http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08 ... ent-page-2
Titanic Quest: Crate Speak About Grim Dawn
By John Walker on August 3rd, 2011 at 11:03 am
Crate Entertainment, an indie development studio born out of the ashes of Titan Quest creators Iron Lore, have been working on their first major project for a while now. Grim Dawn, built using the tech behind Titan Quest, will hopefully be entering alpha at some point this year, and it’s a game we’re extremely excited to see. So we caught up with Crate’s core man, Arthur Bruno, to learn more. In a wonderful interview he tells us about the fall of Iron Lore, and the birth of Crate, explains where Titan Quest fell short, and how Grim Dawn is not attempting to appeal to casual players. In fact, it’s going to be actively hostile toward them. And he introduces us to the concept of rainbow farting machines.
RPS: Can you explain a little about how Iron Lore came to an end, and then how Crate began?
Arthur Bruno: There were many decisions and factors within and outside the studio’s control that lead directly or indirectly, over the course of several years, to the studio’s ultimate demise. In some ways it is similar to when an individual suffers some misfortune like a car accident and then looks back and thinks about how the whole terrible event could have been averted if any number of little, seemingly innocuous events or decisions had played out differently. “If only that other guy had been going the speed limit, if only I hadn’t stopped to get the coffee that spilled in my lap and distracted me, if only my boss hadn’t kept me at work late to fill out my TPS reports.”
Ultimately though, all the decisions the company made and all the events that transpired, lead to a situation where Iron Lore couldn’t survive a gap between projects. This is generally what has occurred when a seemingly healthy independent studio suddenly vanishes after releasing a game.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that many, if not most independent studios, make little or no money off the actual sales of games they develop. If you take the case of Titan Quest and Immortal Throne, information I’ve been given put the combined sales over a million copies in late 2008. At that time I heard that it had reached profitability for THQ. Since then it has continued to do surprisingly well in digital sales given its age. Yet, the owners of Iron Lore never and probably will never receive a royalty payment due to the structure of the funding deal.
Studios survive by jumping right from one publisher funded project to the next and try to build enough of a profit margin into their development budgets that they can potentially survive a few months between funded projects. Supporting a thirty person development team, similar to what Iron Lore and most mid-sized studios employ can cost $300,000 a month or more when you add up salaries, office rent, taxes, and other operating costs. Those costs don’t all stop after the last publisher payment is cashed and until funding starts for a new game, the studio is just burning through whatever they’ve managed to stash away.
It generally takes a hit game before a studio can build up enough of a nest-egg that there is some breathing room in this cycle. Until that happens, the count-down to bankruptcy is always running and each new funded project just puts a little more time on the clock. For a variety of reasons, some just bad luck, Iron Lore couldn’t line up that next project fast enough and the clock ran out…
RPS: Were you happy with Titan Quest? Was there anything about it you wished you could have done but couldn’t?
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Good read so far. The part about how he would have changed Titan Quest and the perception of box art and so on sums up how I feel about Diablo 3.