tax breaks to bring more game studios to come here.
"The move seems to reflect Disney's new direction of social and mobile development, which began with a statement to press last November that the corporation would be putting less money into console development in order to maximise profit.
"We've seen a pretty big shift in games from console to what I'll call multiplatform, everything from mobile apps to social networking games, and by putting John Pleasants in to run games, not only will be the focus on turning those businesses into profitability, but diversifying our presence in the business," said Bob Iger, Disney CEO in November."
Pretty much this. Disney purchased/Started a bunch of developers over the past few years to really try and make an impact in the game market. But with the purchase of playdom (for $763 million) by Disney they changed their whole focus. Instead of big console games they are going with mobile/social.
The Toy Story 3 game cost a TON to make, and had over 80% on Metacritic, and was by all means considered a HUGE critical success.... and the sales have been a bit of a flop. Huge open world sandbox game with a high degree of polish that hasn't even broken 700k sales.
Epic Mickey was also another DI game that failed to deliver, despite the involvement of a high profile developer in Warren Spectre.
And if you log into The Chaos Engine, not a single person seemed to have anything nice to say about the Creative Director at propoganda, or his decision to hire a roster of designers heavily hired from EA sports.
They tried making an FPS in Turok, using nothing but designers that only had experience in designing league systems and player stats for various EA sports games, and it seemed NOBODY on the design team had any experience with making a FPS.
Sorry for venting, but the suits are the 'predictable' part in this.
It was creative management that doomed them to begin with.
5th best selling game of the holiday season. Which is saying something for a Wii only game.
The expectations internally were VERY high for Toy Story 3 (considering the successes of various other HUGE movie releases). They dumped a BOATLOAD of money into internal development of Toy Story 3, just to have it become a fiscal disaster.
I believe Disney is now starting to forget about developing high quality products, and is already entertaining 3rd party developers for upcoming movie liscences, who can make it for the cheapest...
...and have a proven track record of shipping on time, under the most ridiculous schedules.
But you will never hear about a new studio opening.
That was my last project there. Can't comment though.