Games

Michael Fitch on Iron Lore Closure

THQ creative director points a lot of fingers

By Andrei Dumitrescu, Games Editor

3rd of March 2008, 10:27 GMT

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Iron Lore closed down last week. Even if the games they put out were critically appreciated and even if they were in charge of developing Warhammer 40,000: Soulstorm for THQ, they just weren't able to secure the financing they needed for new projects and that led to the closure of the whole game studio.

Almost immediately after news of Iron Lore's closing hit the games

media, Michael Fitch, the creative director of THQ and one of the people that worked very closely with Iron Lore on Soulstorm, posted a rather aggressive attack on the Quarter to Three forums, in which he blames everyone from pirates and hardware developers to reviewers and gamers for Iron Lore's downfall. His comments are interesting as they apply to the whole PC gaming world.

Pirates are to blame not only for not paying for a game, but also for the way they react to copyright protections. Iron Lore had created a copyright check for Titan Quest that activated at the entrance into the first cave of the game. The copyright check dropped the user of a pirated copy directly to desktop, without any other notice. Some pirates complained that it was a game stopping bug and Fitch says this will lead to lower sales of the game.

Hardware producers are to blame because they offer low-price and low-quality embedded solutions that let players think they have the hardware needed to play a certain game, even if they really only have access to dumped down hardware that's integrated. This generates a lot of confusion and pressures game developers to go for the lowest common hardware denominator when they design a game, which reduces the gameplay experience that a game generates.

Gamers are to blame for Iron Lore because they tend to bitch about a product being buggy or laggy, even if they are at fault, by not doing normal things like checking for viruses or defragmenting drives. And reviewers share the blame because of how they tend to slam games for perceived flaws that aren't really there.

For more reactions to Fitch's rant, check out the original thread at Quarter to Three.

TAGS:

THQ | Iron Lore | piracy | gamers | reviewers

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: Johnnyxp64 on 03 Mar 2008, 22:47 GMT

reply to this comment

As a Programmer (not in games thought) i have to agree,

especially with the stupid pc users out there who cant use a damn VCR what about a PC?!! and hardware conflicts, and OS bugs all the time with drivers and BSOD...like Nvidia
the fracking BSOD since 2004!!!
nv4dll infinite loop Blue Screen!

you cant imagine how many time i made softwares that was runnig perfect in 2-3 tested pcs and mine, and in customers didnt, with little search one was Full of Viruses and Spyware, no resources to run! others had memmory issues that didnt appear all the time or general hardware failures!
and i am ALONE imagine now those that were a team! its fracking dificult to survive as a new company in our days when everyon thinks they know, or the place is full of bad cracked pirated copies, and technology moves so fast that they even cant test there own hardware beetween them!

i mean how many times an MSI mobo with nforce didnt "fit" with an MSI nvidia VGA? all the time!

Companies with small money at there bigging CANT stand long time and have 300people stuff like Blizzard does.

Blizzard was succesfull because it was 1990 not 2008 if Silicon and Synapse (now BLizzard) was statring to today with the same knowledge on making games the same money they had back then and NO MATTER the talent NO MATTER the pasion they could stand more that 6months! .-

p.s reviwer allways suck cause the critise a game with there taste and not generally!and the worst magazines are getting payed to promote games!!!!!

so I AGREE with him 100%

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