Rumor: Nobody's smiling about more GRIN layoffs

It's not a clever image; that's the GRIN logo.

It's an upside down Grin logo, referencing the "nobody's smiling" headline.

Clever.

I always disliked their logo. Just because it scares me.

I'm not sure I'd call flipping the companies logo upside down and cropping so you can't see the eyes where the chin would be "clever." Maybe "lazy" is the word you're looking for.

@(01):

Their logo is just the grin. There is no face.

You know what kills me is that these guys are VERY talented. They clearly love video games and can make a compelling experience.

I don't know if the money ran out or if their were time constraints, but Wanted DID have some cleaver ideas. It was just executed horribly and bundled in a short game.

You know, I'll give you that - each one of those games had SOMETHING cool going for it. Well, maybe not Terminator; but still. It's like they would just come up with a cool idea but not work enough on EVERYTHING ELSE around it. It's like a company of talented people who really don't feel like working very hard.

^My thoughts exactly...

They have great ideas, but just can't figure out how to make a 15 hour experience out of it. It's like their making glorified tech-demos.

Exactly! That was the sentiment I was aiming for. Exactly, talented people undone by lazy programming.

YOUR ARM IS ALSO YOUR WIFE

LOL.. Worst.. Plot.. Hook.. EVER.

What?! There's no bubble. For one, the game industry makes actual, tangible products where as the dot coms did not, which made it easy to fudge stock prices and create a bubble that was not backed by real dollars.

All this business of a handful of game studios shutting their doors is likely the result of a bad economy. In a bad economy there is less disposable income and therefore people aren't going to spend the money on the games that aren't any good.

Many high-end development houses have fallen prey to worse than Grin. Anyone here remember Ion Storm?

Nope...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbreeze_Studios

GRAW is probably their most famous game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRIN_%28company%29

Darkness was terrible. Bad game is bad.

It's not a matter of being greedy, you ignorant twat. It's a matter of survival as a third party.

Company X comes to you, says they want you to make Terminator Salvation, and finances your wages for a bit. fair enough, then they say has to be deved in under a year from beginning to end. Who cares, you still try your damndest to get the job done. You deliver the best product you think you can but want more time. Licenser says "fuck you, give us our game... we don't care about quality" and thus it ships. Meanwhile, gaming press goes off on the studio, not the timetable given, and bashes the hell out of the developers.

"Why can't this be as good as Wolverine, Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, or Gears of War? Stupid lzy developers." Out of all those mentioned above, dev times were OVER three years. Grin had one. One year to dev it, along with Bionic Commando and Wanted tangentally, and in a 50-60 person strong studio.

They did what they could with the time that they had. The people at Grin are INCREDIBLY talented fellows. Their problem is they had to deal with the instability of being a third party.