Early this morning, Fury developer Auran announced in a forum post that Auran will be shutting down and all employees will be let go (although they will still be receiving compensation for their time up to this date). The game Fury will continue its development at Trainz.
Quote:
The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.
Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.
The post at the Auran forums and then tell us what you think about all this back and forth.
I really feel sad for the Auran team. Fury was never my kind of game, because I'm not much for PvP beyond the occasional /duel in EQ, but I had really hoped they would succeed. The devs that I met from Auran were enthusiastic and dedicated. I wish them the best as they move on to other projects.
Annatar, you're right that it's been quite the year for the industry. Let's hope 2008 offers up a lot less...drama. Then again, drama is good for a community like TTH--it gives us plenty to talk about!
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Karen "Shayalyn" Hertzberg
Public Relations & Resident Forum Goddess (All your posts are belong to me!)
"I fell asleep watching Jeopardy, and I snored in the form of a question "
~ Christoper Moore
I'd rather the mmorpg news be about great new, and current, games and other exciting things going in in the industry, rather than all the failures and dodgy developers that have plagued this year. I am sincerely hoping that 2008 is a better year for our hobby :holiday_confused:
Way back in the 80’s it was possible to be a games developer and do a game solo or in a team of two in three months and still make money to put on your families table. In the early nineties you could still have a production house of four people but the time to market was getting longer.
However, times change. Fast forward to today.
Fury cost over 15 million to develop and the project would have been laid out years prior to its release and ended up employing dozens of people. Time to market has increased, size of project has increased and cost to deliver a competitive product has increased. Astronomically.
If you want to know if this will get better or worse next year I can tell you that now, I need no crystal ball. It will get worse. It will get worse because of the inertia of time to market and the still short-sighted near-blind hopes that enough people will appear or churn to play and pay (in some form) good new MMO’s.
Too many games, too few people to play them.
Moreover with Mass Effect raking in a million sales in nothing flat for the Xbox any developer starting a title now would be ill advised to rely solely on a PC user base. Assuming Age of Conan does nothing inherently wrong (and at the end of the day while Fury was not my cup of tea it didn’t do anything inherently wrong either) the fact that it will have an Xbox version is a huge plus for the developers. I don’t have any kind of console btw, I play all my games on a PC, but I see the way the wind is blowing.
Way back in the 80’s it was possible to be a games developer and do a game solo or in a team of two in three months and still make money to put on your families table. In the early nineties you could still have a production house of four people but the time to market was getting longer.
However, times change. Fast forward to today.
Fury cost over 15 million to develop and the project would have been laid out years prior to its release and ended up employing dozens of people. Time to market has increased, size of project has increased and cost to deliver a competitive product has increased. Astronomically.
If you want to know if this will get better or worse next year I can tell you that now, I need no crystal ball. It will get worse. It will get worse because of the inertia of time to market and the still short-sighted near-blind hopes that enough people will appear or churn to play and pay (in some form) good new MMO’s.
Too many games, too few people to play them.
Moreover with Mass Effect raking in a million sales in nothing flat for the Xbox any developer starting a title now would be ill advised to rely solely on a PC user base. Assuming Age of Conan does nothing inherently wrong (and at the end of the day while Fury was not my cup of tea it didn’t do anything inherently wrong either) the fact that it will have an Xbox version is a huge plus for the developers. I don’t have any kind of console btw, I play all my games on a PC, but I see the way the wind is blowing.
The XBox version of Conan isn't going to be released until well after the PC version. If I remember correctly, and I may be wrong, it wasn't even on the radar at E3 this year in terms of development.
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John "Boomjack" Hoskin Loading...
TenTonHammer's Daily MMOG Mailing List
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The XBox version of Conan isn't going to be released until well after the PC version. If I remember correctly, and I may be wrong, it wasn't even on the radar at E3 this year in terms of development.
I think that's right. I'm fairly certain that its not going to be a consecutive release.
While the consoles continue to soar, it's hard to ignore a game like WoW. I mean, isn't that its' own sort of monkey-making machine?
Fury: Auran Lays Off Entire Staff, Closes Doors
Linear Mode
