Titan didn't work out as planned. One thing they liked about Titan were the PvP team based encounters. So they took the assets and made them into Overwatch.
No conspiracy there. They talk about this in the Overwatch dev trailers - it's public knowledge.
Given the positive feedback Overwatch is getting, I'd say that was a good call.
Titan didn't work out as planned. One thing they liked about Titan were the PvP team based encounters. So they took the assets and made them into Overwatch.
No conspiracy there. They talk about this in the Overwatch dev trailers - it's public knowledge.
Given the positive feedback Overwatch is getting, I'd say that was a good call.
@Baitness asked: "Scrapping all but 10% of an MMORPG and then marketing it as a premium shooter is bizarre at best."
May sound bizarre but the answer will lie in what Titan probably was - for most maybe all of its life: game development big business style.
When a project starts you don't know what you are going to do. A company will assign a "tiny" team to do some initial work, identify the questions they need to answer and the people they need to answer them. And they will report back to senior management and say this is what we need to do and how much $$$ we need to do it.
Once given the go ahead - after however many attempts - the go-ahead will be given to pull together a "small" team. Some game development folk for sure but also some IT folk and a high % of business folk: estimators, planners, HR folk and accountants.
They will spend time coming up with game ideas: settings, artistic styles, story outline, game scope, character progression systems maybe; top level stuff. What they won't do is come up with full blown dialogue, masses of artwork, code; probably won't even get to classes, races etc. That keeps the costs down at this early stage. And the business half of the team will take all this and come up with timescales, resource profiles, plans and crucially estimates of how much it will cost. And some others will consider it against possible business models and come up with how much money they might make.
Now this could go on and on. With whoever is running the team going back to management and saying: haven't got an answer yet, need more time and ..... money.
Over time they probably started to home in on certain ideas. Discarding who knows how many. They would want to flesh these ideas out and so would identify the people they needed - ask for more money - and once given the go-ahead start to flesh out their key ideas. There can be many, many dead ends whilst doing this. An awful lot of work cast aside or stuff getting reworked.
And throughout the business team will be updating the a) this is what it is going to cost to finish b) this is what we hope to make - trying to take account of changes in play styles, hardware, how receptive people are to certain business models etc. and c) what has been spent. Burn rate (spend) increases of course as more people are brought in..
At some point AB said enough. They pulled the plug. The team - presumably - were swimming in circles trying to come up with the next big thing. Titan was dead.
Work was done however. A new small team was probably created - to see what went wrong and what could be salvaged from the ashes. A big chunk of stuff - discussions, estimates, plans, market research - will have been unusable. And that is how you would end up with a mere 10% (or whatever) being used. The unused stuff - what sort of game should we be making that should make us money, the eureka moment if you like - is intangible.
Comments
Titan didn't work out as planned. One thing they liked about Titan were the PvP team based encounters. So they took the assets and made them into Overwatch.
No conspiracy there. They talk about this in the Overwatch dev trailers - it's public knowledge.
Given the positive feedback Overwatch is getting, I'd say that was a good call.
ssssssshhhhh....you are making sense.
May sound bizarre but the answer will lie in what Titan probably was - for most maybe all of its life: game development big business style.
When a project starts you don't know what you are going to do. A company will assign a "tiny" team to do some initial work, identify the questions they need to answer and the people they need to answer them. And they will report back to senior management and say this is what we need to do and how much $$$ we need to do it.
Once given the go ahead - after however many attempts - the go-ahead will be given to pull together a "small" team. Some game development folk for sure but also some IT folk and a high % of business folk: estimators, planners, HR folk and accountants.
They will spend time coming up with game ideas: settings, artistic styles, story outline, game scope, character progression systems maybe; top level stuff. What they won't do is come up with full blown dialogue, masses of artwork, code; probably won't even get to classes, races etc. That keeps the costs down at this early stage. And the business half of the team will take all this and come up with timescales, resource profiles, plans and crucially estimates of how much it will cost. And some others will consider it against possible business models and come up with how much money they might make.
Now this could go on and on. With whoever is running the team going back to management and saying: haven't got an answer yet, need more time and ..... money.
Over time they probably started to home in on certain ideas. Discarding who knows how many. They would want to flesh these ideas out and so would identify the people they needed - ask for more money - and once given the go-ahead start to flesh out their key ideas. There can be many, many dead ends whilst doing this. An awful lot of work cast aside or stuff getting reworked.
And throughout the business team will be updating the a) this is what it is going to cost to finish b) this is what we hope to make - trying to take account of changes in play styles, hardware, how receptive people are to certain business models etc. and c) what has been spent. Burn rate (spend) increases of course as more people are brought in..
At some point AB said enough. They pulled the plug. The team - presumably - were swimming in circles trying to come up with the next big thing. Titan was dead.
Work was done however. A new small team was probably created - to see what went wrong and what could be salvaged from the ashes. A big chunk of stuff - discussions, estimates, plans, market research - will have been unusable. And that is how you would end up with a mere 10% (or whatever) being used. The unused stuff - what sort of game should we be making that should make us money, the eureka moment if you like - is intangible.