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Reader Comments (25)

Posted: Sep 4th 2010 2:46PM Miketor said

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Stardock is based about 20 minutes from where I live. I know 3 people that work there. Guess I should get in touch with them to see if they got the axe. Game industry, why you gotta be so harsh?
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 3:07PM Huma said

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@Miketor

Don't hate the industry. Hate the games.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 3:42PM Mmmmz said

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@Miketor

The game was terrible. I don't like layoffs, especially in this economy, but if they don't get their house in check and stop the bleeding now the entire company will fold which would result in more job losses.

Frankly, the producer should have been fired or at least laid off for 3-6 months. Maybe it's different at every company, but generally a producer keeps things in line and help determines if a product should be released. If that was their duty, they failed on this launch and should be punished accordingly. I mean, why keep the person that screwed everyone and fire the people that actually did their job as told?
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 6:25PM Miketor said

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@Mmmmz Well since development was about 1/5 of Stardock's business, I'm going to assume that they will cut their losses and not make games for a while.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 6:26PM Miketor said

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@Miketor Game development that is.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 2:50PM Otimus said

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Naturally, the CEO who said he's mostly to blame, will suffer the least, right?

I hate life.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 3:09PM Xevn said

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@Otimus

Actually Stardock is a privately owned business. Meaning all that debt mentioned in the article Brad is directly responsible for. So when Elemental doesn't make back its development costs for those employee salaries paid over the past 2 years, the rest comes out of his own pocket. Now if Stardock was publicly traded that wouldn't be true. The company could go bankrupt without forcing him to also go bankrupt.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 8:59PM 2late2die said

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@Otimus

Seems to me that seeing poor reception for a product you loved, watching your company bleed money (which as pointed out above comes directly from Brad's pocket), and having to fire people with whom you worked for months if not years, and given the small size of the company, may very well have become friends, is not a small amount of suffering.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 3:06PM Acosta02 said

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While this sucks, it's strange to see actual cause and effect in the industry. This is like the opposite of Infinity Ward.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 3:36PM WC said

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Oh perhaps the plan was always to finish the game, then lay off everyone not needed to continue fixing and improving it. It's not uncommon for that to be the case.

The source claims that Wardell lied about it not being rushed for money, but there's absolutely no proof that he lied about that.

The source could even be one of the bitter, laid-off developers. We don't know.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 3:40PM Cypher FDP said

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I bought this game, learned that there was a bug or something that reduced framerate to 20 fps over cities, then realized I wasted my money.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 5:01PM GreenReaper said

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@Cypher FDP : Did you try grabbing the latest update, 1.07? There were a lot of improvements to the graphical subsystem, and they significantly increased framerates when things got busy.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 4:06PM hiruuamon said

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I played the beta, and loved the concept of the game, but there are currrently SO many problems with the game, it is a shame. I DO believe they will be able to patch it into an outstanding game, but with Civ 5 on the horizon, YIKES!
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 6:57PM wcarnation said

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This game had a lot of promise, but was so rough off the printing press. It's story gets more depressing each day.

Elemental: War of Magic should get the Depressing Game of the Year award.

The little train that could, but tried and didn't. Now he's being disassembled and sent to Russia.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 6:59PM wcarnation said

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Also, I'd just like to say it's kinda weird how reactionary a lot of the press and gamers are. Stardock has always always received heaps of praise for everything they've done, then they make one mistake and everyone acts like the entire company should be put out of business and every copy of the game destroyed.

Granted a lot of it is on them, but really? I think we've gotten to a pretty extreme point of self entitlement sometimes.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 9:35PM darkinchworm said

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@wcarnation Were you around for the Demigod launch? It was very similar, although with a bit less drama surrounding it.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 9:38PM darkinchworm said

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I don't know why this didn't cross my mind when I commented, but to be fair, Stardock only published Demigod and didn't have a hand in developing it. I would've thought they'd learn from that, but surely this time hits close enough to home.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 7:59PM Draugdraugr said

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This guy is way confused. As a PC developer, when profits aren't looking right, he should be complaining about how everyone stole their game and not how they didn't deliver a good product. FOR SHAME!
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 10:42PM BIGMercenary said

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I've never seen a single bit of marketing from this game and the only time I've seen it was in stores. I took a look at the box and couldn't decide whether it was RPG, RTS, or city-building. The screens on the back of the box might as well be stick art. I put it back and got Plants vs Zombies instead.
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Posted: Sep 4th 2010 11:50PM Cap Morgan said

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It's looked down upon to pirate at Stardock game because the don't use DRM.

I fully plan on picking up this game in a few weeks bad press or no. Ultimately it's fun, they support their games with patches so I'm not worried
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Posted: Sep 5th 2010 3:25AM Crayola Q Pants ESQ said

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Sucks to see a company with so much goodwill (I'm ignoring any Demigod stuff, since I've only really heard of its issues since this fiasco appeared) fall south so rapidly. Especially that something like this could seriously top them producing games for a long while, given the size of their company in the first place.

Wardell's candidosity (is that even a real word?) is fresh to hear, but yeah... doesn't exactly save the game. I'd love to pick it up when it's all fixed, but who knows when that'll be and if anyone even remembers it by that stage.
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Posted: Sep 5th 2010 10:08AM dcfox said

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I hate to see this happen to a company I love and especially to a company that so obviously cares about it's consumers. I'm a big fan of Gal Civ and hopefully when Elemental gets patched I'll be picking it up as well. Best of luck to everyone affected.
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Posted: Sep 5th 2010 5:39PM Lucas Fenix said

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I supported this through the beta and there was crashing, it released with crashing and I felt quite let down. I have alot of faith in Stardock as they've never let bugs go unfixed, I downloaded a patch yesterday and all my issues are now fixed, I could now alt-tab out of the game without it crashing and I played for quite a long time without a memory leak.

In my opinion, putting the game back a few weeks and dealing with this issue would have led to stronger sales numbers as every review seemed to slate it for errors. It seems now that it's finally fixed it's probably too late to salvage such a mishandled launch.

Get the next Gal Civ out and get your revenue back up, every company's gotta take a hit at some point.
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Posted: Sep 5th 2010 5:53PM macandme said

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I see a lot of SD fanboys defending the company even though it put out what is undoubtedly the most disappointing game of 2010. May be he should start shifting is focus towards console games, Lite version of Galciv for consoles would be great.
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Posted: Sep 8th 2010 2:46AM Its X with Guns said

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Well, yeah, it should have been an open beta, not closed to anyone that hadn't preordered.
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