Irrational Games being shut down

ShakyJake

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Infinite left a sour taste in my mouth so I honestly do not care about Irrational or Mr. Levine. As for those losing their jobs -- if they are talented they'll have no problems finding new ones.
 

Alex

Still a Music Elitist
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What's wrong with Randy Pitchford? I like the Borderlands games a lot.
 

Vaclav

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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I believe they're using it as a jab at Aliens: Colonial Marines... which was something a defunct studio handed off to them and they "finished nicely".
 

Vorph

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Kind of the opposite actually. The rumor/allegation is that Gearbox was given a pile of money to develop Aliens and instead put most of it into Borderlands. Then when Sega started asking what was going on, Pitchford farmed A:CM out to TimeGate to cobble together something that vaguely resembled a game.

Duke Nukem Forever is the game that the defunct studio (3D Realms) handed off to Gearbox. It was a piece of shit too.

For that matter, so was all the BL2 DLC except for Tiny Tina's.

Somewhat relevant to this thread, Pitchford's actions with A:CM--since it was ultimately his responsibility to oversee the game that eventually shipped, and he was the one who made all the promises of features that never existed--resulted in a bunch of people at TimeGate losing their jobs.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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It's tough to say how much Gearbox is to blame for the disaster that is DNF but yeah, ACM is one of the biggest frauds in gaming history. At least games like SimCity and Spore had all the best intentions.
 

Sean_sl

shitlord
4,735
11
Did Sega ever pursue any type of litigation against Gearbox?
If they did I don't think it was made public. I'm guessing dick all happened, which is too bad, because Randy Pitchford is a huge fucking fraud and a thief who should be in jail for stealing millions and millions of dollars.
 

Mist

Eeyore Enthusiast
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20 seems awfully low. The future is making games without spending so much fucking money to do it. Reusing game engines, reusing level design and other content creation tools. That's why they can keep pumping out Assassins Creed games without them costing a bajillion dollars. They're like 20-30 million each, and I'm assuming Watch Dogs's new engine is what they're using for the next AC games for a while.

It seems like studios spend a lot of money reinventing the wheel when they don't have to. Bioshock Infinite costing 200 million is just poor management, that game could have been done for under 20 if they hadn't fucked around for 5 years trying to make it into an open world game when it worked fine as basically a linear FPS. It's like they couldn't decide if they were making a sandbox game or an rail shooter, or if they were making an FPS or an RPG...

200 million is like 8x what it cost to make Mass Effect 3 for what is basically the same game: a bunch of hallways and vistas with some loot in them and a lot of dialogue. Except Mass Effect 3 probably had 3-5x as much dialogue.

There's a good chance that Ken Levine is just incompetent at managing a large team and that the failure of Bioshock Infinite to make money is not indicative of any larger industry trends. I mean fuck, Skyrim reportedly cost 85 million for development + marketing combined. For 200 million there should have been a whole game inside every one of those god damn lighthouses at the end.