Working Designs Shuts Its Doors 43
An anonymous reader writes "1UP.com is reporting that publisher Working Designs has officially closed shop, apparently due to difficulties with Sony's approval department." From the article: "If I can't guarantee that the games I personally choose for us to release in the US can actually get approved and come out, there's no business to be done ... I know many of you will have lots of questions, and there will be some I can answer, and some I can't. Sony has made it clear that they do not want the details of their dealings with any publisher made public. Suffice to say that you would buy what we wanted to sell if we could sell it."
Why does Sony care what publishers did? (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as people are putting out games, why does Sony care? Even if they're not all winners and huge sellers, a variety of games is great for a console.
So Sony doesn't make as much from Working Designs as they do from Take 2. Why does it matter? They made a hell of a lot more from Working Designs when they were still publishing games than they make from WD now.
Hell, every game released here can just pad the number of games available in a commercial. Buy a PS2! We've got a library of over X games! Less is not more when it comes to game selection. People have varied taste, and if it was approved for Japanese release, why is it an issue for somebody else to do the work and release it in the US?
Re:What Is He *Not* Saying? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example... hope I'm recalling this right... they were translating Magic Knight Rayearth for the Sega Saturn, and wanted to keep the heroes' original names (Hikaru, Umi, Fuu); but the american distributor of the cartoon tried to force them to use the translated names (Lucy, Marine, Anne). Anyone else would compromise - WD went to court, won, and eventually released the game just the way they wanted.
Sony Computer Entertainment America - SCEA - also has standards. Sadly, the wrong standards. They have a very subjective policy of not approving games that could "harm the Playstation 2's image". That means: anything 2D is very unlikely to fly, unless it's a collection package. WD's last title, Growlanser Generations, is actually Growlanser 2 and Growlanser 3; Sony forced WD to sell 2 for the price of 1, and now I'm guessing WD realized that Sony's nonsense would eventually drive them out of business anyway.