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Businesses Entertainment Games

Troika Games Closes 225

Posted by Zonk from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
Voodoo Extreme has the story that talented development house Troika Games has closed its doors as a result of lack of funding for future projects. Rumours of their closure have circled for the last week or so, but today's announcement makes the closure official. Troika is best known for its table-top RPG adaptations, such as The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade. From the announcement: "We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years, it has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company. But we especially want to thank all of our employees - we had the pleasure of working with the some of the most dedicated, hard working, creative people in the industry, and we really appreciate all that they did for Troika."
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Troika Games Closes More

Troika Games Closes

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  • Another Sad Adieu (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Thursday February 24, 2005 @01:50PM (#11768155) Homepage Journal
    we had the pleasure of working with the some of the most dedicated, hard working, creative people in the industry, and we really appreciate all that they did for Troika."

    Meanwhile the ruthless [slashdot.org] prosper [gamesindustry.biz] while throwing breadcrumbs [firstadopter.com] to their employees. Seems one more failure ensures the continued trend.

    It's a hard world. [slashdot.org]

    New form EA: Mail Order Monsters: John Madden Edition! Listen to John's witty repartee as your monster slugs it out for survival!

    • This is why its more important than ever to support smaller independent studios. Eventually it will just be EA and Activision and they will pwn joo...

      • Re:Another Sad Adieu (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TrappedByMyself ( 861094 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:08PM (#11768356)
        This is why its more important than ever to support smaller independent studios.

        Why? Support the studios that make the best games.
        If everyone supports a small studio, they become a big studio, then the same people will hate them for it. People start businesses to make money. If you turn capitalism into a social cause, you're just making person A rich as opposed to making person B richer. If you want to fight a fight and feel good about yourself, go volunteer your time to disadvantaged youths or something.

        • Re:Another Sad Adieu (OT) (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:30PM (#11768579)
          For me, it's that I consider myself a Capitalist rather than a Monopolist. The guys who thought up capitalist economic theory did _NOT_ have the USA's current economy in mind when they thought of capitalism, and many of them even wrote about the need for people to be vigilant because of the constant danger of a capitalist economy turning into a monopolist or oligopolist economy like we have now.

          I honestly believe that a true capitalism is better for consumers. You don't have monopolies like Microsoft stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have cartels like the RIAA stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have oligopolies like the big cable TV providers stifling innovation and price-gouging.

          I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.

          As for your crap about helping disadvantaged youths, how do you think they got to be disadvantaged? Maybe because the middle class works for chicken-feed at massive companies like EA, and their relatively low income drives down the price of low-income services and such, which drives down the pay of the parents of those disadvantaged kids. Or maybe because big companies like EA like to work with as few employees as possible, which increases unemployment and competition for other jobs, which drops pay, which also leads to those disadvantaged kids being poor.
          • Please get a clue.

            In true Capitalism, there is no one preventing monopolies. Bill Gates would own countries in that world. The US system is decent in that the government wacks monopolies when they get too big. Yes, there is some bribing and crap, but its the best system that's actually been implemented so far. You do realise the EA was one of those start-ups you romanticize about. Those startups either died or grew up and ate each other. That's the way of things. Businesses scratch and claw their way to yo
            • No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

              People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise p

              • Your excerpts are all over the place, taking things out of context. The "corporation" in this case is more akin to trade guilds and certifications. The section discusses the issue of goverments by law restricting the labor pool through the requirements of long apprenticeships, to maintain high wages.
                The exclusive privileges of corporations are the principal means it makes use of for this purpose. The exclusive privilege of an incorporated trade necessarily restrains the competition, in the town where i
                • He mentions several types of corporations. From the East Indies Company, to education corporations and so forth. Seems pretty clear from that, to me at least, that modern corporations would fall into the same category. To me, it seems he didn't trust any corporate structure, because it isolated the workers from customers, decreasing accountability and efficiency.
                  • He mentions several types of corporations. From the East Indies Company, to education corporations and so forth.
                    He discusses what we commonly refer to as corporations in other sections of the book. The specific section dealt with incorporation of individual trades and their protection by laws of goverment, which result in monopolies of labor talent.
                    To me, it seems he didn't trust any corporate structure, because it isolated the workers from customers, decreasing accountability and efficiency.
                    The corp
          • I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.
            The video game market of the early 1990s was a different time. Games were simpler and cheaper to
          • Um, he probably meant kids who lost their parents or had some sort of physical or mental disability. I doubt you can blame EA for crippling children, though I am sure you would love to. Listen, EA is not forcing people to work for them, they can freely leave, and should if they feel they are treated poorly. Exclusive deals with the NFL absolutely should be illegal...as far as that goes, it's bad. Other than that, they are just another company out there. There are more great games out there than I could
          • Adam Smith was well aware of monopoly issues. He wasn't that worried about them since monopolies were easily controlled by government and governments by society. However he was was concerned about corporations and warned vigerously about allowing "immortal persons" (perpetual corporations) to accumulate economic power in the society. What he advocated was corporations disbanding, selling the assets every 25 years or so and perhaps an entirely new stock offering for some of those assets.

            Of course we are
    • Meanwhile the ruthless prosper while throwing breadcrumbs to their employees. Seems one more failure ensures the continued trend.

      I certainly don't disagree about the intimidating weight of EA, but, respectfully, I think it oversimplifies things to position Troika and EA as David vs. Goliath. Troika had some great ideas and some great licenses, but their trio of games suffered from consistenly lackluster technical execution, and, in the case of Arcanum, a presentation so glacial that it dissuaded the major

  • no buy-out? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theVP ( 835556 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @01:52PM (#11768178)
    I'm surprised that their games didn't attract enough attention from EA and Activision to get bought out in a situation like this. There must have been more to their lack of funding than meets the eye...

    • Re:no buy-out? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Alkaiser ( 114022 )
      What was the last RPG EA made? They're essentially the same as Microsoft. They won't make any game that they can't re-use the engine for, and then turn around and flip out a sequel to in 12 months. RPGs don't do that, and so, there was no need for Troika.
      • I believe the last EA rpg was something about LOTR.

        I can't condemn EA or Microsoft for wanting to reuse their engines. This helps them to concentrate on content, rather that having to develop a whole new engine from scratch just because computers are slightly more powerful a year later.

        If Troika didn't did this, maybe they were employing too much time on developing software rather than games.

        (But...didn't Vampire use the Source Engine?)
        • Yeah, it did.

          Can you imagine trying to finish a game using an 3rd party engine that hasn't been completed yet?

          Not fun.

          As far as Microsoft and EA developing better content, I can't honestly say that's the case. It's mostly the same content.
    • They had good ideas but terrible execution. Their games were consistently buggy as hell. Nobody wants to pick up a company that can't produce solid games on schedule that sell a lot of units. C.R.E.A.M.

      Also the RPG market is a niche. It's small potatoes for EA. There are really only two consistently performing North American companies doing RPGs - Bethesda and Bioware. Not a lot of room there for underperformers when those two are kicking out great games (although both also have technical issues).
      • The patch for Bloodlines solved all of the major issues, I played through the entire game with no problems. Blame their publisher (Activision) for pushing the game out two months before it was ready.

        Vampire: Bloodlines was one of the more innovative, immersive, and overall excellent games I have played in the last couple years. Definitely one of the best RPGs.

        It's an impressive achievement to make a game where you actually care about what happens. I hope others follow their example.

        I recommend Vampire

  • Arcanum (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lu Xun ( 615093 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @01:52PM (#11768185)
    These people made one of my all-time favourite games: Arcanum. Too bad they didn't release the rights to it before vanishing, I guess they're held by Sierra anyway. I'd like to see an open-source version of this game, with some working multiplayer!
    • I thoroughly enjoyed Arcanum. ood replayability value in that one.

      (Until I discovered Diablo II)

    • Re:Arcanum (Score:1, Redundant)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 )
      The one great thing both Arcanum and Fallout had running for them were the settings: either the apocalyptic post-war world of Fallout and it's dark humor or the fantasy-world-ongoing-industrial-revolution one of Arcanum. I always hated fantasy settings with passion, and both games not only tried something new but did it well and were fun to play.

      I'll miss Troika.
    • Arcanum is a great game, and I still occasionally dust it off to play. The ability to have a half-elf mage packing an elephant gun is just wonderfully amusing =]

  • Temple of Excremental Evil. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dameron ( 307970 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @01:53PM (#11768196)
    I've enjoyed several Troika games and plan on playing Vampire soon, but the incredibly unfinished Temple of Elemental Evil was a huge black mark on their reputation. Entire levels were only partially furnished. There were parts where you could wander for half an hour opening empty chests in unfurnished empty rooms.

    I wish them the best 'though. Good luck guys.

    -dameron
    • Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a great game. (currently replaying it as a different clan). I was really hoping to see the game get developed further and an online component added to it. (the first Masquerade had one.. but is missing from Bloodlines).

      'tis a shame to see Troika close down.
      • I just started playing "Vampire: The Masquerade" a couple of nights ago. It's truly an amazing product. Dramatic flexibility in creating very different characters with very different capabilities and playstyles is clearly a strong point. I was hunting a ghost (a quest early in the game) at 1 am (real time) and I was literally getting shivers up and down my spine. It's been a long time since I've found a game this engaging, exciting, and fun to play. I personally find that it creates a much spookier at

    • I've enjoyed several Troika games and plan on playing Vampire soon, but the incredibly unfinished Temple of Elemental Evil was a huge black mark on their reputation. Entire levels were only partially furnished. There were parts where you could wander for half an hour opening empty chests in unfurnished empty rooms.

      You can thank Atari for that. They published it early, and a two month old build at that.

      If you look around for some of the user patches and install them, the game is quite playable.

    • It's a damn shame about Temple of Elemental Evil too... it had probably one of the most true to form adaptations of 3.5e DnD rules. It really did have the chance of being on par with the Baldur's Gate PC series, if they fleshed things out a bit.

      Sigh... another nail in the CRPG coffin. Very sad.
    • Temple of Elemental Evil is the most unbalanced game i've ever played. It seemed so good when i started playing it, but went so bad so quick. It just wasn't balanced! and I have heard really bad things about Vampire too..

      I totally wrote Trokia off at that point. But i wanna try Arcanum, maybe I'll that game and play it this summer, just because they just closed :)
    • The games was certianly buggy, but in the roleplaying game, I remember the templ being large and empty as well. A reflection that it had once been a populated by a lot of people.
  • You knew someone was going to ask it...

    mandatory response: it isn't that simple, they cross licensed other comapnies IP, blah, blah

    there, now we don't have to go through that thread again

  • Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Thursday February 24, 2005 @01:55PM (#11768218)
    From this review [ign.com]:

    Unfortunately, it seems Troika's transition from their prior isometric perspective games to first-person this time may not have been completely smooth. Since release, several bugs have emerged including a showstopper that has quite a few players to experience a crash to desktop in one of the later missions. An interim patch has been released by the fan community, but it's unfortunate a flaw of this magnitude managed to sneak past quality assurance, and that the players themselves had to fix it. Aside from that, characters occasionally glide across the floor instead of walking, and some actions are out of sync with the audio. There are also various graphical glitches like flickering textures and NPCs that disappear in front of you as you move down the street or exhibit other bizarre behaviors such as walking above the ground.

    While the review says that the graphics were nice I couldn't disagree more. I wasn't blown away by them and I certainly don't care much for graphics anyway.

    Give me great gameplay and a stable playing environment. I haven't ever had a PS2 game crash my PS2 and I certainly haven't had Quake crash my computer. I wouldn't expect any game to do that... Patched or not.
    • I think the "shiny" eyes are the most outstanding feature, apart from the atmosphere created by the great level design. And the gameplay was not so bad either. Now, stable, that's another thing.

      Vampire: Bloodlines was a technical disaster, but the storytelling is absolutely wonderful. With only a little more polish to the engine, it could have been up there with other great games like Mafia or Max Payne (and IMHO, the story is even better and more original.)

      In that sense, I believe using such a new engine

    • Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause? (Score:4, Informative)

      by XorNand ( 517466 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:17PM (#11768444)
      I haven't ever had a PS2 game crash my PS2 and I certainly haven't had Quake crash my computer. I wouldn't expect any game to do that... Patched or not.

      I'm not defending their lack of QA, but to be fair, the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console. Your analogy to Quake is a bit more accurate, but you also have to keep in mind of the funds that smaller gaming companies have available. id has millions of dollars available to them--per title! As the technology keeps getting pushed further and further and games get more complex, you're going to have to be willing to accept some trade-offs. You have the choice of sometimes innovative, but stable, games from the mega publishers, or geniunely innovative titles from the smaller guys. The smaller studios generally can afford either the latest & greatest whizbang or rock solid stability, but not both. Yeah, it sucks that we can't have both, but that's just how things are when the gaming market is as cut-throat as it is.

      • > the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console.

        I seriously doubt this is the case. You cannot patch a console game (not on current generations of consoles anyway), so you MUST get it right the first time. The limitations of the hardware (or for the PS2, the strange architecture) force you to make optimizations that range from nasty hacks to intimidatingly complex. DirectX has made the PC more uniform than consoles -- you only need to write for

        • I'll agree with you to a point, but consider the differences in scope. While PS2 testers have to get it right the first time, the entirety of their lab is that single machine. A PS2 only runs one app at a time, doesn't have user-swappable hardware (other than "offical" accessories), and has a very limited input device.

          Yes, DirectX and similar APIs have done a lot to standardize Windows game development, it isn't a magic bullet. Unlike a game console, a PC is a general purpose computer. That jack-of-all-tra

    • Worst. Ending. Ever.

      Just a tip to whoever wrote the ending to Vampire Bloodlines: the Indiana Jones box up the evil artifact and store it away in a warehouse only works if we already know what's inside!
      • Wanna see a really bad ending? Play Knights of the old Republic 2
        • Speaking of KotOR2, lets talk bugs. Everywhere. Many unacceptable IMO - the broken Pazaak tutorial, aborting a swoop race and never being able to win... just awful QA.

          Both cases (KotOR and Bloodlines) are most likely publishers pushing a game out before it's ready. It's really too bad.

          Troika did have a history of games that had far too many bugs at release, even in their former incarnations (though Interplay was legendary for that). I thought Bloodlines was less buggy than many previous games by Troik
    • Give me great gameplay...

      Sigh. How's it feel to be in the minority?

      The more I mine old games, the less I appreciate too many of today's offerings. Remember when some game with rotating geometric elements took the game world by storm? Original thinking is a scarce commodity.

    • It surprised me to discover that while Vampire used the Source engine, it ran slower than Half Life 2, and wasn't nearly as detailed.

      Goes to show you that underlying technology doesn't really mean much...

      On the other hand, I liked the character creation system.
    • I loved Vampire because it was so ambitious, and that of course is why there were so many bugs. I haven't played any console RPGs lately, but back when I did (FF7 etc) I was struck by how incredibly linear the plot was in the japanese games. You could act like a complete asshole to Tifa and theotherone the whole game, but both would *still* sit down at predecided plot points and have tentative talks with you about their developing feelings for you, and then fall madly in love with you before the game ended.

  • Undead Strategies (Score:3, Funny)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @01:59PM (#11768258) Homepage Journal
    This is just a publicity stunt by Troika. They defied "impossibility" by finally releasing an actual "Temple of Elemental Evil" module, after decades of waiting for that unholy grail. Now they're just spending a year dead for tax purposes, before releasing a tabletop version of "Duke Nukem Forever".

  • Another victim (Score:2, Informative)

    by Cirrius ( 304487 )
    Maybe if less people would have pirated Vampires they would have actually made enough money to create another title.

    And people wonder why all the good games go to the consoles...
    • "Maybe if less people would have pirated Vampires..."

      Standard /. answers...

      * Information wants to be free!
      * Down with the man!
      * It's not stealing, cause like they still had their copies!
      * Microsoft sucks!
      * Piracy is just another term for "fair use"
      * Software patents suck!
      * They should have made their money on customer service.

      • or (Score:3, Interesting)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )
        maybe if it was craptacular in nature, thye would have made money.

        If the pirating of Vampire caused them to loose sales, then why is half-life 2, Doom, and warcraft 3 making money?

        Not saying downloading an item that someone doesn't have permission to do so is right(legally or morally), just pointing out that the success of a product doesn't seem to be related to piracy.
        • If the pirating of Vampire caused them to loose sales, then why is half-life 2, Doom, and warcraft 3 making money?
          Because those were mass market type games. ToEE and Vampire were more niche games. That niche market also tends to be more tech savvy so a larger proportion of their potential sales base would be lost due to piracy, as well as the small size of the company didn't allow them to absorb the lower revenue as easily.
          Just a thought
        • I have to say I downloaded Vampire and played HL2 at a friends house. I ended up buying HL2. Its amazing how crappy the graphics were for the engine they used in Vampire. Not only that, there were some serious bugs in gameplay.

          But the LARP crowd in general ate it up just because they did a pretty decent job of sticking to the way things should be in the World of Darkness.

  • Valve's Source Engine (Score:2, Interesting)

    by borawjm ( 747876 )
    Well, I guess it goes to say that, even though they used Valve's source engine (Half-Life 2), that gameplay and content are more important than graphics and cool physics.

  • Saving throw (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:06PM (#11768332)
    Guess they failed the saving throw.

  • Whew! (Score:1, Troll)

    by doublem ( 118724 )
    The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade

    Oh, that's OK then.

    Nothing wrong with a company that made bad games going under.

  • This is sad (Score:5, Informative)

    by apharov ( 598871 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:09PM (#11768358)
    It really is quite sad to see how the people who have made two excellent computer RPG's (original Fallout and Arcanum) cannot succeed in the current computer game market.

    Fallout was undoubtably one of the very best computer RPGs and Arcanum is not far behind IMHO. I was actually really looking forward to perhaps one day seeing Arcanum 2 with the same great world and especially atmosphere as the original.

    It would be really nice to see these people succeed in what they are really good in doing, especially as this (making excellent computer RPGs) produces some additional happiness to other people. The closing of Troika Games is sad in the sense that there is little hope for the same magic atmosphere to appear again soon in computer games.
    • It really is quite sad to see how the people who have made two excellent computer RPG's (original Fallout and Arcanum) cannot succeed in the current computer game market.
      Making kick-ass computer games and running a successful business are totally unrelated skills. In fact, one could convincingly argue that hacking skills and business skills are inversely proportionate to one another.

      • Yeah. Hackers (the good kind, a.k.a programmers) are used to being honest since you can't lie to your computer when programming, business people on the other hand...

    • Well in this case (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @03:00PM (#11768909)
      I don't think it's the market, I think it was Trokia's extreme sucking. No not in the games they chose to make, not in how they decided to do the gameplay or anything, those were excellent. The problem was in the programming. ToEE was so buggy it was unbelievable. In it's inital state, the game was practically unplayable. After two patches it was still riddled with bugs, and they showed no intrest in updating it. Frustrated fans finally set to work on it and made an update that got the game pretty close to what release status should be.

      I haven't played Vampire, but I understand it's in a similar boat.

      There is a market for RPGs, and they can make money, but part of that is that they must be well developed programs. I'd say this goes even more than many other games. I can deal with a fair bit of glitches in an FPS, I mean all I'm there to do is shoot shit. However an RPG is about character and story development, so things need to work right. If I can't, for example, loot a creature (common problem in ToEE) that really fucks things up.

      While I'm sad to see them go, I have no illusions of who is at fault. They produced some of the buggiest code I've seen in a long time and it's no wonder people got frustrated trying to play it and sales were bad.

  • Yet Another Developer Buried (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kiwidefunkt ( 855968 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:09PM (#11768363) Homepage
    The game industry is looking more and more like the music and movie industries every day. Soon EA and all the other big corporate names will have eliminated competition, formed an RIAA/MPAA style ruling body, and then actively attack piracy. And thank god, because look at how good popular music is today! I can't wait for game quality to keep sliding as huge companies buy up as many licenses they can and flood the market with crap while companies like Troika can't even pay the rent...
    • Are you suggesting that EA, Activision, and other giants of the gaming industry should bail out failing companies like Troika? Or perhaps the government should, for the sake of fair competition, ya know?

      That's not how business works. Companies that produce the better product succeed; those that don't... well, don't. EA isn't successful because they are EVIL, they are successful because they produce games that people want to buy.

      Face it: companies don't have a 'right' to exist. They must be able to pro

  • It's quite sad really.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@@@gmail...com> on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:12PM (#11768383) Journal
    Probably one of the best PC RPGs ever was fallout and its sequel. First, Black Isle closed. Many of the former employees were working at Troika. Now Troika's gone. If I could point out a single problem, it would be that the original Fallout team was split up; the closings merely show that this team was greater than the sum of its parts.

    The major failing of any open-ended RPG from Arcanum to KOTOR2 was 1) an unbalanced ability system and 2) trying to make the game too grandiouse and forgetting the polish.

    I wish someone would release an RPG with the polish of warcraft, the open-endedness of fallout, and the great voice acting/script writing from KOTOR. Now there's a game I would happily pay $80 for.
    • I wish someone would release an RPG with the polish of warcraft, the open-endedness of fallout, and the great voice acting/script writing from KOTOR. Now there's a game I would happily pay $80 for.

      This game exists; it's called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I bought a PS2 specifically for this game.
      • I was disappointed with SA on a number of levels. First, GTA3 was very open-ended; most missions you got to choose your own car for and could even make roadblocks and the like to make chasing someone down easier.

        In contrast, every mission in SA almsot introduced a new control scheme and came with ready-made vehicles for it. Far from being open-ended, the heavily scripted non-sandbox nature of each mission drained any creative problem solving.

        The story wasn't too bad I suppose; though the voice acting wa
    • I wish someone would release an RPG with the polish of warcraft, the open-endedness of fallout, and the great voice acting/script writing from KOTOR. Now there's a game I would happily pay $80 for.

      So... Morrowind?

  • What about the ToEE codebase? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel...handelman@@@gmail...com> on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:22PM (#11768490) Journal
    With mods and patches the game was very nice - as someone else pointed out Atari forced them to ship an unfinished game (see also Master of Orion 3) but fortunately it was still salvageable.

    So - now that the bugs are ironed out ToEE is an excellent engine for making D&D 3rd ed. single player scenarios. Does Troika still exist enough to lease out access to that Code to other design studios? You also need a WOTC license, of course.

  • Free at last? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:28PM (#11768565) Homepage Journal
    If they don't pass the rights to the games to some other entity, doesn't that mean the rights aren't owned by anyone? Doesn't that mean they're in the public domain? Or do they get scarfed up by the first games lawyer to register the copyright after they expire? What about the copyrights on the game code? If they're not owned by anyone anymore, what's to stop a Troika programmer from publishing the source code?
    • rights are allways passed somewhere and with the current copyright law.. they exist forever.
      • Well, unless you can give some details on "rights are always passed somewhere", like what law specifies a default recipient, or where Troika explicitly transferred them, all you've got is FUD.
        • Well, what do you think happens to all the equipment a company owns when it dissolves? Does it all go up in smoke with it?

          No, all company assets are first distributed to its creditors. After that, if there's anything left, it goes to the stockholders.
          • Nothing just "happens" to physical assets, even when they're abandoned. Usually the windup process, whether bankruptcy or otherwise, includes negotiations among creditors and equity owners to sell those assets, and divide the proceedings. But only because they're physical are they usually liquidated - they're obvious, everyone knows they have some value (even if just junk at the dump), and abandoning them can even be illegal dumping. When a company folds, leaving behind its office furniture, even if it does
            • If it doesn't already belong to the publisher, it'll get auctioned off just like the office furniture, but in a more closed fashion. That's why I used the example.
    • most likely the rights will either go to one of troika's investors, or they will be sold off in bankruptcy court for a pittance. i've worked for a lot of failed start up companies, and i've never heard of the rights to any developed technology just being set free. somebody always takes them, regardless of whether they see any real value in them. of course if they do end up being sold in bankruptcy court (doubtful, as their investors will get first pickings) i don't think there would be anything keeping y
      • I helped a lot of startups also shut down. And I've seen lots of IP get "left behind" when they wind down, their other assets divided up traditionally. So I want to know, specifically to Troika, whether their IP is all being rolled into a new owner, or what other status it has. Because a new owner means that "Troika" isn't really gone - their IP is the only way I knew it, so it's just changed hands.

  • The last of the great Offline Content creators (Score:5, Insightful)

    by popo ( 107611 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:37PM (#11768658) Homepage

    I'm a huge fan of a fat manual.

    This might be slightly O.T. but with the passing of Black Isle and now Troika, I can't help reflecting on the fact that both of these studios IMHO were the only ones out there that spent enormous time and energy in creating beautiful offline content to accompany their games.

    Arcanum was a great game. And one of the reasons I have huge respect for Troika is that they didn't just stop there:

    That Arcanum manual was a work of art.

    • Firaxis (Sid Meiers Pirates!) had the same, with a quite thick manual detailing everything in the game, down to the strengths/weaknesses and modifiers of land combat, to a chart showing the details on all the ships (best angles into the wind, general speed, guns, cargo, crew, etc)
  • From Penny-Arcade [penny-arcade.com] "It sounds as though Troika is no more, or at any rate they are liquidating everything in their offices, so if they are still coherent as a developer presumably their next game involves sitting in a bare room. Troika (for those of you with a concussion) is the little company that couldn't, producing games of marvelous, unprecedented promise coupled with epic lapses in technical execution. The company was a hole that great ideas crawled half-way out of, so I hope you'll pardon me if I don't

  • A Series of Unfortunate Mistakes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Obiwan Kenobi ( 32807 ) <evan@misterFORTR ... m minus language> on Thursday February 24, 2005 @02:54PM (#11768841) Homepage
    This studio has a long history of buckling under publisher demands and therefore releasing half-assed games that need FAN-CREATED PATCHES to fix glaring holes (caps because it's so ridiculous you have to have your players create patches for you).

    You want to fail as a game studio? Release your latest game with a showstopper that drops them to the desktop (Vampire: Masquarade).

    You want to fail as a game studio? Release an unfinished RPG, with unfinished rooms, quests, and broken bits that were so broken it took MULTIPLE (ugh!) fan-created patches to fix them.

    Troika is an example of how to fuck up. It has nothing to do with EA or whatever, they simply released unfinished games with bad, ugly bugs. This will sink any game company at any time. EA or no, if a game doesn't play or is broken, people won't buy it.

    "They lost because the world is going corporate."

    No, they lost the fight because the world doesn't put up with that kind of performance, horrid out of the box experience, and regulating the fans to make the patches.

    I'm sorry for the team involved, and I'm sure they tried their damndest. But whether it was bad management or some other reason, there were clear and easy-to-read signs on why they went kaput.
  • I know a lot of the guys (and gals) who worked at Troika. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but its so sad to see a company of people who I know for a fact just loved good computer games and tried their damndest to make them, end up in the dustbin of history.

  • stop bitching about qa issues (Score:3, Interesting)

    by truffle ( 37924 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @04:49PM (#11770177) Homepage

    Yeah Troika had some QA issues, but they made brilliant games. A bug free piece of crap game is not really very interesting. A buggy brilliant game is still a brilliant game.

    It's easier to improve quality than it is to improve brilliance.

    Even with quality issues, TOEE and Vampire have sold pretty well. The bigger question should be, how can a company make critically acclaimed games that sell well and still go under? What's wrong with the market? Do we want to see game production limited to a few major studios like EA and Ubi or do we want to see innovative titles?

    I hope everyone participating in this thread is voting with their pocketbook and buying great games made by small studios.

    I hope that those small studios can come up with business models that let them succeed. Maybe Valve's STEAM model is the future? I'd like to see more suggestions for how small studios can survive and less bitching about QA issues.
  • I feel really really bad about pirating their games now.

    Lately I've started buying a much larger share of the games I play, however I never got around to buying anything from Troika. As an avid fan of their work, I'd guess it wouldn't be too far from fair to say me and the likes of me caused their downfall.

    Vampire The Masquerade; Bloodlines was an amazing game, with some of the best dialogue/script writing I've ever seen:

    "Who are you talking to? I am not here. "

    "Stop," , "No, you stop!" - conversing w

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