Chiude Irrational Games --> Ghost Story Games

Aperto da Bluforce, 18 Febbraio, 2014, 19:33:28

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Bluforce

C'è una lettera di Levine sul sito ufficiale.

http://www.irrationalgames.com

Inaspettato.


EDIT 23/02/2017 by Turry: dalle costole di Irrational nasce Ghost Story Games

Joe

:|

Come diavolo è possibile????

Turrican3

CitazioneA Message From Ken Levine

When Jon Chey, Rob Fermier and I founded Irrational Games seventeen years ago, our mission was to make visually unique worlds and populate them with singular characters.

We built Rapture and Columbia, the Von Braun and The Rickenbacker, the Freedom Fortress and some of the nastiest basements a SWAT team ever set foot into.  We created Booker and Elizabeth, the Big Daddy and the Little Sister, MidWives and ManBot. In that time, Irrational has grown larger and more successful than we could have conceived when we began our three-person studio in a living room in Cambridge, MA. It's been the defining project of my professional life.

Now Irrational Games is about to roll out the last DLC for BioShock Infinite and people are understandably asking: What's next?

Seventeen years is a long time to do any job, even the best one. And working with the incredible team at Irrational Games is indeed the best job I've ever had. While I'm deeply proud of what we've accomplished together, my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we've done before. To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers.  In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience. 

I am winding down Irrational Games as you know it. I'll be starting a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor at Take-Two.  That is going to mean parting ways with all but about fifteen members of the Irrational team.   There's no great way to lay people off, and our first concern is to make sure that the people who are leaving have as much support as we can give them during this transition.

Besides financial support, the staff will have access to the studio for a period of time to say their goodbyes and put together their portfolios. Other Take-Two studios will be on hand to discuss opportunities within the company, and we'll be hosting a recruiting day where we'll be giving 3rd party studios and publishers a chance to hold interviews with departing Irrational staff.*

What's next?

In time we will announce a new endeavor with a new goal: To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable. To foster the most direct relationship with our fans possible, we will focus exclusively on content delivered digitally.

When I first contemplated what I wanted to do, it became very clear to me that we were going to need a long period of design. Initially, I thought the only way to build this venture was with a classical startup model, a risk I was prepared to take. But when I talked to Take-Two about the idea, they convinced me that there was no better place to pursue this new chapter than within their walls. After all, they're the ones who believed in and supported BioShock in the first place.

Thanks to Irrational and 2K's passion in developing the games, and the fans who believe in it, BioShock has generated retail revenues of over a half billion dollars and secured an iconic place in gaming. I'm handing the reins of our creation, the BioShock universe, to 2K so our new venture can focus entirely on replayable narrative. If we're lucky, we'll build something half as memorable as BioShock.

We do our best to update an FAQ in this space as questions come in.

-Ken Levine
@iglevine

*If you're a 3rd party interested in interviewing some of the best game developers in the world, please contact chris.bigelow@2k.com

Quindi Levine resta in Take-Two con un team minuscolo (sedici persone) che si concentrerà solo su una roba digital delivery il cui obiettivo è realizzare "giochi narrativo-centrici altamente rigiocabili".

Come si possa coniugare la rigiocabilità al raccontare una storia in un videogioco mi sfugge ma una cosa è certa, se questo è il futuro di Levine e soci è un futuro estremamente differente da quello visto in Bioshock et similari.

Turrican3

CitazioneJP LeBreton ‏@vectorpoem
Nobody's willing to call out toxic egomaniacs if they're successful and influential. It doesn't have to be this way.

https://twitter.com/vectorpoem/status/435838769510350848

Minchia se ci va duro. :sweat: :sweat: :sweat:

(questo signore ha lavorato a Bioshock 1/2)

Turrican3

Citazione[...] In any creative form, as we instinctively try to picture the creator behind the artwork, and it’s much easier as an audience to boil the author down to a single person: the director, the lead singer, the conductor. But this obscures the realities of how that work was produced and why it is the way it is.

Often, when we play a game and lament about an obviously terrible design decision in one stage and ask nobody in particular “Urgh, why would they design it like that?” the answer isn’t that the creators were idiots, but something much more mundane such as: two level designers worked on different floors of the studio, or a post-it note fell off a monitor.

That doesn’t excuse a poor design decisions, of course, but I think it is worth understanding and appreciating the very real and often straightforward reasons why something is the way it is: because this thing was made by a large team of dispersed and imperfect humans under actual, boring constraints.

Earlier this morning, this tendency to boil the entire creative output of a large studio down to a single individual was starkly clear in a press release about the closure of Irrational Games. Irrational, responsible for the Bioshock series, is headed by one of mainstream gaming’s better known auteur figures, Ken Levine.

The press release, written by Levine, explains how the studio is closing down so that he can take a much smaller group of 15 employees to work on smaller games. The rest of the studio’s employees will lose their jobs.

It’s a very weird press release. Studio closures and downsizings are not rare in the videogame industry, but the idea that the studio would be shut, with almost everyone losing their job, because the creative lead feels like doing something new, is incredibly strange. Taken at face value, it implies that the many other people who created Irrational’s games are irrelevant to the studio’s creative output: just grunts that can be replaced when Levine gets bored of them, like sacrificing the servants when the master passes away.

Taken at face value, it’s an almost shockingly arrogant megalomania, one that ironically plays into the exact labour and capital conditions the studio’s games attempted to critique.

But it’s a press release, so of course there is more to it than face value. My suspicion would be that publishers 2K are closing down Irrational for far more typical financial reasons; but in an effort to hold onto the valuable source that is Levine’s auteur-ness for future products, allowed him to write this heartfelt letter about what he would like to do next.

The other employees are, again, hidden from sight. A couple of paragraphs are spent benevolently discussing how they will be assisted in finding new jobs (conveniently with no mention of the fact that such new jobs will inevitably require life-altering relocation to studios in other cities for many employees), but the main thrust of the release is “What Will Levine Do Next?”, relying on the crux that its audience has long personified Irrational’s creative output in Levine alone.

By taking advantage of the need to personify the creative output of the studio and promising new and exciting projects from the supposed auteur, the labour conditions that lead to many others losing their jobs is successfully downplayed.

And it is successful. Many games news outlets reporting on the closure are taking the press release at face value, mentioning the job losses briefly as sidenotes before moving on to an exciting anticipation of What Levine Will Do Next.

I don’t think it is necessarily the job of journalists to fight for the industry’s employees. That’s what unions are for – or would be if the games industry wasn’t so embarrassingly lacking in unions. Indeed, there’s a very valid case to be made that games journalists and developers are already too chummy with a lack of critical distance between the two fields.

But there is a responsibility to read between the lines of press releases to find the “actual” story. But it’s not simply a case of lazy journalism, either. Even if we tried to get the story from former employees, they would not be able to speak to us: either because of contracts they’ve signed or, much more simply, because they still want to find a new job in the industry. And so, they remain invisible to us.

The ease with which 2K and Levine are able to spin a studio’s closure and the loss of over a hundred jobs to one of an auteur’s exciting new venture reveals just how poorly we – journalists, players, critics – appreciate the full breadth of people whose labour creates these works.

But theirs are the only voices we will hear on the matter, and so the myth of the great creative auteur continues.

http://theconversation.com/games-by-humans-23399

Articolo sul quale ci sarebbe tanto da riflettere, secondo me.

Bluforce

Il succo dell'articolo è riassumibile con questa frase:
By taking advantage of the need to personify the creative output of the studio and promising new and exciting projects from the supposed auteur, the labour conditions that lead to many others losing their jobs is successfully downplayed.

Prima o poi, come successo in altre occasioni, usciranno i retroscena circa questa situazione.

Joe


Turrican3

Per fortuna avevo copincollato... certo che questi tweet andrebbero grabbati per maggiore sicurezza.

Turrican3

#8
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211139/Irrational_Games_journalism_and_airing_dirty_laundry.php

Molto molto interessante.

Comunque sembra che stringi stringi il problema sia il solito: Infinite ha venduto molto al di sotto delle aspettative dopo uno sviluppo lunghissimo e, manco a dirlo, altrettanto costoso. Take-Two avrebbe quindi pianificato circa un anno addietro la chiusura di Irrational in caso di rientro economico insoddisfacente, e a quanto pare così è stato.

Biggy

Quindi è finita (cit.) per Bioshock  :sweat: :'( ?

Turrican3

#10
CitazioneWhen reached for comment, a 2K games spokesperson referred us back to Levine's blog post on the Irrational Games website. When asked about the future of the BioShock series, we were given the following statement:

"BioShock is one of our most beloved and critically acclaimed franchises, and we are indebted to Ken and the talented team at Irrational Games for their contributions to the series with BioShock and BioShock Infinite; the latter being one of the most decorated games of 2013.

"The BioShock universe remains a rich creative canvas for many untold stories, and we look forward to exploring the next BioShock experience."

http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/21/5431332/what-irrational-games-closure-means-for-the-industry

Questo un commento dell'azienda raccolto da Polygon.

Per il resto, Bioshock2 non l'ho ancora iniziato ma leggevo in giro che è molto, molto sbilanciato verso la parte shooter. Tenuto conto che dei tre episodi è l'unico sul quale non ha lavorato Levine immagino si possa fare 2+2.

Su una cosa però puoi scommettere: titoli che sviluppi con team "grossi" per cinque anni e poi fanno 4-5 milioni di copie* sarà difficile vederne da loro in futuro.


* come un Bioshock Infinite a caso

Biggy

Mah, vado a giocare a Infinite :thumbup:, Bioshock senza Levine è niente  :thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown:.

Joe

Citazione di: Turrican3 il 21 Febbraio, 2014, 18:56:44

Per il resto, Bioshock2 non l'ho ancora iniziato ma leggevo in giro che è molto, molto sbilanciato verso la parte shooter. Tenuto conto che dei tre episodi è l'unico sul quale non ha lavorato Levine immagino si possa fare 2+2.


È vero che sia più shooter di BS1, ma imho lo è meno di Infinite.

Turrican3

Ah. :|
Ennesima conferma che si devono sempre prendere le cose che si leggono in Rete con un pizzico (abbondante?! :D) di buonsenso.

Joe

Citazione di: Turrican3 il 24 Febbraio, 2014, 10:20:00
Ah. :|
Ennesima conferma che si devono sempre prendere le cose che si leggono in Rete con un pizzico (abbondante?! :D) di buonsenso.

Questa è l'impressione che ha dato a me, Infinite mi è piaciuto abbastanza ma ci sono delle cose che avrei sicuramente cambiato.