f13.net forums - Iron Lore closes

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July 23, 2025, 01:27:35 PM

we're back, baby

No more Titan Quest. No idea what the status of DoW: Soulstorm is, though I'd guess it's in done and delivered.
http://www.ironlore.com/

That is a shame.

:(

Quote from: Stormwaltz on February 28, 2008, 08:32:26 AM

No more Titan Quest. No idea what the status of DoW: Soulstorm is, though I'd guess it's in done and delivered.
http://www.ironlore.com/

Soulstorm has a release date of 3/4 so I'd assume it's already delivered and went gold awhile ago.

maybe they got bored or something. Oh well. I guess I owe TQ a replay to see what they've done great.

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We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who has helped us in the last seven years – our team who moved mountains to create such great games, our publisher THQ who has been a great partner through three product development cycles,

That sucks, they didn't even get a chance to see Soulstorm go live and it might have helped out. It was announced that Relic will handle any patches and follow up with Soulstorm, maybe Relic can add to there staff for the next version of Dawn of War.

I wonder if anyone will pick up TQ now?

Michael Fitch (Creative Manager on TQ) responds to Iron Lore closing:

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Venting my frustrations with PC game-dev

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.

Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a shit what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of shitty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.

Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...

Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Best,
Michael.

Also note that both HRose and SirBruce can be seen participating in the thread.

Yea, I read that whole thread.

Bruce is clueless.

Also, the post is almost as bad as an "I'M LEAVING U GUYZ R MEAN" post.

Meh, piracy. Weak.

Wtf? Why are you insulting your buyer? Yeah I'm sure it's real easy now that you don't need him anymore. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

I think he needs to work at McDonald's or something.

Quote from: schild on February 29, 2008, 01:04:09 AM

Also, the post is almost as bad as an "I'M LEAVING U GUYZ R MEAN" post.

Meh, piracy. Weak.

Yeah, I think it's especially ironic that he makes comment about the "it can't possibly be my fault culture" when the whole point of his long diatribe seems to be "it can't possibly be my fault".

It's all very Brad McQuaid. Let's blame Zoo Tycoon 2. Or 3. Whatever.

Also, I hate the "piracy made my game not sell" angle.

1. Titan Quest was a no-brainer port to the 360 and PS3.
2. It's impossible to convince me or anything WITH A FUNCTIONING BRAIN that if those pirates hadn't have downloaded it, they would've have bought it.

Sorry, but, this guy just needs to go the fuck away.

Quote from: schild on February 29, 2008, 01:04:09 AM

Meh, piracy. Weak.

Piracy encourages MMOGs (because, you know, subscriptions). WoW encourages MMOGs to be like WoW.

Therefore, piracy encourages developers to create WoW-clones. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Wether it is the true problem for this particular game, he is right in general.

Piracy costs money, errors in pirated copies hurt the word of mouth. Which costs even more money. Thats a no-brainer.

Programming for varied hardware is harder than programming for one hardware. That truth should be self-evident as well.

People are stupid. People on the internet doubly so. This very site thrives on that fact.

Of course, a simple "Your copy is pirated, sucker. No more playing for you" instead of a simple crash would have helped their PR.

Piracy costs a nebulous amount of money though. There's no way to exactimate. Now, people being stupid probably costs them a LOT more money than piracy. And of course, having to program for lots of hardware instead of one piece of hardware is... harder. But then, ONCE AGAIN, easy translation to consoles here.

Fucking consoles NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED Diablo clones.

This isn't like some obscure idea either. It's fucking obvious. All we get is the mediocre Untold Legends series and once in a blue moon a Fushigi no Dungeon title gets released in America (COMING SOON TO A DS NEAR YOU).

Anyway, point being, sounds like the business folks at Iron Lore were as dumb as the people this guy is insulting).

Yeah, I had that in my post initially, but I didn't want to insult the Red Names. You never know when one goes mental again! ACK!

Quote from: schild on February 29, 2008, 01:36:37 AM

Fucking consoles NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED Diablo clones.

This isn't like some obscure idea either. It's fucking obvious. All we get is the mediocre Untold Legends series and once in a blue moon a Fushigi no Dungeon title gets released in America (COMING SOON TO A DS NEAR YOU).

Too Human is that last hope on that front. If it fails, I wouldn't expect to see another attempt a big budget Diablo clone on a console for a long time. Especially after the PSO franchise completely shit the bed with Phantasy Star Universe.

Quote from: schild on February 29, 2008, 01:36:37 AM

Piracy costs a nebulous amount of money though. There's no way to exactimate. Now, people being stupid probably costs them a LOT more money than piracy.

It's a difficult question, and I am probably not anything near normal in this regard, but when I was back to being a student just a couple of years ago I had fuck-all money and happily pirated away anything rentable that looked interesting (to usually never play it anyway) while also buying stuff that seemed must-have or was cheaper or predominantly-online. My first play-through of Far Cry for example, was on a backed-up rental. Doom3, I bought, like a sucker. COD1 copied and played, COD2 copied and never played.

Now I'm earning decent money, and can afford it, I've been not only buying anything I bother to play (including a retail copy of Far Cry for my second run-through), COD2 for the actual play-through. COD4 bought and finished. Sure, the copy of Far Cry went down in retail price over those couple of years between by first and second playthrough, but it also got them an easy sale of Crysis, which is still sitting uninstalled behind me, depreciating in retail value. Hell, I went through all my PS2 stuff recently, sorting it into stuff worth playing and not playing. Almost all the pirated PS2 stuff got disposed of, some got replaced by PS2 originals and a big chunk of what was worth playing got bought as Xbox titles for the upscaling 360.

I dunno, I don't feel unique in that I used to pirate when I had no money, and now buy pretty much all my stuff. (probably 5% would be PS2 warez of stuff that I'd never play anyway of stuff that will never get a local release, to check it out.)

Sad that Iron Lore is closing, but I did enjoy reading Michael's diatribe.

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One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

Next time (if there is a next time) don't crash the game when it fails the security check. Complaining that the crashes are giving the game a bad name when you purposefully put those crashes in is, well, I don't know the proper word for it.

A screen freeze along with a text message on the screen of "if you have enjoyed playing so far, please buy the original and support software development" might do better next time.

I guess, you live and learn. Or go out of business. As schild says, ports would (should) have been a no-brainer.

Are you guys kidding? He didn't say a single unreasonable thing in that entire block of text.

He specifically addressed numbers on piracy would-they-buy-it issue. He listed huge, known, game-breaking development issues that are almost never talked about when reviewers or people on this site bitch about a game. But no, he's obviously just bitter and spouting nonsense.

"It's all the developers fault, he didn't develop it for an entirely different platform!" "They didn't include nice messages to pirates who stole the game before it was even released!" Pathetic.

He should go the route that Introversion and countless other indie studios have gone - authentication servers. That solves a lot of your piracy problem.

Also, they said they didn't lose money on it Titan Quest. The entire comment was spent on a game that did OK. What about all those other games that apparently dragged the company down? They are blaming their marginal success and saying "Well, if it had been a breakout hit, we wouldn't have gone under! It's those pirates fault that it wasn't a breakout hit!"

Stupid.

Someone here should just build a Diablo clone using XNA. I don't have much else to add. This topic is stupid and think the man is silly for thinking people would see eye to eye with him after his company just went under.

But come on! Surely the fact that less than 10% of PC games in circulation are legitimate versions has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the non-MMO & non-Steam/Stardock/etc PC game market is dying on its arse?

(I don't do green)

Quote from: NiX on February 29, 2008, 07:25:10 AM

Someone here should just build a Diablo clone using XNA.

Teaching yourself C# in your spare time is hard.

Quote from: NiX on February 29, 2008, 07:25:10 AM

This topic is stupid and think the man is silly for thinking people would see eye to eye with him after his company just went under.

Um his company didn't go under. The poster works for THQ and still is employed by THQ.

Michael Fitch: whiny bitch.

The best bit was the "customers are thickos who try and do other stuff on their PCs and blame our software". Guess what, numbskull? Many of us work in IT and are familiar with the sort of end-users that you describe. We vent with reasonable amount of identity obfuscation among other BOFHs. We don't typically log into sites where our customers are, post under our work affiliation and then call the bulk of respondents of those forums idiots. When you do that, you can expect your hard life as a software developer to get harder in the future.

Righ, people that post on official forums are people that consider working sales in the laptop bag department "working in IT."

Which is to say, those people are thickos. There's a reason people like us avoid the fuck out of those people.

On that same note: His life would get a lot easier if he worked for a standard platform like the 360 or PS3.

Quote from: Simond on February 29, 2008, 08:02:23 AM

I'm with Simond, I'm pro piracy for what thats worth but those #'s were sad and the current state of things is sad. I don't buy many games though so its not really a big deal to me. But aren't both Bioshock and COD4 Steam games? I've never looked but can you get cracked nonsteam versions?

Firstly titan's quest wasn't that good a game... too much repetitive with not enough fun even for games of this type.

A silent crash as a result of a security check is their screw up. I understand putting an event to inform the user makes those checks more discoverable, but a moments thought would have made them realise this would just bring them bad publicity. I'm pretty sure those checks did eventually get found and removed anyway.

Ultimately I can't help feeling microsoft has a lot to do with it. They have sufficient control of the PC Gaming environment that they could easily release an add on or integrated card making it every bit as secure as the XBox360, extend their live system to the PC platform and beef up their certification processes for hardware. If piracy is really hurting as much as this text indicates then game developers would flock to it and they could even start bringing down the purchase costs for b-list titles like titan's quest. Easy stuff, but microsoft probably quite likes the current environment. The availability of pirated games helps sell PC's while at the same time moving games to a platform that they own and sell directly.

I don't understand how you can be in favor of pirating games.

You know, unless you're a douchebag with a heightened sense of entitlement. Back when I was in school, I still payed for games. That just meant I couldn't pay every single game I wanted.

It's different if the game is simply not available to be bought, but really, it's nonsense to think stealing someone's work is ok.

What's it called if you "pirate" a game you already own but are too lazy to dig it out of a box?

Because that's what I am, Lazy.

That's different, because you've already Paid. While I am not in favor of pirating and stealing games, I AM in favor of being able to use Your copy how You please, including making personal backups, or ISO dumping to avoid disc swaps or whathaveyou.

Quote from: KallDrexx on February 29, 2008, 09:03:55 AM

Um his company didn't go under. The poster works for THQ and still is employed by THQ.

Well then. I have to agree with Righ in this case. Whiny fucking bitch.

I bought TQ a few months ago when I was in my brief throes of HGL fever. Steam version. It would not run on Vista. I emailed ILE, I posted on the Steam forums, I emailed Valve, I went to the TQ fan forums... I even had a Vista techie I know remotely control my computer to try to get it to work. This was four days after I bought my new machine so it was a clean install.

I never got any official support. The game is still in my steam account and I can't play it. Fuck this guy blaming his consumers. New line of work.