Irrational Games shuts down

    http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-…D100m-to-market


    A large team (200'ish), I figure didn't lose that many folks after the original Bioshock so they probably had over 100 for long while, working on Infinite for 6 years, selling 3.4m. And if that article is right about the marketing then that probably doesn't even come close to break even.


    Still, it does seem pretty insane that the studio just implodes because Levine isn't hot on doing big scale games anymore. Dissolving a studio of that caliber seems nuts, but yeah it probably was sales combined with Levine wanting to step down.

    Quote from Mazy

    http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-…D100m-to-market


    A large team (200'ish), I figure didn't lose that many after the original Bioshock so they probably had over 100 for long while, working on Infinite for 6 years, selling 3.4m. And if that article is right about the marketing then that probably doesn't even come close to break even.


    Still, it does seem pretty insane that the studio just implodes because Levine isn't hot on doing big scale games anymore. Dissolving a studio of that caliber seems nuts, but yeah it probably was sales combined with Levine wanting to step down.


    I knew about the development cycle but I figured it would be a much smaller studio. Like Id Software or something similar. Never had I expected that it housed 200 people. Also, 100 million for marketing a game that has a widely known and very successful predecessor seems a bit excessive to me. Or maybe I'm just naive.

    I'd assume that they've had a fairly large team on Infinite for a long while, not 200 people, but probably roughly the size of the original Bioshock's team. I'm actually also pretty surprised that the full team size ended up at around 200 people, had the impression that even at it's biggest Irrational was a company at just a bit over 100 people, they always seemed to have such a cozy vibe.


    And yeah, like with movies then marketing budgets are ridiculous these days.

    1) I cannot believe they had 200 people full time for that long. It just doesn't add up. You really need full time equivalents for # of months to come up with an average monthly burn.


    2) $100 million in marketing just seems impossible. I've gone through reported media spending data for US and Europe, and while fraught with error, $100 million in worldwide marketing is just not conceivable. In going through Take 2's public filings over the last several quarters I just don't see how this is possible either.


    3) I remember Ken Levine refuting the $200 million dev cost, such as reported here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/the-cos…nfinite-budget/


    However, the game was delayed a lot, and no doubt the total all in cost was probably high but we just don't know exactly how the accounting worked so by some logic one might argue the cost of the game at $200 million. I have never met Ken but I really feel like there is more to this and I am guessing there is a lot more he can't say especially since Take 2 is publicly traded and he's obviously under NDA. It's pretty sad but it does sound like they are at least trying to help the impacted employees.


    Sucks, but I hope good things will come out of this and other game developers looking for quality, experienced people can hire the people let go.

    It sounds more like a personal decision. Maybe he doesn't want to do another 200 Mil $ game along with the constraints and pressure that it brings. If 2K is funding his new project, it doesn't sound exactly like they parted on bad terms. Maybe he just wants to do a smaller project to be more creative. Obviously this will be little consolation to the ones affected at Irrational

    Quote from FrieChamp

    It sounds more like a personal decision. Maybe he doesn't want to do another 200 Mil $ game along with the constraints and pressure that it brings. If 2K is funding his new project, it doesn't sound exactly like they parted on bad terms. Maybe he just wants to do a smaller project to be more creative. Obviously this will be little consolation to the ones affected at Irrational

    Yeah, it's really sad that such an decision costs so many jobs.

    If that's the case, i'd say the team should do a provision of pizzas, sequestrate Ken Levine in the offices, throw banners by the windows "Bioshock infinite killed me", then dance naked around burning computer piles and bring the national press.


    Ok but that's if they don't plan to work in the videogame industry anymore.

    I guess this is one of the interesting side-effects of having 'celebrity' game designers. Who really cares about Lionhead any more since Peter Molyneux left? Would anyone be into Valve if Gabe Newell walked? If Deus Ex: Human Revolution or the Uncharted games had some well-known figure at their helm and he left, would people lose interest in those franchises?


    Perhaps in some ways it's better that studios be allowed to collectively lay claim for something, after all a lot of people built BioShock Infinite and it's not necessarily that big a deal that Levine even left. That is, the studio wouldn't automatically be paralysed and incapable of coming up with great games. It feels to me like Irrational wasn't even given a chance. Of course, maybe it was so badly managed that virtually everything did hinge upon Levine.


    It is nice to have passionate heads in the industry that stand for innovation and amazing ideas. But it seems like it can also be dangerous.

    I think this is a change that we are bound to see happen more in the industry as we shift from large 100+ sized teams into more manageable 15-30 sized teams. There's three reasons why I think this.


    1. Upper Management/Money people are slowly starting to realize that 15-30 really great individuals will accomplish so much more on their own than 15-30 great people who has to manage another 100+. Simply because they reach the good decisions faster and don't waste time prototyping or implementing bad ideas. And on top of that now they don't have to waste time reverting the mess that unskilled laborers usually cause.
    2. With a small team you don't need managers. The moment you go above 25 people you suddenly need managers, and then a manager to manage the managers and all of a sudden you have a hierarchy. I think it was Peter Molyneux who said something like this in a video interview when talking about 22Cans and Godus.
    3. This is basically the structure that Valve is built upon. Valve is basically lots of small teams that work under the same name and share some common goals. This goes back to my first point, but I read somewhere that there's close to a 1000 employees at Riot these days (who created League of Legends), whereas theres 40~50 people working on Dota 2 at valve. And right now it seems like Valve is pushing out 2x the content that Riot does. Why? Because once you're in a meeting with 12 other designers you're not gonna get shit done. Every idea will be put down by someone in that room.
    4. I know I said only three reasons, but here's a fourth smaller one that happened close to home. After Funcom shipped the Secret World (and Age of Conan for that matter) they fired almost all employees. And instead of waiting to be picked up again a lot of those people have now started their own indie companies in and around Oslo. There's literally hundreds of indies in Norway right now. And there's some amazing games that are being made. Two of which were kickstartered. (Dreamfall and Among the sleep) Before Age of Conan was released it was probably closer to 5. At some point there was over 200 people working on Age of Conan. It was in development for 5-6 years. When it released it had voice acting up until level 10 and quests up until level 40. And 2 dungeons with bosses at level 60. Everyone was asking themselves what happened, but I think it's fairly obvious. Throwing money at unskilled laborers wont get the job done. Creating a game is not like working in a factory, even though theres a lot of menial labor involved. I believe that 25-30 experienced people would have made Age of Conan hell of a lot better in half the time for about 1/10th of the cost.


    Even though the games industry is still young, there are a lot of developers who are not anymore and have been there from the start. They remember how fast things were done back when they had small teams.


    But this is not just happening in the games industry. Huge corporations are falling left and right because start ups with 5-25 people come up with better ideas than them. Lets use Android as an example. The first version was developed by a very small team (before they got bought by google). At the same time Nokia was developing its own operating system for phones called Symbian but everyone hated it. Why? Probably because hundreds of people worked on it instead of a small elite group of like minded individuals with a shared goal.

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