Originally Posted by
tonybsg
A Message From Ken Levine
"I am winding down Irrational Games as you know it. Ill be starting a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor at Take-Two. That is going to mean parting ways with all but about fifteen members of the Irrational team."
Apparently multiple people had told them that it had to sell exponentially more than the previous games to keep the studio open.
This probably isn't overly shocking given the cost of the game.
Originally Posted by Gamasutra
I mean, I hated it. But I might not be a very good journalist. The news that Irrational would effectively close, laying off its staff, leaving Levine to start a new endeavor with just 15 former Irrational members and a flat hierarchy, came as a surprise to me -- and that's even though someone told me it could happen, a year ago.
I didn't report it. I don't report a lot of things people tell me in confidence about what goes on at their jobs. Digging around in dirty laundry and in open wounds is complicated. The value of the story to those who will read it has to be worth the net risk. There's the risk you're dead wrong: you can't just write an article based on what you heard from one friend or one colleague and present it as fact, just because you believe it. People have to be willing to corroborate, and they have to be willing to do it on the record. Otherwise it's not reporting, it's rumor-mongering. It's irresponsible.
No one talks to the games press officially. I wish they did, but I get it. They want to keep their jobs. Let's just say multiple people within a studio were willing to risk their careers to confirm to me that yes, in fact, if their game didn't sell extremely well, like exponentially more than its predecessor or "well" according to a matrix of time and cost investment and desired profit, that their studio would be closed in a year.
What good does it do anyone, the story about the conditional but likely imminent closure? Who does it help and serve? What good does it do to risk my friends' jobs and their confidence to patch together the plausible but potentially biased story about all the extra unfinished or un-implemented content from the wildly over-budget and over-scope game? The story about the high stress, the high turnover, the difficult-to-work-with creative lead?
Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2...ty_laundry.php
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Said in the other thread but from a financial standpoint the writing was on the wall. All those years of development, scarping material,changes up the ass, bringing in Ron to help push it out the door....
Irrational was a money sink. Six years between Bioshock 1 and Infinite....come on now.
As expected when you take nearly 6 years to make a game .
BI is no GTA .
I don't know why everybody keeps blaming Take Two. They gave Irrational enough rope to hang themselves, Take Two wasn't the reason they went massively over their budget and couldn't ship the game out in a timely fashion.
For comparison, in the time it took Irrational to ship Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, a studio like Naughty Dog shipped Uncharted, Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us. And I believe Irrational is a bigger studio, so they would've spent even more money on just those two games.
Pretty crazy but mismanaging projects seems to be how 2K rolls. Closing Irrational rather than fixing the problem is an even bigger sign of management incompetence imo.
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