

Games that no longer support their creators - jayeshsalvi
http://machinestudios.co.uk/viewentry.php?id=45

======
droithomme
This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is
making. No references are provided nor insights into what exactly is meant by
saying they don't support their creators.

Is it a comment about the studios having gone out of business because
subsequent titles were not as popular?

Is it an acknowledgment of the fact most game developers work long hours for
below market rate pay, and receive no royalties for their creations?

Is it a comment that distributors like Steam, or corporate fat cats take all
the money?

No idea.

~~~
dpcan
He just says, here is a list, think about it. Which we did, so, mission
accomplished IMO ;)

All I can think is, if I had the rights to, and assets form a great old game
that many loved, I'd be working my butt off right now to rescript it for
release on mobile app stores. It would be like a second wind of revenue.

Why the Sierra adventure games like kings quest, space quest, and police quest
never came out on wii ware is beyond me. Not to mention iOS. Just look at the
success of grisly manor.

~~~
ido
While that _might_ work with adventure games, a lot of games are simply
impossible to do well on a tiny screen, with an inaccurate finger-on-touch-
screen interface (imagine playing starcraft on an iphone).

~~~
icebraining
Might be doable on an iPad, though. I'd play Theme Hospital on one.

~~~
ido
Right, that one doesn't require precision or tight-timing.

Basically anything turn based or slow is doable.

------
zach
If the point is that there are no residual payments[1] for individual game
creators, this list is ridiculously short. Practically all games ever on a
shelf are in that category, where the individuals worked for hire with only
the hope of short-term bonuses or profit-sharing for successful games.

Instead, this list seems to say that sometimes the corporate entities who
developed the game, and their shareholders, sometimes aren't getting money
anymore for whatever possible success the games get. This doesn't seem to be
riddled with moral complexities as much as business complexity. But I know
this is an "abandonware" [2] apologia and so I'm not expecting this to be
totally serious.

I think individual residual payments are a much more provocative idea. I've
programmed on games on and off this list, and when I was younger I acted in a
few TV shows. I've gotten a couple dollars (literally[3]) in residuals from
the Screen Actors Guild, which is 100% more than for my work on games after
leaving the developer. So hmm, what can I say about this?

First, the economics don't make sense for it right now. Games are like movies
in the pre-TV era, where they earn 90% of all the money they will ever earn in
the 12 months after their release. But I recognize that with emulation that is
becoming somewhat less true.

Second, the project structure doesn't support this. This was actually easier
to do in the studio system when you had more free agency, movies banked
heavily on their highly-visible actors and movies took a few months to film at
most. Major game projects require more creators than ever and are now longer
than ever, so only a few creators have individual influence over the finished
product. So game developers are not in a strong position to get them.

Finally, you can make an argument that a game is an work that encapsulates a
performance of its creators. This is a rational basis for residual payments,
because it's very comparable to acting. This is a promising angle to argue,
but still, this is a very unrealistic possibility. But it was interesting to
think about, right?

[1] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_industr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_\(entertainment_industry\))

[2] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware>

[3] - [http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-
snc1/6620_10281393...](http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-
snc1/6620_102813931789_727716789_2590928_7932573_n.jpg)

~~~
Fargren
This can't possibly be about Abandonware, since software that's still being
sold is not abandonware, and a lot of the games on that list can still be
gotten through legal means, even if the corporations that originally made them
no longer own them or no longer exist.

~~~
potatolicious
A lot of games that once used to be Abandonware are now... not. Thanks to
digital distribution there is now zero cost to selling these titles on Steam,
GOG, or elsewhere. The definition of abandonware has _shrunk_ over time.

In any case, I'm a bit allergic to "abandonware" being sold on Steam. These
titles are sold as if they've been tested and work on modern machines/OSes,
but more often than not there are crippling issues. This is something that has
actually tainted my opinion of Valve - that they would continue to list and
sell these items without any disclaimer, warning, or _anything_.

------
Argorak
I am absolutely not sure what to make of this. A lot of those companies have
sad histories (Looking Glass especially) and went bankrupt or were closed, but
rarely because of piracy. Some examples:

\- Ion Storm built Daikatana (Romero, ____*, you know the history) and Deus Ex
2, 2 huge time- and moneysinks that are widely regarded as failures. Add
Anachronox, which was mediocre at best.

\- Ensemble Studios was closed by Microsoft with no specific reason, most
likely due to a shift of focus, after multiple really successful releases,
piracy or not. Also, Halo Wars didn't get a lot of praise.

\- Core Design is praised for Tomb Raider I and hated for running the series
into the ground release by release. This ended in Angel of Darkness, which was
bundled with some ATI graphics boards (9800) on which it didn't run (!). I
still have an unplayed but not untouched version of this.

\- Kaos Studios made Frontline and Homefront which were... ehm... yes. Okayish
at best.

I could go on. Games is a tough market. Production costs are high and failures
are costly. Companies surviving more than 10 years in the gaming market are
great. So whats the point of this post? Should we start paying rent to
developers that worked on games for dying companies? Should sales of these
games be stopped because the money goes to whatever publisher that still puts
these games out on the shelves? And whats the thing with piracy again?

~~~
gambler
_Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best._

Anachronox was a damn good game. It used non-traditional narrative techniques
and did a fine job of utilizing the diverse set of characters to help the
storytelling. It had great writing and humor, as as well as an interesting
universe with many diverse, interactive areas to explore. The locations were
probably the best part. They were so _dynamic_. When you were on a space
station there were places with displaced gravity to make you feel like you're
_really_ on a space station. When you went to a dock, you could see space
ships coming and leaving. Even now there are very few games that go to that
level of detail, especially on such large scale.

~~~
Argorak
I knew this one was going to bite me :). I meant mediocre in a product-market-
fit way. It definitely had its high-points (and not accidentally), but it also
suffered from the fact that Ion Storm Dallas was already burning when it was
released. The cult following definitely showed that a lot of things were right
about the game.

This was strictly a personal note, I didn't enjoy the game as much as I could
have and still consider it a wasted opportunity for greatness.

~~~
gambler
Ah, that I can agree with. The graphics in particular was quite outdated, even
by the standards of those times.

------
Tim-Boss
Look, these studios/developers had the choice between retaining the copyrights
themselves (thereby securing royalties for the life of sales of that
particular product) leaving distribution and sales up to themselves, or
selling the copyrights to a distributor for a fist full of cash...guess which
option they chose! (protip: its the latter!)

Almost every developer I know who works for a large studio is paid by the hour
for the work they do, not paid in stock, promises of shares of future
royalties or in magic beans!

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people help make one single
(semi-popular) product and expect to live off it for the rest of their
lives...

~~~
petercooper
You might not like this story then. Guy who writes textbook that students
continue to pay big bucks for has built a $30m house from the proceeds:
[http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-
that-m...](http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-that-math-
built) .. Gotta admit, I wouldn't mind being in his position :-)

~~~
mattmanser
School textbooks, probably the _worst_ example you could have picked as a
counter point.

------
moomin
The saddest thing for me is how many great games and companies are on this
list. The following are all games I bought, paid for and loved (one per firm):

    
    
        Thief
        Deus Ex
        Battlezone 2
        Syndicate Wars
        Magic and Mayhem
        Planescape: Torment
        Startopia
        Hostile Waters
    

The only one on this list I didn't play through to the end is Syndicate Wars,
because it's rock hard.

Seriously, how come they don't make games like this anymore? Maybe, sadly, the
answer is that I'm unusual. :(

~~~
teamonkey
Great though that list is, I think a large part nostalgia. There are loads of
great games being made these days but as adults we're more cynical and don't
have the time to immerse ourselves.

~~~
moomin
I quite agree that there are still plenty of great games being made, but there
are very few games like the ones on the list. Hostile Waters and Battlezone
were cracking first person RTSes. Sacrifice is pretty much the only other game
like it, and that's old as the hills as well.

Torment, again, is a game that no-one makes anymore. The storytelling in
something like Mass Effect 2 is excellent, but it's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
The sheer out and out weirdness of some of the story-telling in Torment has
yet to be surpassed.

Deus Ex and Thief/Thief 2 were vastly better than their sequels, and it seems
unlikely anyone will ever make a game quite like Deus Ex again. Even with the
best will in the world, a modern 8 hour game isn't going to have the same
depth as a 20 hour RPG.

------
hythloday
The cop-out "no editorializing _nudge nudge wink wink_ " is a bit
disingenuous.

Even leaving that aside, the list is weird: you can _easily_ argue that LGS
folded because their publishers were incompetent (and therefore as an entity
they "deserved" to survive), but Bullfrog were bought outright by EA--it's
hard to argue that the creators of Dungeon Keeper 2 don't receive any money
when in a legal sense the creators of DK2 are EA, as everyone who worked on it
assigned their copyright to Bullfrog.

Perhaps "no editorial" just means "I'm a bit confused about what I mean"...it
would have been nice to have something a bit more substantive (even if it's a
position the author doesn't believe) so one could understand the point of the
list.

------
tete
It's pretty sad. I had lengthy talks with friends about this. Most of the
games were absolutely awesome, but had bad marketing or had to be completed
under time pressure.

Deus Ex Invisble War and Vampire the Masquarade Bloodlines for example are bot
games that suffered from lack of polishing, performance problems and
incomplete/disabled multilayer support. Both of them have great communities
that still (yes, really) release very patches to fix bugs and enhance
incomplete stuff.

I never got what happened to Startopia. It still is a great game. I think it
suffered from marketing. There have been full shelves, but I guess nobody knew
what it was about. It's a bit like a mix of an RTS and a tycoon game (Theme
Hospital, which sadly is on that list too (and has an awesome open source
engine remake called corsix-th)) like and features a lot of references to
Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, aswell as its humor. It features a good balance
of micro and macro management and incorporates features from multiple genres
without failing. It even has something from Dungeon Keeper, which sadly is
also on this list.

A öpt pf these things could also said about other games, like Populous II,
Magic Carpet or System Shock. These all have been great games. It's sad that
these studios died. I think it is the reason that a lot of people switched to
indie games or completely stopped buying games.

------
barrkel
This is a list of games produced by defunct studios. Whether a business closes
or not may have something to do with piracy... and maybe it doesn't. It's a
fairly large jump to make, but that's the apparently desired implication.

~~~
_delirium
I think the desired implication is the other way around: that these are games
that it's now okay to pirate (according to a certain ethical view), because
buying them wouldn't help the creators anyway.

------
tsotha
I don't see the point. Game developers sold the rights to games, and now they
don't get more money. And?

------
njharman
Very few, only owners founders, developers get "supported" by their creations,
games or other. They are employees, making works for hire.

The idea that copyright is for, or supports creators is the most successful
propaganda purportrated by the rights industry.

------
shinratdr
What about developers that left the company after developing the game, like
the Diablo teams?

------
forgottenpaswrd
I don't know what the author mean by that.

Of course the people that created Tomb Raider are no longer supported!(Quake,
Dune, Deux Ex, Theme Park)

Some of them made millions of profit in the process, that was a good reward.
They don't need to receive rewards because they already did.

