Supreme Cmdr Posted November 26, 2005 Report Share Posted November 26, 2005 Another one bites the dust. Ganked over at EA quote: Stainless Steel Studios, the makers of Real Time Strategy games such as the winner of GameSpy's PC Game of the Year 2001 award Empire Earth, is no more. A fact leaving the January 2006 release of their now final game, Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War, in jeopardy. No official word has been given yet, but the company's site was taken down earlier this week. Granted, an incident which in itself may be writen off as being the result of techinical difficulties, but the existence of a thread - over at R&F Heaven - started and visited by several now former Stainless Steel employees confirms the sad news. They didn't, however, detail how come the studio was closed just weeks before a gold copy of Rise & Fall where to be handed over to its publisher Midway. There is ongoing speculation as to whether or not a possible bad relationship between Midway and Stainless Steel, notorious for their lack of consistency when it comes to publishers, was the reason for the abolishment of the studio. Stainless Steel Studios was founded by Age of Empires designer Rick Goodman and other Ensemble Studios employees. Their fate, as well as the fate of all other Stainless Steel employees, is currently unknown. quote: This is true, SSSI is no more. I can't give details as to why, but I can tell you the product is in excellent shape, the team was in high morale and plowing ahead at full steam, and we were just weeks from gold disk. When making games, not all factors are under your control. If one of those uncontrolable factors are important to your company and product, and fails you, bad things like this can happen. It's an unfortunante part of life. You can only learn from the experience, hopefully educate others on your experiences, and everyone in the games industry gets stronger as a result. Still, this is truly a dissapointment. The talent of our team was incredible, the synergy we had, amazing. We would have been a gold-mine pickup for one of the bigger publishers if they wanted a top-notch RTS game company under their wing.. but alas... People are spreading to the wind now, unfortunantly seperating some amazing talent that worked on, what I feel is one of, if not the most, modern RTS Technology in the industry. 7 years, and.. hmm.. something like 70 programming years (man years) put into the product. If Rise & Fall is released by someone else (its just a few bugs from finishing), you guys will love it! RAF is an RTS evolutionary game, and its a shame we won't be around to write its XPacks and sequels. I think the biggest loss here is the fans who love RTS. The death of our AAA RTS company means 1 less team driving to increase the industry's limits. It means 7 years of technology and the team who knew it like the back of their hand, put on the shelf. I feel bad for you guys. :-( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Prezioso Posted November 27, 2005 Report Share Posted November 27, 2005 Man, PC developers are dropping like flies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamotto Posted November 27, 2005 Report Share Posted November 27, 2005 Curious to see what happened? sad news. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain McMahon Posted November 29, 2005 Report Share Posted November 29, 2005 I wonder how the industry got to this level of "excel or die" situation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supreme Cmdr Posted November 30, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 30, 2005 When publishers got greedier and stopped taking risks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supreme Cmdr Posted December 5, 2005 Author Report Share Posted December 5, 2005 Apparently Rise&Fall is still going to be released. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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