pulp said:
Which might probably be why Interplay switched over to console in the first place. As Mr. Deiley notes, it's far easier to make a console game because you know what you're working with, and that translates to fast turn-around project times, I would think - nevermind the quality of a product.
You do know that Run Like Hell and Galleon, the two I mentioned at the end, were console games, right? One took four years and flopped BAD.. Really, really bad. The other was Galleon, which took six years and was never released.
And though I shouldn't really say this, the formula for making passable console games that anyone would pick up is pretty established: make a game involving lots of guns, swords, knives or similar sort of brutality and throw in a potential twitch-fest, viola!
Except that's not the case, as there's pretty steep competition in the console arena. On top of that, as Feargus mentionned, you have to rent hardware from the console people in order to make a console game and you have to give them an additional cut of every game you make.
PCs have one huge advantage in that you can make budget titles for them, and you really can't with console games. You can release a PC title for $20 to $30 and make a profit on it after the retailers get their cut. It's much more difficult to do this with consoles because if you made a $30 game for the PS/2, Sony's going to be expecting $10-$15 of that right off the top.
Now, given that console games also cost more, and there's lots and lots of publishers out there cranking these things out, that spells trouble for a company like Interplay which doesn't have a heck of a lot of money. They have to sell their swill at $60 along side an actual GOOD GAME that costs the same amount.
Whereas for PC games... well, the reaction to FO:T when it first came out, and the collective reactions of fans to sequels in general should indicate that making that special game is pretty hard, let alone making that special game that really sells.
Interplay's track record on PC games isn't that great either. The main problem with FOT that anyone would notice is the bugs. It just wasn't tested well. The same holds true for Giants, Starfleet Command 2, and the list goes on all the way back to Descent to Undermountain.
Now, you can argue that some of these bugs come from hardware problems with nonstandardized PC hardware
but that's not even remotely true. Many of the bugs in those games were non-hardware specific bugs. Since you mentioned it, check out
the list of fixes in Fallout Tactics 1.25. Very few of those are hardware issues - yet IPLY QA was more than willing to sign off on those issues and release the game. This ruined their name for a lot of people in PC gaming, and if they continue that kind of thing in the console arena, it'll spell disaster for them there.
There's no reason to think they won't do this either, since Titus is known for releasing crappy console games, even buggy ones.
BIS might have a track record, but I think Roshombo would probably interject here that what remained of the team that created FO and FO2 pretty much dissipated after the whole affair - BIS isn't completely what it was before the layoffs as it was when it first began.
Even before the lay offs, they were slipping up, true. Rather than nuturing BIS, they decided to focus on console games. Even gave up the rights to the PC Baldur's Gate license in favor of the console one, which was the last straw for many of the ones who left earlier this year.
So, logically speaking, we have a team that's not going to guarantee a success that BG2 was, and therefore Interplay might have to depend on the fans for the failure or success of any other PC product that BIS might produce.
The team working on Jefferson(aka Baldur's Gate 3) consisted of a lot of the bigger names they had, like JE Sawyer, Chris Avellone, etc.
I'm not saying I would have bought it, but I'd say BG3 would have sold a hell of a lot more than BG
A did, considering how well BG2 sold. Before IWD2 was released, Interplay announced they'd made a net profit on the Infinity Engine games of around $20M. At the time, there were only four of them and two expansions, IIRC.
The problem is, IPLY and BIS didn't know when to stop using this engine, so you got IWD2 using the same old Infinity Engine. On top of that, Interplay decided to release it around the same time as Neverwinter Nights. They also totally botched the release in Europe, but that's another matter.
Now, which would you prefer, *objectively* speaking? A sure-fire method that might just rake in the money (consoles)
Except that it's never been a sure fire method for Interplay, and they've only had a few successes in that market. Those successes don't outweight the losses they've taken either on games like Run Like Hell and Galleon. That's the point. Interplay has been hit or miss in the console market, with big, weeping bruises from those failures. Those failures, BTW, came out after BG
A. Even their successes like Hunter: The Reconning and BG
A would be considered failures by other console developers. Hunter: the Reconning probably made money in sales, but I'd bet selling the license to Vivendi made them more than the game did.
Despite what I've said above, I do have to agree: closing down a success, or potential success, is pretty darn stupid. It's too bad that Interplay didn't trust BIS enough to deliver, like we did.
Well, the two failures BIS has had were mainly Interplay decisions. The choice to make IWD2 came from the top of the ladder. Lionheart, IIRC, was Vivendi's big idea - making a Diablo clone using SPECIAL. Really stupid idea, and it cost them.
I won't know how to speculate on the thinking behind their actions, but I do think they might have become desperate, and then decided to go back to doing what they knew best: consoles. (I mean Titus, by "they").
Of course, it hasn't worked for Titus, so why would it work for Interplay?
