~Devil Trigger~
In favor of setting Muslim women on fire
??....Unknown Soldier said: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.
??....Unknown Soldier said: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.
They never were. When Sony had great shooters, PSN didn't exist.g35twinturbo said:exclusive PSN shooters aren't as popular as they use to be
I enjoy Socom 4
LevityNYC said:From someone who put 200 hours into Socom 2....aside from a few fixable bugs, Socom 4 is a fantastic
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.shintoki said: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.
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.MalboroRed said: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.
DR3AM said:is zipper 1st party?
alphaNoid said:You haven't played many shooters than..
The game did not bombed.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)
Rattles said:I don't get developers that refuse to listen to their fanbase.
ezekial45 said:Either Socom 4 bombed, or this was set to happen regardless.
Zipper isn't hiring new people. They have no open positions listed on their site and haven't in ages.arnoldocastillo2003 said: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.
element said: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.
Zipper currently has nearly 150 employees located in downtown Redmond, and is still hiring.
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.arnoldocastillo2003 said:
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.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.
MalboroRed said: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.
Are we playing the same game? And what you say contradicts itself.MalboroRed said: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.
Greg said: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.
Greg said: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.
element said: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.
galian beast said: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.
Getting in the top 10 NPD != not bombing.arnoldocastillo2003 said:WOW you guys should really read the NPD threads sometimes, from NPD April 2011:
The game did not bombed.
arnoldocastillo2003 said:Ok dude, i got your point jeez!
Maybe the PSN Outage had something to do with that.
Nirolak said: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.
That would still likely take a lot more than 300-400K copies to cover, especially once we add in marketing.arnoldocastillo2003 said: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.
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.MalboroRed said: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.
Nirolak said: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.
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.Gazunta said: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.
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.Ok dude, i got your point jeez!
In fact they were so shit that Bungie hired their graphics lead. Really, enjoy living on your cloud of ignorance.hebrew hammer said: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.
LevityNYC said:From someone who put 200 hours into Socom 2....aside from a few fixable bugs, Socom 4 is a fantastic
[Nintex] said: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.
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.MalboroRed said: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.