14 DAY TRIAL // 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.