Runic Games 'Fantasizing' About XBLA Release For Torchlight
A little over a year after the collapse of Flagship Studios, direct descendant Runic Games is preparing to release dungeon crawler Torchlight. But while the Diablo-like RPG is currently exclusive to the PC, CEO Max Schaefer admitted that the team wouldn't mind seeing their game on consoles.
"We talk about it a lot. We fantasize about getting the [Xbox Live Arcade] version, and that would probably be the one we did... the XBLA one," Schaefer told 1UP.
Runic Games has other commitments however, with Schaefer saying that "we're really committed to making the MMO version next, and we're a pretty small studio. We just have one little team."
If Torchlight ever made it to XBLA though, the team at Runic feels that it would be successful. "We look at it and we say, 'This would really do great," Schaefer said.
Torchlight is currently slated for release at the end of October, and will focused exclusively on single-player. It's being positioned as a budget download on the PC, and will include a full suite of development tools upon release. While any console version would necessarily lose the modding aspect, Torchlight's lightweight accessibility would seemingly make it an ideal fit for services like XBLA and PlayStation Network.
For now though, Runic is committed to developing the massively multiplayer spinoff of Torchlight after it's released to the public. Look for it on PC on October 27, with the Mac release date to be announced later.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
