People News The Decline of Origin Systems, as seen through the eyes of artist Denis Loubet

[SuicideBunny]

@someone_more_knowledgeable_than_me - What are the longest operating studios that have some kind of continuity (as in people leave and get replaced, but not all at once) and maintain their identity?

team 17

 

[Infinitron]

@someone_more_knowledgeable_than_me - What are the longest operating studios that have some kind of continuity (as in people leave and get replaced, but not all at once) and maintain their identity?

team 17

Hah. That's true. Can't go wrong with Worms.

 

[toro]

@someone_more_knowledgeable_than_me - What are the longest operating studios that have some kind of continuity (as in people leave and get replaced, but not all at once) and maintain their identity?

team 17

Hah. That's true. Can't go wrong with Worms.

But ... but these guys are still around:

 

[Infinitron]

The guys might be around, but the company isn't.

 

[Kane]

Firaxis is another good name. They definitely don't extend much beyond the 5-10 year timeline, though.

even their motto is "games that stand the test of time"

 

[Tytus]

I guess every company that becomes too large for its own purpose has to decline in time. I wonder if Larian and CD Project end up in a similar fashion sometime in the future.

Well CD Projekt RED - not CD Project you potato race traitor - has started showing signs of decline already. Especially with Witcher's 2 gameplay. They abandoned the more traditional gameplay style just so they could gather some console crowd later. Also they invited AngryJoe to their studios. If that isn't a sing of massive decline I don't know what is.

Larian is on the decline too. Just watch their video when they talk about QA department. QA reported that the duck was wrong and Larian did nothing about it. Decline.



A since we are talking about bloated companies that lost their identities. I propose a new thread or something called - Shit developers say. We can start with Bioware:

"PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox console won’t enable as dramatic a graphical leap as the previous console transition did, BioWare art and animation director Neil Thompson believes.Speaking to OXM UK, Thompson said it comes down to economics – the industry can’t afford to ramp up development to meet the new hardware’s potential as it did last time we got new consoles.
“Clearly we still hammer up against the limitations of the hardware on a daily basis and if you push those parameters back, as I’m sure the next-gen will do, we’ll hit them again,” he said.
“I think the main thing is that the industry doesn’t get itself into a corner where it becomes economically unviable to make a game. The last technology iteration caught folks by surprise – especially the number of people you needed and the skillset jump that was required to do the work that people expected.
“In the last generation the perception was that it was going to be a ten times improvement over the previous generation. For the next generation there will be a big leap, but it won’t be as obvious
“People will do things in a cleverer fashion. I think they’ll be better prepared, shall we say – but we can’t see a ten-fold team increase again as the budgets would just be ridiculous. You’d have to sell 20-30 million copies before you broke even. "

Games can't look good because they are too expensive to make Bioware? That's funny because CD Projekt RED makes, a lot better looking games for the fraction of the money and resources. But if you can't afford games anymore, maybe just stop making them, or here's an idea. Start creating games with stylized graphics. They don't have to look realistic and they don't age as bad.

 

[Hobo Elf]

blizzard

This is what I was thinking too. You can see the decline start to set in now (though it probably had its roots as soon as WoW came out and was absurdly successful), but until very recently it still seemed very contiguous with their early work, and certainly they had a reputation that was kind of unrivalled in the industry as a PC exclusive developer who refused to put out bad games.

Firaxis is another good name. They definitely don't extend much beyond the 5-10 year timeline, though.

I wouldn't say the decline came with WoW. It still had the Blizzard touch to it all through vanilla and The Burning Crusade. The decline of WoW and Blizzard began much later with WotLK.

 

[Zeriel]

blizzard

This is what I was thinking too. You can see the decline start to set in now (though it probably had its roots as soon as WoW came out and was absurdly successful), but until very recently it still seemed very contiguous with their early work, and certainly they had a reputation that was kind of unrivalled in the industry as a PC exclusive developer who refused to put out bad games.

Firaxis is another good name. They definitely don't extend much beyond the 5-10 year timeline, though.

I wouldn't say the decline came with WoW. It still had the Blizzard touch to it all through vanilla and The Burning Crusade. The decline of WoW and Blizzard began much later with WotLK.

What I mean by that is any time a new product (in this case they had never done an MMO before) ends up being 99% of your income, it will inevitably do horrible things to your company. Everything else goes by the wayside.