This has been percolating for about a week now, but it’s official – Epic Mickey creator Junction Point Studios has been shut down by parent company Disney, putting Warren Spector and about 140 others out of work. Coming as it does so quickly on the also-anticipated-but-also-sad THQ fire sale, one can’t help but feel that attrition seems awfully high for early 2013. Hopefully it’s not a harbinger of things to come.
Epic Mickey never did as well as Disney had hoped, though I think the company’s desires for the franchise may have been a little unrealistic. The first one shipped in 2007 as a Wii exclusive, moving around 1.3 million units. That’s not too bad for a platform-specific title, and honestly it’s more than I would have expected for a Mickey Mouse game. Spector’s (of Deus Ex and System Shock fame) involvement surely didn’t hurt; he did his Master’s thesis on old cartoons and is a serious Disney historian. Unfortunately Epic Mickey was apparently plagued by bad camera controls and never fared that well in the critical world. 2012’s sequel shipped for multiple platforms but didn’t perform; according to Joystiq it sold about 530,000 units due in large part to massive price cuts during Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving American shopping binge where you can buy an island for eleven cents.
Spector has spoken of retirement for a while now. As far back as the first Epic Mickey he said he only had a handful of games left in him; five years later he’s 56 years old and one of the longest-lasting and best-respected developers in the business. With the shuttering of his most recent studio it wouldn’t surprise me if he calls it a day, either fully retiring or perhaps phasing into a more comfortable, flexible consultancy role. It’d be a pity to lose him in either case, but you can’t fault the man’s dedication to the industry. I’m sad that Junction Point is no more, but in the end I’m not that surprised. Disney is making a lot of corporate changes. The good news is that Austin, Texas, Junction Point’s former home, is a pretty good ecosystem for game development, and the studio’s personnel should be able to find work. I wish them the best.
The other, bigger collapse is that of publisher THQ. They’d been struggling forever. The beleaguered firm owned or had rights to a handful of pretty good IPs – Saints Row, Company of Heroes, Metro, Darksiders – but a catastrophically stupid foray into semi-tablets (or whatever the hell the uDraw was) essentially sealed the company’s fate two years ago. What they were thinking getting into peripherals, and limited-use, limited-audience peripherals at that, is completely beyond me. Sometimes decisions are made for indescribably foolish reasons; sometimes the company leadership is actually misguided enough to believe it’ll work.
The high-profile failure of Kaos Studios’ Homefront (also not a surprise to me, though I could reasonably be accused of Monday morning quarterbacking at this point) didn’t help matters. Kaos was never in a position to develop a shooter intended to compete with Call of Duty, and I commend them for doing as well as they did. Their story is proof that THQ leadership is heavily responsible for the fall of the once-strong publisher. EVP Danny Bilson caused interminable chaos at Kaos, among other things insisting on a seemingly-minor story change to Homefront that utterly ruined the game’s credibility. While Kaos employees are quick to admit that the game’s failure was more their fault than Bilson’s, it’s further proof that THQ leadership was making decisions that weren’t for the good of its properties.
They’d hoped to hold together, perhaps even emerging from bankruptcy or getting bought, but it wasn’t to be. Instead the publisher’s assets were sold at auction last week, and frankly, a lot of other companies in the business made out like bandits. Germany’s Crytek, inexplicably working on Homefront 2, picked up the Homefront IP for half a million dollars. Ubi got South Park and a studio, THQ Montreal, for about six million. SEGA nabbed Company of Heroes and Homeworld developer Relic, perhaps THQ’s most valuable property, for $26M. And Koch Media, AKA European publisher Deep Silver, bought the Metro franchise and Saints Row creator Volition for just under $30M.
Rather surprisingly, Darksiders developer Vigil Games not only didn’t get sold, it didn’t get any bids – meaning the studio was to be shut down. It now looks like Crytek is going to head off that problem by opening a new studio in Austin (eh? eh? Austin?), one that will apparently employ pretty much everyone who once worked at Vigil. Where this leaves the Darksiders property is unclear.
Game studios shut down all the time; publishers much less often. THQ was once one of the biggest American publishers, but it’s been in decline for a decade and a series of missteps doomed it. Junction Point, a studio, just didn’t sell enough games – that’s the usual reason developers go under. Much has been made of the apparently endless consolidation going on in the games industry right now, yet developers seem to spring up as rapidly as they go down, and despite that consolidation I still see a landscape with a reasonable number of publishers. The rise of super-indies, Steam Greenlight, and Kickstarter projects may yet redefine the face of game development, forcing major publishers to reevaluate production values and perhaps quit valorizing graphics at the expense of original ideas. It’s far too early to say, however, and in the meantime it’s just kind of sad news. These days whenever a studio or publisher goes down I find myself thinking not of the games that are in limbo, but the people who’ll inevitably wind up in unemployment lines. The human cost tends to be greater than the creative one, and 2013 is showing no signs of being less than a bloodthirsty year.
Send an email to the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
A NeoGAF poster once compiled a list of all the studios who have shut down over the course of this generation. It’s a frightening list, with some serious talent seemingly thrown on the scrap heap.
There’s a counter argument that the rise of Android/iOS and indie gaming would mean a list of start ups over that same period would be even greater, but for me that doesn’t sit right in the same context and is a separate issue.
It’s particularly bad when a large publisher goes under because everyone under that umbrella is put at risk, and job losses become inevitable. Like you say though, THQ seemed to have been in trouble for a while. Somewhere around the half way point of this generation they tried to step up and compete with EA, Activision and Ubisoft, wasting huge amounts of money on Homefront – a failed attempt to take on COD and Battlefield – and uDraw – a failed attempt to take on the plastic peripheral market. Both were disasters and I think both cost THQ a huge amount.
I just hope South Park doesn’t suffer too much in the transition to Ubisoft. That’s my most anticipated game of 2013.
I though 2012 was going to be the year of the next big video game blow up and/or collapse. It kinda happened but not fully. Except for a very few hand full of games, people are just refusing to pay $60 to $70 for a game these days. Right or wrong, that is reality. I’m hearing rumors from both Sony and Microsoft that the next gen consoles will both have internet on security measures and will not allow the use of used games. This, in my opinion, will be the swan song for consoles. Piracy is just out of control in the industry in general, and buying a game used was one of the only ways to experience a game a year or two later without having to pay the full price.
I agree with you lakerz that such measures of DRM (and that’s *all* it is) will be bad for consoles. It seems that any time a console is genuinely successful (PS2, Wii) it’s because of a bunch of dumb mistakes and fortunate timing. When the console makers got what they wanted and everything went right it was shit for consumers.
It’s not that I misunderstand capitalism and the free market, because it’s fairly simple to understand, but I just don’t get how these big business think that playing this fear mongering game will lead them to success. You *can* still be secretly evil behind closed doors if that’s your MO, and have it all as well; “all” being financial success and popular support from consumers. To witness proof, I present the word: Valve.
There may be a New Xbox and a PS4, but I believe that will be the last “generation” of console gaming as we use the term. After that it will be a wild west of hardware manufacturers all putting out competing devices for one universal PC-like platform. Sony and Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Nintendo) will have to get in line or go back to making Walkmans and operating systems.
THQ must have put their foot in it somewhere because that’s one hell of a stable of IPs to hold, to then close down so quickly. It’s strange how, despite the industry growing year on year, the big players keep on falling. While I don’t care so much about the various AAA franchises that are gobbled up by closures, it’s never nice to hear about the unemployment it causes — especially if its due to terrible decision-making higher up. My hope is that these devs band together independently and produce something smaller and tighter using their existing ideas without any sort of publisher intervention.
I just can’t see how the multi-million dollar AAA smash hit production model can be sustainable given how financially risky it is, and to some degree how creatively risk-averse it is. With the increasingly accessible PC market solidifying, the likes of the OUYA box (and Steam box) gaining traction, the rise of crowdfunding and indie development, and the rumours surrounding the next-gen consoles (and their inevitable shift towards resembling PCs as xtal says above) I foresee the next few years being very, very interesting indeed. I think there are going to be some shake-ups and I also think xtal’s right with regards to the future being a battleground for PC-alike hardware, it’s kind of inevitable given how savvy everyone is becoming with technology and how desirable choice and personalisation is (from graphics, controls and accessibility options in games right through to mobile apps, internet browsers and plugins). Anyway, slightly OT there, but great article!