FASA Founder: Microsoft 'Destroyed' Dev Culture at Former MechWarrior Studio
"I don't think the studio ever really had a chance," said Weisman to GamesIndustry. "It was destroyed right in the beginning."
"The two reasons they bought us was, one, they wanted the catalogue of intellectual properties and, two, they felt that we had developed a really good development culture," he said. "And the reality is that, pretty much from the day we moved to Redmond, that development culture was destroyed."
Wiesman says that he was instrumental in making sure Bungie's unique culture was maintained after Microsoft acquired the Halo developer in 2000:
When we were acquiring Bungie, they wanted me to sit down with the owners of Bungie and tell them how well the transition went," he explained. "And it was like - 'what planet are you guys on?' This transition did not go well. And actually I became the lead vocal pain in the ass to get things done very different for Bungie.FASA was shut down in 2007. Weisman is now licensing his properties back from Microsoft through his new company Smith & Tinker, including the MechWarrior franchise. Piranha Games is set to develop a new MechWarrior sequel--provided a publisher deal can be established.I tried to convince them to leave Bungie in Chicago, but not winning that I did succeed in getting them to put them in a walled off room, which didn't follow any of the other Microsoft stuff. We were much better able to defend Bungie's culture than we were FASA's culture.
"We're operating under some pretty tight restrictions of the license that make publishing the games kind of challenging," said Weisman of MechWarrior.
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the archvile
replyMicrosoft doesn't care about gaming people!
Seriously.
FASA? Dead!
Bungie? Split!
ACES? Dead!
Ensemble? Dead!
Games for Windows is a running joke. Microsoft Game Studios has ZERO PC titles in development right now. Not even a console port.-
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Halo: Reach, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Forza 2, L4D 2, Fable 3.
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Well they're exclusives, so honestly what difference does it make?
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Oh, Microsoft cares. It'd be nice if they cared about more than goddamned Halo, of course.
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They love them some Fable too.
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Access Software. :(
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Exceptional groups have chemistry. Chemistry is a strange property that cannot be forced into creation; it just happens when the conditions are right. Those conditions are impossible to determine, so when it sparks and the whole thing starts to ignite, it should just be left to itself. The reaction becomes self-sustaining if conditions persist. Interference of any sort can douse the reaction. Once it's gone, it's gone. You will not be able to restart or recreate it.
A smart manager would institute a near total hands off policy in these cases.
That's been my personal experience. I worked for a startup in the semiconductor industry. We were purchased by a billion dollar company. Their funding allowed us to become 100 million dollar per year business unit, and their managerial interference destroyed that same business. The product line was canceled when it all fell apart due to massive loss of personnel.
I guess that's a fancy way of saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it."-
Yeah, unfortunately Microsoft is legendary for enforcing their culture on newly acquired entities (just like Jordan Weisman said in this article). Large companies tend to do that because it makes business sense for them, even if it ends up killing the chemistry that was originally in the acquired company.
Sometimes there are glitzy press releases saying that they'll be "hands-off" or isolate themselves from the newly acquired company, but in the long-term, resistance is futile.
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Bioware, id, Remedy, Relic. Quite a few ACE development houses you missed out. Microsoft are a set of total tossers imo. They want the death of PC gaming so we all go buy XBOX's, well, it ain't gonna happen.
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Lol, it's weird how MS is still making DX APIs (That DX 11 has 3 great new major features) while now ignoring the PC games completely! Though, to be sure, it seems that they're just merely in the business of making and then selling the DX APIs to the developers in preparation for their future consoles that would support them.
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Alan Wake was a Remedy-only deal in the beginning, a baby of Sam Lake's.
Trouble only started when Remedy went to MS for help/publishing for whatever god-damned reason.
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Don't forget Popcap games! :D
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Worth noting, Bungie is still partnered with Microsoft despite their new independence, and while Ensemble itself may be no more, both spinoffs Robot and Bonfire also appear to be continuing the relationship, only as independent developers (Bonfire I'm not 100% certain, but Robot has been handling the post-release Halo Wars updates).
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What baffles my mind, is I thought they had some kind of 'Software Development Enviroment' where if developers programmed a game to work on the 360, it would automatically work for Windows....
And that would be their selling point, .. Developers make 1 game, and reap the benefits of the PC and Console world....
What ever happened to that plan? -
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OUCH!
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