Dungeon Siege And Supreme Commander Developer Suffers From Devastating Layoffs

So sad to see a talented studio like this get hit so hard.

Its sad to see, but it's also hard to forgive him for selling out and consequently running Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander into the ground. He needs to go back to his roots, not continue with this sterile decline.

While I don't think too highly of Kickstarter, I have to wonder if it's going to become the last available place on the market where small and medium size game developers can thrive, before the big developers eat them alive. The games industry looks like it's going to have only two types of releases, AAA big-budget games, and whatever trickles thru Kickstarter, and no middle-ground.

If it's any comfort, cold or otherwise, the industry is obviously vaulting headlong towards a crash. The current AAA model isn't actually profitable for most firms. Freelance developers are basically living paycheck to paycheck and they are at most one or two milestone payment failures away from utter collapse.

Sad to say, I also feel that the AAA model is heading to a Guitar Hero-Rock Band type of crash, but of course it will have a much more bigger impact that the crashes of said franchises/bussiness models. Let's us hope that whatever comes out of that crash is better than what we have now, I wonder who will be the saviour of the industry this time? Nintendo with Mario again? who knows.

My guess is that the crash will take a form similar to that of '83. Money, interest and attention will fly far away from consoles for a while. This time the American, Japanese and European console-exclusive developer scenes will take a severe beating and the ones that cannot make games PC gamers want to play will have a hard time even surviving. Those that do well will do so by putting as many eggs as possible into that basket. Obviously the profits are slimmer and PC gamers are legendarily fickle so many console developers will have a very hard time readjusting. Bland games designed to work within the narrowest possible hardware limitations whilst appealing to the broadest possible audience will now have to compete with games designed to fully take advantage of a specific platform and to cater to an audience with generally much higher standards.

The timing for all of this seems off. AoEO is going to support, and they didn't have any other projects to carry them? And then the kickstarter still has 5/6 of it's time to go and is on track to make it, but then layoff now? Even if it made 1.1M instantly they wouldn't get the money for another few months...