Fallout 3 is outstanding

[rocketpig]

mrstickball said:

rocketpig said:
Stickball, we all know that no matter how well a game sells, incompetent management can bury the company. Interplay was a damned fine company in the late 90s with several high profile franchises under their wing. Still, the company tanked.

Comparing late 90s PC sales to modern multiplatform sales is ludicrous. Shit, even Half-Life can't measure up to that comparison. In the late 90s, PC gaming was niche, at best. Hardware was insanely expensive, had to be updated constantly, and the internet gaming craze hadn't taken hold yet.

That's like bitching about the Model T being a failure when compared to the Volkwagen Beetle. Time and market size have to be taken into consideration.

...You really think PC gaming was niche in the late 90s? That's pretty funny. Why is it that PC gaming is supposedly much bigger & better now, but there are far less 'big' PC exclusives versus the mid to late 90s? I'd tend to believe the opposite is true, given how many titles are forced to go to consoles to break even.

I do agree that Interplay's failure could be due to incompotent management. However, I just don't think it adds up that Fallout was some sort of rampant success, but still bit the dust and got sold as soon as it was conveniently possible.

I'm kind of close to a similar issue with the closure of Dynamix - one of Sierra's biggest & best developers in the 90s (they made the Aces series, Betrayl at Krondor/Betrayl series, A-10 series, and of course, Mechwarrior/Earthsiege). Dynamix was a great company, but got axed when Sierra got sold to Vivendi. They were a profitable, successful studio with a blundering publisher...So what happened? As soon as the studio got axed, they re-formed in to 3 different, smaller, studios that are very succuessful since their former titles did well. I now work for one of the said studios, and all 3 do work together on new projects (the newest being a Red Baron sequel). Their Tribes sequel is doing awesome, Aces just came out, and Marble Blast has been a great success on 3 different platforms.

But when we look at Black Isle - and their 'sequel' in Trokia - Why did they close as well? I tend to think that, despite the pedigree of what they were, their titles were unsuccessful, which makes me believe the former Fallout developers may not have been the financial powerhouse that shio claims them to be.

Yeah, it was niche. I was a hardcore PC gamer during that time and very few people I knew played PC games. Everyone owned a SNES or a PSOne or another console, but PC gaming was pretty small in comparison. Valve just announced that Half-Life has sold 9.3m copies. In 1999, I remember that number was a little over 250,000, about a year after the game released. It was only after CS took off did Half-Life become the monstrosity it is today. Plus, it helped that after a few years, nearly any off-the-shelf computer could run the game. When it released, that was far from the case. I spent $1700 on a PC rig to run that game shortly after release and it still didn't run on the highest settings possible. I think you're forgetting just how expensive PC gaming was until early this decade.

As for multiplatform PC titles today, isn't that obvious? Budgets vs. single-platform returns. Hell, it's even bleeding into the console realm it's gotten so bad. And you don't think budget size has something to do with it? If you can make a PC-only game for $100,000 and have it sell 50,000 copies, you're probably pretty happy with yourself. If that same game today costs $10,000,000 to make, you have to sell just a few more copies to break even. The entire notion of exclusivity is quickly vanishing and your argument is rather silly.

Interplay had to have had piss-poor management... Look at their franchises:

- Fallout

- Descent

- Earthworm Jim

- Baldur's Gate

If not for horrible management decisions, how could a company with that kind of pedigree from 1993-1999 fail so miserably?