Good to see them move onto a platform that can actually make them money.
Surely there has to be something else that offers these studios with smaller development budgets and a need for bigger profit margins ... annoyed by another team going iOS
PSM? PSN? XBLA?
So they ended up doing the same as Eat Sleep Play
Atleast ESP made a good game and it sold well decently. 500k i think .
Starhawk was aweful and the fans who loved warhawk hated it
Maybe you should speak for yourself?Atleast ESP made a good game and it sold well decently. 500k i think .
Starhawk was aweful and the fans who loved warhawk hated it
Can we round the numbers on how many studios have been closed by MS and Sony this gen? Sorry I'm on my slowass iPhone 3g so I'm sorry if it's mwntoned.
I know, i was one of the fans that loved Warhawk Spent over 1000 hours on it and never bought Starhawk
Can we round the numbers on how many studios have been closed by MS and Sony this gen? Sorry I'm on my slowass iPhone 3g so I'm sorry if it's mwntoned.
I hear ya! The ol ps3forums BnW clan was awesome fun! I never played Starhawk once.
Put hundreds of hours into Warhawk. Played the Starhawk demo and thought it sucked. People just wanted Warhawk in space, not some tower defence game with a dumb story on a muddy brown planet.
Another studio that made a game its fans did not want and suffered the consequences.
Ok I think its safe to say this strategy by SCEA to fund the foundation of smaller independent teams was a bust.
Eat, Sleep, Play went through the same thing. Founded by ex staffers and was financially backed by Sony. They then release one game that is poorly marketed and get out of there contract and run off to mobile.
I wont be shocked if the same happens to Superbot.
Damn right it was, man. Pity that forum went to shit.
Yep. I wandered around different forums but ended up here. Better here by far!
Weren't Eat Sleep Play and Lightbox both formed from ex Incognito employees?
Kind of weird that they both ended up going the same way (contract dropped after one game, switched to iOS development).
When did you start hating on Starhawk? Seems sudden.Atleast ESP made a good game and it sold well decently. 500k i think .
Starhawk was awful and the fans who loved warhawk hated it
http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012...tbox-interactive-hit-with-layoffs-moving-away
LightBox Interactive, the Austin-based developer behind PlayStation 3 game Starhawk, has laid off 24 of its employees, studio founder and president Dylan Jobe tells Polygon. The layoffs are part of a "shift in product strategy" at LightBox, Jobe says, which includes a move away from traditional console development.
Jobe says he's not shutting down LightBox Interactive. Instead, the company will self-fund a small, focused indie-style team to bring the developer's next game to iOS, not the PlayStation 3.
funkystudent said:They then release one game that is poorly marketed and get out of there contract and run off to mobile.
iOS and Android really are the future.. It sucks seeing console gaming slowly fade.. More and more developers will go this way.
I really wish people would stop with this "marketing can sell anything" stuff. Its just wrong on so many levels.
You shouldn't need a huge spend to sell a product. Whatever happened to word of mouth? Sales growing organically based on recommendation and buzz?
Does everything have to be created by throwing huge sums of money at a marketing budget and payola for corruptible publications?
Beyond that if you have a huge marketing spend, that's even more money to recoup from sales, and generally speaking only happens when there's massive confidence in the product to begin with.
The reality is that in 9/10 cases the fate of a product is decided based on focus groups and marketing test feedback long before it gets launched. If the sales prediction looks bleak you will most often see your marketing budget go down, not up, because its pointlessly risky to double-down on an outside bet.
And more than anything else, if you think marketing is an issue, the absolute last place you'll turn to iOS where you are at the mercy of whether Apple deigns to feature you on their storefronts, and happen to launch at a time when the big boys aren't hogging the spotlight via promotion or discount.
I never understood why they made their games PS3 exclusive. The lost sales must be tremendous
When did you start hating on Starhawk? Seems sudden.
I can't say it enough this game had no chance after the beta.
The writing was on the wall when they announced all the DLC was going to be free right before the game came out.
Yeah, because that caused Valve/et. al. that has gone that route harm before, right?
OH WAIT.
No the issue was that the multiplayer had a 32 TEAM build item limit, and because of that you were constantly fighting your public team to expand bases in objective modes. And because of that problem people complained to Lightbox about it during the BETA phase. But they didn't listen until after the game launched (and dropped like an A-bomb) two months or so later, which is past the point where most people are going to care if you fixed your game after a sub-par beta that turned many people (including me, actually) off.
Rest in Peace.
Sadly I saw this coming as well.
Now Western developers now have the equivalent of Pachinko Hell that formerly sweet Japanese developers have been relegated to for years now with mobile game development.
Does anybody from the Sony forums recall the Dylan Jobe photoshop thread from a few months back? I saved this image from there:
Such a shame. Warhawk was one of the most unique experiences on any of the current consoles this generation, and Starhawk threw that all out the window to pursue demographics that could give a shit about what Warhawk offered. It made assumptions about console gamers playing a resource limited game like PC gamers, but then dumbed down other mechanics that wouldn't scare off PC gamers (flight mechanics).
They couldn't have spent that much time on the SP. They basically dropped you into a MP map and threw enemy waves at you.