Support NeoGAF

[~Devil Trigger~]

SOCOM 4 tried to turn the franchise into CoD-clone instead of what SOCOM was known for. Not sure what they were hoping to accomplish there.

??....

 

[shintoki]

Could just be them letting off people after the big projects are done. They released MAG last year, and Socom this year after something like 3-4 year lull. Probably hired a lot of extra staff for that. And Socom is no longer the multi-million headrunner for Sony's online network anymore.

 

[godhandiscen]

exclusive PSN shooters aren't as popular as they use to be
I enjoy Socom 4

They never were. When Sony had great shooters, PSN didn't exist.

 

[MrToughPants]

From someone who put 200 hours into Socom 2....aside from a few fixable bugs, Socom 4 is a fantastic

From someone who put 5000 hours into SOCOM 2, bought the PS2 HDD only for AH/LB/Lib...SOCOM 4 is terrible.

 

[element]

Could just be them letting off people after the big projects are done. They released MAG last year, and Socom this year after something like 3-4 year lull. Probably hired a lot of extra staff for that. And Socom is no longer the multi-million headrunner for Sony's online network anymore.

no. people with years of services at the company were hit. hired on help is typically contractors, which many people updating their linkedin weren't contractors. also in those situations writing is on the wall. from what it sounds like via twitter it was everyone got an email, and you went to room a or room b. one room got good news, the other got bad news.

 

[Booshka]

You don't need to be multiplatform to have a cohesive community, HALO was extremely successful without being multiplatform, very few multiplatform shooters can hold onto its base after a few months nowadays.

It comes down to having a high quality product with it's own unique twist, accessibility and effective marketing, without all of those qualities you can have a multiplatform game and it would still bomb.

The problem with SOCOM 4 was that it was not accessible (you don't need COD-type lock-on to be accessible), it did not impress graphically, and it didn't have a compelling single player campaign.

It absolutely sucks that some folks at Zipper lost their jobs, but between SOCOM 4 and MAG they're just not cranking out high quality products, you can blame poor sales on marketing but as far as the quality of the products goes they have to bear the bulk of the responsibility.

I know, it's more of just a pipe dream to have more players in the lesser known FPS games. I haven't played either of their games on PS3, the news just compelled me to post about wanting to have larger communities in more shooters.

Halo, and Gears, are pretty much the only successful shooter franchises on 360, the others slowly die or eek out an existence with a tiny community. On PS3 I assume that their FPS exclusives do a bit worse than Gears and Halo, but the other lesser known shooters completely disappear. CoD is its own animal at this point. There are some smaller, lower profile shooters that deserve to have more players, and I think merging communities on the two platforms would help keep those communities alive.

 

[DR3AM]

is zipper 1st party?

 

[Guardian Bob]

Hrmmm. I have a hard time believing it was because PSN was down. They are first party (right?) so Sony would have absorbed any loss.

 

[Booshka]

Yea on the twitter account someone posted it said Sony bought them in 2006.

 

[Rattles]

I don't get developers that refuse to listen to their fanbase.

 

[chessnut]

is zipper 1st party?

yup

 

[Deadly Joker]

is zipper 1st party?

Yes.

Edit- Beaten like a $5 whore.

 

[maxxpower]

You haven't played many shooters than..

Of course I have, doesn't change the fact that I loved MAG.

 

[UraMallas]

I can't be the only one who thought this was going to be about a Final Fantasy cancellation?

 

[arnoldocastillo2003]

WOW you guys should really read the NPD threads sometimes, from NPD April 2011:

Software Notes:

If SOCOM 4's accessory bundle sales counted, it would have been in the Top 10 as well. (Anita Frazier Below)

Top 10 Individual SKUs include: (Gamasutra And Anita Frazier Below)
-Mortal Kombat (360)
-Portal 2 (360)
-Crysis 2 (360)
-Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters (360)
-Michael Jackson: The Experience (360)
-Pokemon White (NDS)
-Pokemon Black (NDS)
-Just Dance 2 (Wii)
-SOCOM 4 (PS3)
-And Presumably Mortal Kombat (PS3)

The game did not bombed.

 

[MalboroRed]

I don't get developers that refuse to listen to their fanbase.

PS3 fanbase in general or the Zipper fanbase who are known to kick people out of rooms who don't belong to their clan?

The key is to attract those people who will reasonably stick by you, but in such numbers that your IP will be viable in the long run, the goal should not be to specifically aim for the COD fanbase (those people will flock from one COD game to another anyway), your game should not be so inaccessible that your fanbase is constantly shrinking instead of constantly growing because people with decent skills who are interested in the game want to be able to have fun without spending days to learn all the maps and all the nuances just so they won't be embarrassed, this is the problem with the recent SOCOM games and MAG.

 

[MidnightRider]

Either Socom 4 bombed, or this was set to happen regardless.

putting my money on the later

 

[arnoldocastillo2003]

Have any of you thought that maybe those people who were fired had a fixed-term contracts that ended with SOCOM 4 and that is why ZIPPER is hiring new people.

EDIT: The game did not bombed, look at the NPD thread!

 

[J-Rzez]

I hope these guys get on their feet soon. I wonder what brought this upon them though? Maybe just an economy crunch? Too large of a team? I don't think they can be faulted that their sales though in the top 10 weren't as high as expected considering the PSN fiasco really would have impacted a game widely known for it's MP.

 

[element]

Have any of you thought that maybe those people who were fired had a fixed-term contracts that ended with SOCOM 4 and that is why ZIPPER is hiring new people.

Zipper isn't hiring new people. They have no open positions listed on their site and haven't in ages.
You typically don't have fixed term contracts for full-time employees with benefits.

This is the rug being pulled from under people.

Also games don't need to bomb for studios to have to restructure. I'd say 10 employees would be normal for a studio to restructure, but 30+ people being laid off is major. That is about 30% of their workforce. Between that and leads leaving on their own accord, it is a bad sign.

Bad month here in Seattle. Amazing Society and now Zipper hit.

 

[arnoldocastillo2003]

Zipper isn't hiring new people. They have no open positions listed on their site and haven't in ages.
You typically don't have fixed term contracts for full-time employees with benefits.

Trust me. This is the rug being pulled from under people.

http://www.zipperint.com/company.html

Zipper currently has nearly 150 employees located in downtown Redmond, and is still hiring.

EDIT: Maybe SONY is making a big restructuring because ZIPPER will be making games for a different market, i read somewhere that SONY will be making some restructuring in some 1st party companies to make mobile/social games.

 

[patsu]

Zipper, I have been too busy. Will buy Socom 4 when I have more time. I thoroughly enjoy MAG.

 

[element]

http://www.zipperint.com/company.html

every company pulls that shit. that is static page content on their site. find me a link. find me a JOB OPENING on their site. find me a job description.

I know their site. They are listed right below Jobs At Zipper. Guess what. Empty.

EDIT: Maybe SONY is making a big restructuring because ZIPPER will be making games for a different market, i read somewhere that SONY will be making some restructuring in some 1st party companies to make mobile/social games.

Why on earth would Sony rip apart a shooter team to make social/mobile games? If any studio is going to do it, it would be SOE or San Diego, not Zipper. Zipper makes shooters. Always have. That is like telling them to start making Soccer games all the sudden.

 

[Greg]

The problem with SOCOM 4 was that it was not accessible (you don't need COD-type lock-on to be accessible), it did not impress graphically, and it didn't have a compelling single player campaign.

PS3 fanbase in general or the Zipper fanbase who are known to kick people out of rooms who don't belong to their clan?

The key is to attract those people who will reasonably stick by you, but in such numbers that your IP will be viable in the long run, the goal should not be to specifically aim for the COD fanbase (those people will flock from one COD game to another anyway), your game should not be so inaccessible that your fanbase is constantly shrinking instead of constantly growing because people with decent skills who are interested in the game want to be able to have fun without spending days to learn all the maps and all the nuances just so they won't be embarrassed, this is the problem with the recent SOCOM games and MAG.

Are we playing the same game? And what you say contradicts itself.

S4 is easily the most accessible game in the series, but some of the changes that made it that way are what's currently threatening its userbase. The elements you're complaining about are what made SOCOM so popular in the first place. Relative to other shooters, the older SOCOM games describe 'spending days to learn all the maps and all the nuances just so they won't be embarrassed' exactly.

 

[fernoca]

Maybe they're restructuring to have Zipper focus on one main game/series (and a small one on DLC), rather than having them juggling 2 games/teams and each games' DLC.

They went from releasing nothing in 4 years, to releasing 2 games in around 1. So they were making those 2 games and the DLC and everything at the same time (which according to some affected the quality of each). And alternating team member and hiring other people probably to finish the game(s) faster. As noted by one of the employee mentioned earlier, saying she didn't joined the Socom 4 team, till later.

Also the 30+ number hasn't been confirmed yet. She said that she thinks is 33, because that's the amount of people she remembers been in the 'bad room'.


But if anything, we'll know really soon. Which is the recent kind of things. Layoffs has been the "order of the day" for years, the only difference between now and then, was that "then" there weren't the Facebooks, Twitters, LinkedIn profiles to talk/post about it. So this helps to know some things faster, but also tends to overblown some .. things out of proportion.

 

[MrToughPants]

Are we playing the same game? And what you say contradicts itself.

S4 is easily the most accessible game in the series, but some of the changes that made it that way are what's currently threatening its userbase. The elements you're complaining about are what made SOCOM so popular in the first place. Relative to other shooters, the older SOCOM games describe 'spending days to learn all the maps and all the nuances just so they won't be embarrassed' exactly.

Too bad you can't access the ability to join friends or lobbies.

 

[Man]

Noo... Mag 2 must survive.

 

[MalboroRed]

Are we playing the same game? And what you say contradicts itself.

S4 is easily the most accessible game in the series, but some of the changes that made it that way are what's currently threatening its userbase. The elements you're complaining about are what made SOCOM so popular in the first place. Relative to other shooters, the older SOCOM games describe 'spending days to learn all the maps and all the nuances just so they won't be embarrassed' exactly.

It would be incorrect to assume that being inaccessible nowadays can make SOCOM as popular as before, why are we even assuming that there is still all that large of a userbase that is being "threatened"?

SOCOM 4 is still not all that accessible, everything from reloading to simply throwing a grenade feels clunky, why do we still have to deal with having a crosshair disabled sign over a box or a ledge? There are a lot of basic things that just haven't been brought up to date, none of those things make SOCOM 4 "special", they make the game feel dated and clunky.

 

[galian beast]

With recent historic events, SOCOM4 should have been marketed perfectly to become one of the best selling titles of the year...

I'm stunned that SCE/Zipper didn't announce SOCOM4: Seal Team Six Edition.

Rather than offer those crappy titles, SCEA should have made a point to reinvigorate and strengthen the interest in PSN by offering everyone a free copy of SOCOM 4.

~20 million people getting a free copy of SOCOM4... the SOCOM franchise would be hard pressed not to become one of the most popular titles... it would have been a win win for sony.

 

[arnoldocastillo2003]

every company pulls that shit. that is static page content on their site. find me a link. find me a JOB OPENING on their site. find me a job description.

I know their site. They are listed right below Jobs At Zipper. Guess what. Empty.

Why on earth would Sony rip apart a shooter team to make social/mobile games? If any studio is going to do it, it would be SOE or San Diego, not Zipper. Zipper makes shooters. Always have. That is like telling them to start making Soccer games all the sudden.

Ok dude, i got your point jeez!

With recent historic events, SOCOM4 should have been marketed perfectly to become one of the best selling titles of the year...

I'm stunned that SCE/Zipper didn't announce SOCOM4: Seal Team Six Edition.

Rather than offer those crappy titles, SCEA should have made a point to reinvigorate and strengthen the interest in PSN by offering everyone a free copy of SOCOM 4.

~20 million people getting a free copy of SOCOM4... the SOCOM franchise would be hard pressed not to become one of the most popular titles... it would have been a win win for sony.

Maybe the PSN Outage had something to do with that.

 

[msdstc]

It seemed like this was bound to happen. Zipper hasn't been nearly what they were for a while now anyways, it's too bad.

 

[Nirolak]

WOW you guys should really read the NPD threads sometimes, from NPD April 2011:


The game did not bombed.

Getting in the top 10 NPD != not bombing.

You could sell 750k worldwide and still bomb if your budget was high enough, and bottom of the top ten was low, pointing more to like 300-400k worldwide.

 

[Buckethead]

Socom 1 is one of my favorite games, but thought that the games since have been kinda crappy.

Don't wish bad on anyone though.

Sucks.

 

[galian beast]

Ok dude, i got your point jeez!



Maybe the PSN Outage had something to do with that.

PSN going down or not, I still would have made the announcement within a week of the news breaking...

You publish a title about Navy Seals, and the most historic event in the history of the navy seals goes down, and you don't touch on it at all... thats horrible marketing.

Even Disney went out and is trying to trademark the name seal team six.

 

[hebrew hammer]

Zipper made two duds. They were shitty games (according to the reviews, I didn't play them) and sold poorly. In all honesty, I expected that lay-offs in the management team will be made and they would be under sucker punch management. Was it the senior zipper employees that got axed?

 

[arnoldocastillo2003]

Getting in the top 10 NPD != not bombing.

You could sell 750k worldwide and still bomb if your budget was high enough, and bottom of the top ten was low, pointing more to like 300-400k worldwide.

Nice point but that means that we should speculate about the production budget and we don´t know how much the game cost and to be honest i doubt that game had over a $20 Million Budget.

 

[Nirolak]

Nice point but that means that we should speculate about the production budget and we don´t know how much the game cost and to be honest i doubt that game had over a $20 Million Budget.

That would still likely take a lot more than 300-400K copies to cover, especially once we add in marketing.

THQ needed over 2 million copies to cover Homefront.

There's also opportunity cost.

 

[Greg]

It would be incorrect to assume that being inaccessible nowadays can make SOCOM as popular as before, why are we even assuming that there is still all that large of a userbase that is being "threatened"?

SOCOM 4 is still not all that accessible, everything from reloading to simply throwing a grenade feels clunky, why do we still have to deal with having a crosshair disabled sign over a box or a ledge? There are a lot of basic things that just haven't been brought up to date, none of those things make SOCOM 4 "special", they make the game feel dated and clunky.

The point of my post wasn't to defend S4 - I'm just stating that the reasons you think the game is/isn't successful are baseless. The series in the past describes everything you say a community can't be built around (average graphics, average campaign, steep learning curve), but it put up great numbers online and had quite a following that stuck with the game through a number of other big releases.

I don't think anyone is assuming there is an amazing CoD-like userbase for the game, but I don't think any of the players from the older games in the series will quit S4 because the graphics are average, the campaign was bad, or that they got their ass kicked online.

 

[Gazunta]

I still find it incredible how naive so many people here are about how the industry works.

"Maybe these 30 guys were given so much bonus money they retired!" "Maybe SONY are going to have ZIPPER make a new God of War game and are moving them to another town!" "30 people is no big deal, it happens all the time, and I'm sure SOCOM 5 will be at E3!"

This is bad news for the team and for Zipper. There is no silver lining to this news.

30+ people got laid off through no fault of their own.

It sucks and there is no positive spin on it.

Also, please stop capitalizing words that don't need capitalizing.

 

[arnoldocastillo2003]

That would still likely take a lot more than 300-400K copies to cover, especially once we add in marketing.

THQ needed over 2 million copies to cover Homefront.

There's also opportunity cost.

Ok there you got me, don´t really know how to answer that, but one thing we are sure is that Sony will always backup Zipper, the thing is that i think that Sony is firing people because they are restructuring the company to have the best assets sorted for a common project, rather than having the team divided and making too many games that they can´t manage.

 

[zlatko]

Word of mouth wasn't there, advertising was slim, and this is probably due to PSN being down. Without the core buyers being able to play online and tell others about it there was no extra sales to be made. With PSN down, why advertise a multiplayer focused game?

:/ Shitty deal.

 

[[Nintex]]

Layoffs at studios working for/owned by Sony so far this year:
March - London Studio, Studio Liverpool, Evolution Studios(Restructure/layoffs)
March - SOE's Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios(Closed)
March - SOE San Diego, Austin(layoffs)
April - Cohort Studios (Closed)
May - Zipper (layoffs)

It's a massacre.

 

[hebrew hammer]

I still find it incredible how naive so many people here are about how the industry works.

"Maybe these 30 guys were given so much bonus money they retired!" "Maybe SONY are going to have ZIPPER make a new God of War game and are moving them to another town!" "30 people is no big deal, it happens all the time, and I'm sure SOCOM 5 will be at E3!"

This is bad news for the team and for Zipper. There is no silver lining to this news.

30+ people got laid off through no fault of their own.

It sucks and there is no positive spin on it.

Also, please stop capitalizing words that don't need capitalizing.

Zipper Interactive f'd up completely. They were poorly managed: missed release dates and released mediocre titles. I don't understand how you could say that management wasn't shit. People that do a poor job get axed. I don't understand less senior staff getting axed though.

 

[element]

Ok dude, i got your point jeez!

Just annoying when I have friends who were affected, and you are using static site text as your counter evidence as it isn't a big deal.

 

[newjeruse]

Uggh. I need MAG 2 as a PS4 launch game.

 

[[Nintex]]

Zipper Interactive f'd up completely. They were poorly managed: missed release dates and released mediocre titles. I don't understand how you could say that management wasn't shit. People that do a poor job get axed.

In fact they were so shit that Bungie hired their graphics lead. Really, enjoy living on your cloud of ignorance.

 

[supermackem]

From someone who put 200 hours into Socom 2....aside from a few fixable bugs, Socom 4 is a fantastic

Yep its like a myth that socom 4 is bad, if you like old school socom you can play that in classic mode. I really hope this doesnt harm the chances of the party patch coming out its my only gripe with the game in its current state.

 

[supermackem]

Layoffs at studios working for/owned by Sony so far this year:
March - London Studio, Studio Liverpool, Evolution Studios(Restructure/layoffs)
March - SOE's Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios(Closed)
March - SOE San Diego, Austin(layoffs)
April - Cohort Studios (Closed)
May - Zipper (layoffs)

It's a massacre.

Its happening all over though aint it just like a the pgr dudes, it just looks worse as sony has one of the biggest first party collection of studios.

 

[Inanna]

It absolutely sucks that some folks at Zipper lost their jobs, but between SOCOM 4 and MAG they're just not cranking out high quality products, you can blame poor sales on marketing but as far as the quality of the products goes they have to bear the bulk of the responsibility.

Strongly disagree. Well, S4 isn't anything special, I'll agree with that but MAG was definitely a very great game. You can't really compare Halo/Gears type games with MAG, though. Halo is very accessible whereas MAG has a very high learning curve which puts off a lot of gamers.

 

[spats]

Very sad news. Good luck to everybody who lost their job. Tough few months for Sony, when it rains it pours.