"Deep Silver and Apogee Software are not affected by the situation at 3D Realms," reads the statement. "Development on the Duke Nukem Trilogy is continuing as planned."
some programmer once told me that fixing unfinished code from someone else can take longer than writing the code from scratch. Don't know how true that is, though.
Also you just don't know what they have and how good it is, even id's own contractor raven didn't do that well qualitywise if you remember...
TBH the project would be worth finishing off by drafting in a team and making the lead guys sit it out.
Failing that george should just bundle all the stuff he has at the moment and release the game as a sort of joke,
including all the old scrap content
if everyone is making fun of the devtime, why not package it as something like the "game that was never finished".
I have a feeling that if they banged that puppy out for 14.99 it would do quite well. Unfinshed, locking up, incomplete, developer menus whatever, just let people play all of the content.
Perhaps a DVD with developer interviews, rants from ex-employees etc, I'm telling there is shitload of money to made from the epic amounts of fail.
I guarantee this game will come out, its just got lady luck on its side.
How were they financing this all these years?
They must have known they were in trouble and yet there was no indication that they were going to just close doors, in fact they were making it sound like it was almost done.
Is Apogee just a revived name or is it being run by the same guys?
If it's being run by the same games, it's even more suspicious.
I don't know, I think what they had going for them was...
A) A good brand.
B) They could convince publishers that it would be done soon.
I'm sure take 2 or whoever came into it thinking it would be done within a year or two and make them a crapload of money.
Because the timeframe they have taken defies all reasoning.
I mean you can't make this up right.
Games are not worth it anymore, you spend years and years and millions and millions making them and its not selling anymore than they were 8 years ago with 12 people. GoldeneEye was made with about 12 people, none of whom never made a game before, it took about 3-4 years and sold what 10 million copies.
Those were the days. You had control over the game, now its just amassive dev team with a vision shared between way too many people, and don't even get me started on how that effects the royalties, which believe me are important when you average 60 hour weeks and close to 100 hr weeks at crunch, with no overtime.
These days developers get excited if they crack 1 million and I'm like, ok but it still took you 2-3 years but you have like 40-50 people doing it. The games are selling cheaper than before.
How are most studios staying afloat?
I think you'll see so many crash and burn over the next 3-5 years and working conditions for those who make them plummet.
The game industry was made on exploiting peoples enthuasism to work on them, its becoming less and less fun.
2k have said they were only publishing/distributing the game and not financing it, I can't remember who was the publisher before them but that was a long, long time ago.
Surely the owners have wasted all their money over the years trying to develop a game and just let the money dry up.
I think it's a shame, the 1998 and the 2001 trailers from E3 were both awesome and would have been "Best Game Ever" type material if the trailers represented the final product. In fact the 2001 trailer still looks mega fun.
well, it has been said that Epic also gives them money ever since they switched to Unreal technology. dunno if that's true but I believe it's quite possible