VentureBeat » Wildman

GamesBeat weekly roundup: Luigi turns 30, and Obama says we need more gamers

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:07:41 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, World of Warplanes developer Wargaming bought Gas Powered Games, Nintendo announced a bunch of new content focused on Luigi as the company celebrates his 30th birthday, and both House of Representatives Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Barack Obama defended video games.

You’ll also find a review of Aliens: Colonial Marines and previews for Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Darkstalkers Resurrection.

News:

Mobile News:

Reviews:

Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t the Aliens sequel you wanted (review)

Previews:

Interviews:

Pieces of Flair:

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

Wargaming buys Gas Powered Games following failed Kickstarter and layoffs

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:56:30 +0000

Troubled developer Gas Powered Games has a new home.

Wargaming, the developer responsible for massively multiplayer games like World of Tanks, acquired Supreme Commander 2 studio Gas Powered Games today, according to an official announcement from Wargaming.net.

Gas Powered Games’ chief executive Chris Taylor and several other of the studio’s developers will make the transition to Wargaming.

Gas Powered is coming off a failed Kickstarter to fund a new game called Wildman.

“Gas Powered Games’ heritage and development pedigree shows us just how valuable an addition Chris and his company will make to the Wargaming family,” Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi said in a statement. “Gas Powered Games has a long track record of providing incredibly engaging triple-A gaming experiences, and we can’t wait to start working with them.”

Just days into the Wildman Kickstarter, Gas Powered Games chief Chris Taylor announced massive layoffs at the studio, which turned the crowdfunding campaign into a gambit to save the company.

“Wargaming’s growth in recent years has been tremendous, and we’re looking forward to joining one of the fastest growing gaming companies in the world,” said Taylor. “I’m sure our experience and expertise will help us contribute even more to Wargaming’s global success.”

Wargaming is one of the largest free-to-play developers. It’s stable of military MMOs include the aforementioned — and incredibly popular — World of Tanks as well as World of Warplanes and World of Warships.

This is Wargaming’s second acquisition in two weeks. The developer spent $20 million to purchase F.E.A.R. 3 developer Day 1 Studios in late January.

Gas Powered Games’ most recent release was the free-to-play strategy game Age of Empires Online, a real-time strategy title where players control empires throughout their history. The studio is best known for creating the Dungeon Siege series of role-playing games and the real-time strategy Supreme Commander series.

Wildman, Gas Powered’s Kickstarter project, is an action role-playing game (like Dungeon Siege) with real-time strategy elements (slightly similar to Nintendo’s Pikmin games). The developer hit the crowdfunding site with a mammoth $1.1 million goal but only raised $500,000 before shutting down the campaign with four days left.

We reached out to Taylor to ask what will happen to Wildman. We will update this story as we learn more information.

Filed under: Games

Gas Powered Games’ chief Chris Taylor struggles to stay positive after crowdfunding failure

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:07:39 +0000

HAMBURG, Germany — Chris Taylor realizes just how hard it is to raise money now, especially on fickle consumer-driven crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. The chief executive of struggling Gas Powered Games pulled down his Kickstarter campaign today for his Wildman game as it was failing to get a critical mass of support.

Speaking at the Casual Connect Europe event in Hamburg, Germany, Taylor acknowledged that the pitch for an original game set in caveman times just didn’t resonate enough with gamers. Cryptically, Taylor said that he was pursuing other opportunities for keeping Gas Powered Games, which laid off the bulk of its staff last month, alive.

“I’ve run Gas Powered Games for 15 years,” he said. “I have learned the hard way that being a CEO and a game designer is not an easy thing to do.”

Taylor said that bootstrapping is the way to go, raising funds from people you know. But he definitely believes game developers should get experience working for someone else before doing something on their own.

“I had eight years experience at Electronic Arts before making Total Annihilation,” Taylor said.

Always the joker, Taylor said, “I’m jet-lagged. If you’re thinking, ‘Jeepers, Taylor, you’re the slowest, dumbest guy on the panel,’ I just told you why.”

Eric Goldberg, the managing director of Crossover Technologies, said Kickstarter started out with a boom in game crowdfunding last year, but now it’s getting harder to raise money on. Consumers are becoming more discriminating in their tastes and aren’t funding every single major Kickstarter anymore.

Taylor didn’t lowball his budget in setting a $1.1 million goal. But others have tried to raise a smaller amount of money than they needed to finish a game — just so the campaign would go over well. But Taylor said it was clear his campaign would fall short.

“We had only four days left to get to $1.1 million, and we were at $500,000,” he said. “The experience has been incredible.”

As to why it failed, Taylor said the campaign ran into fatigue among consumers.

“People had spent a lot of money on other Kickstarters and were waiting for those games to arrive,” he said. “We also started just after Christmas, when people had already spent money.”

But Taylor didn’t regret trying.

“I don’t know if you know my career,” he said. “I’m a little bit of nut. I didn’t want to do a nostalgia game or remake. I focused on an original idea. It wasn’t a copycat. But it didn’t work.”

When you ask for $1.1 million, Taylor said, people are more cautious.

“I’m a little more on the cynical side,” he said. “Kickstarter is starting to wear itself out. It’s a numbers game. Someone has lightning in a bottle. This business is really, really tough. It’s turning into a lottery business, unless you work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and study gaming for decades.

“Now, it’s tough. It’s like going to Hollywood and saying I want to make films. You have to compete with James Cameron. I’m leaning toward there is no free lunch” when it comes to raising money for games.

Today’s environment for game development, Taylor laments, just isn’t what it used to be.

“There was a heyday in the 1990s where you could burst in the door of a publisher and you could get a contract. You blew your budget anyway, and they dealt with it,” Taylor said. “That has locked itself so tight. Consoles are going to just hit the wall. The guys who wrote these big checks — that’s just gone.”

In closing, Taylor said, “I have almost been driven out of business. I am still in business. I know everyone in the industry. They didn’t help me. It’s about whether you have a blockbuster that can ship 10 million units.”

Goldberg said, “Chris tried to do something original. The windmill won this particular round and I hope you will do this again and succeed.

Disclosure: The conference organizers paid for my trip to the event. Our coverage of it remains objective.

Filed under: Games

Gas Powered Games kills Wildman Kickstarter project (updated)

Jacob Lopez — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:40:05 +0000

Updated at 5:25 p.m. Pacific with additional information on publisher interest.

Updated at 7:37 a.m. Pacific with response from Chris Taylor.

With four days left, and still short of its goal by over half a million dollars, Gas Powered Games pulled its Kickstarter project for Wildman. Add another game to the pile of Kickstarter projects that never met their funding goal.

As website Joystiq reports, Gas Powered Games cancelled the project and posted the following message on the Kickstarter page for Wildman:

Greetings Kickstarters.

We have some news today. We are canceling the Wildman Kickstarter.

At this point, it makes sense for us to focus our attention on other ways to keep Gas Powered Games running. Unfortunately, we are unable to share any specifics in public. When we have news to share, we will be posting it on our site. If you want status updates, or if you want to continue discussing Wildman and/or this Kickstarter, please consider migrating over to forums.gaspowered.com.

We are profoundly grateful to those of you who backed this project and Gas Powered Games. Your passion and hard work put us in a position to write this exciting new chapter in the history of GPG.

In the video he posted, studio head Chris Taylor said that he’s been working “in the background” as he figures out ways to keep the studio running. “If all goes well, which I think it will, I’ll be able to give you all some great news in the weeks ahead,” and Taylor added, “If it wasn’t for all of the hard work, and the passion and the support that I’ve seen this last month, I would not be in a position where I could be looking at some of the opportunities that we’ve got today.” Furthermore, in a recent Three Moves Ahead strategy-gaming podcast, Taylor explained that there was some interest from publishers.

In a recent interview with website Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Taylor said that Gas Powered Games received several calls from publishers interested in Wildman, “but they would love to see us raise the money on Kickstarter, and then they’ll take us the rest of the way.” In other words, those publishers wanted to see the project meet its goals before handing over additional funding.

Unlike most failed Kickstarter campaigns, the developer had hope for Wildman because Gas Powered Games is an established developer that has shipped notable titles such as Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander. It seems that Taylor expected success along the lines of other big-name developers that jumped at the Kickstarter crowdfunding trend. That wasn’t the case for Taylor’s studio, which reportedly cut 80 percent of its workforce, and is now focusing on keeping the staff it has left.

Based on how the campaign went, it doesn’t seem that Gas Powered Games maintained the best attitude on the project. At one point, Taylor asked fans whether or not he should continue with the Kickstarter. Yes, there’s more to this than crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, but being able to project confidence in your campaign will give others the confidence to help fund it.

GamesBeat reached out to Gas Powered games for comment, and Taylor responded, “Can’t quite talk about what’s next,” but said to “check in anytime.”

Filed under: Games

Gas Powered Games continues with its Kickstarter campaign for Wildman

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:00:09 +0000

Gas Powered Games will carry on with its Kickstarter campaign for its PC game Wildman. Given a slower-than-hoped for start to pledges, Gas Powered Games chief executive Chris Taylor made an impassioned plea in a video update Friday, and fans are coming through.

So far, Gas Powered Games has raised $297,409 from 5,678 backers, with 24 days to go to hit the company’s goal of $1.1 million for the Wildman project. That’s a lot more than the $176,000 in donations from 3,577 fans just before Taylor issued his video. So the crowdfunding campaign — while it still has a long way to go — is on a much better trajectory than it was before.

Wildman will be a cross of real-time strategy combat and a role-playing game set in a fantasy world.

Taylor pressed the panic button on Friday evening, laying off the bulk of his studio’s staff. He disclosed that the company was making the move to conserve its cash and that it is really dependent on the success of the Kickstarter campaign in determining the fate of the 15-year-old game studio.

He also asked the community to either show its support or ask him to kill the Kickstarter, in light of the layoffs. The overwhelming number of the comments urged Taylor to continue with the crowdfunding plan.

“It’s been a real experience to do this, but we need to get the word out,” Taylor said in a video update yesterday.

And today, Taylor issued another statement.

“The outpouring of support this past few days has been unlike anything I could have imagined,” he said. “I can’t thank everyone enough, and can only hope that one day I will return the favor to each and every person who reached out to help.”

Taylor hasn’t said how many employees will remain with Gas Powered Games in the interim. The staff was about 60 people a month ago, and it has been reduced to 10 or less.

Taylor, the creator of hit franchises such as Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander, described Wildman as a game where players will explore dungeons and landscapes in a typical fantasy role-playing setting. But they can also enter a War Zone, where the player controls a single hero — a “wild man” — in the middle of a raging battle

The hero can tip the balance of the fight, but if your enemy switches tactics, you’ll have to reconfigure your force to counter. During encounters, you can upgrade your armies with new technology, execute special abilities, build defenses, change your units, and push an enemy back to its base. In between the War Zone skirmishes, you go on adventures, slaughtering monsters to get new weapons, armor, and material to craft new items. Wildman fuses two different kinds of games, and it will let you indulge your inner barbarian.

Filed under: Games

Wildman developer Chris Taylor lets the crowd vote: kill his Kickstarter now or keep it going

Dean Takahashi — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 03:15:46 +0000

Chris Taylor has everything riding on his crowdfunding effort to raise money for his next game. On Jan. 14, Taylor kicked off a Kickstarter to raise $1.1 million for the real-time strategy/role-playing game Wildman. But just four days into the fundraising, he has had to lay off most of his team at studio Gas Powered Games.

The layoffs will help the company keep its cash reserves while it awaits its Kickstarter fate. In an emotional video update this evening, Taylor explained that he had to cut back on the team before the Kickstarter completes in 27 days or face the possibility that he would — if it fails — shut down his 15-year-old game development studio entirely and let the remaining employees go without severance pay.

Then he put the fate of Gas Powered Games and Wildman up to the community. He said that the community can decide through its comments and donations whether Taylor should continue with the Kickstarter or shut it down immediately.

Wildman has raised $176,000 from 3,577 fans so far. It has a long way to go to get to its goal, and donations have to pick up the pace. Taylor said he has gambled the future of Gas Powered Games many times in its history.

“But today is different. I really felt it was a crazy idea to gamble in this economy,” he said, pausing and fighting back tears. “To gamble with the people here, who are the most talented and loyal people. To play a card game with their livelihoods is not smart. So I made a very, very tough decision.”

“But I have another tough decision,” he said. “That’s why I am here on this video update. Now that the team has been laid off, should I continue the campaign to see if the numbers do improve and hire them back at the end of the campaign — if they still want to come back and if they haven’t found jobs? Or do I shut the campaign down, tonight or tomorrow, and call it done. So help me make a tough decision. Vote with your comments. We’ll tabulate them. Kill the campaign. Or keep it going. It’s up to you.”

So far, all of the comments are overwhelmingly positive, asking Taylor to keep it going. Taylor knew that the finances were coming down to the wire. He said a couple of weeks ago that he was cutting the staff from around 60 to 20 people. And tonight, he said in an email that the staff had been downsized even more to about 10 people, depending on who is sticking around with reduced wages.

Filed under: Games

Big layoffs for longtime PC game developer Gas Powered Games

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:40:49 +0000

[Updated]

On Jan. 14, Gas Powered Games launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1.1 million for a new game called Wildman.

Now, the developer has reportedly laid off a huge chunk of its staff, according to Kotaku. Subsequently, studio founder Chris Taylor told GamesBeat that he was reducing the size of the studio from around 50 people to about 10, with the aim of conserving the company’s cash reserves.

“I won’t know how many until I circle up the wagons on Monday and see if there areany founders that are going to stay for reduced wages to help conserve cash while we (a) wait out the campaign, or (b) find more work,” Taylor said in an email. Taylor had previously told us that Gas Powered Games was reducing its staff from around 60 people down to about 20. But the Kickstarter isn’t necessarily off to a great start.

Four days into its Kickstarter campaign, Wildman has over 3,500 backers pledging $173,683. That leaves more than $900,000 before the game reaches its goal.

You can see in the chart below that the project’s trajectory isn’t promising. The blue line would need to be much steeper:

Taylor started Gas Powered Games in 1998. The company found major success with the launch of its first title, PC role-playing game Dungeon Siege in 2002. The studio later shifted to real-time strategy games with the release of Supreme Commander in 2007.

Gas Powered Games’ last release was the free-to-play RTS Age of Empires Online in 2011.

As of the time of this post, the Kickstarter is still live and taking pledges. While it’s especially unlikely now that Wildman will reach its funding goal, Taylor will have to address what happens if it does. That is, if he doesn’t pull the plug on the project.

We’ll keep you apprised of any further developments.

Dean Takahashi contributed to this report.

Filed under: Games

Dungeon Siege developer Chris Taylor launches Kickstarter for Wildman title

Dean Takahashi — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:24:00 +0000

Chris Taylor, known for games like Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander, is launching a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a fantasy video game called Wildman.

The title is a hybrid of action-oriented role-playing releases and real-time strategy. Taylor, founder of Gas Powered Games, said in an interview with GamesBeat that players will explore dungeons and landscapes in a typical fantasy role-playing setting. But they can also enter a War Zone, where the player controls a single hero — a “wild man” — in the middle of a raging battle. The hero can tip the balance of the fight, but if your enemy switches tactics, you’ll have to reconfigure your force to counter.

During encounters, you can upgrade your armies with new technology, execute special abilities, build defenses, change your units, and push an enemy back to its base. In between the War Zone skirmishes, you go on adventures, slaughtering monsters to get new weapons, armor, and material to craft new items. Wildman fuses two different kinds of games, and it will let you indulge your inner barbarian.

“I am doing something that I wanted to do before but couldn’t,” Taylor said. “It’s a hybrid game. Your hero is a persistent character and fights like they do in the film Braveheart. But you go on adventures as well. This is Reese’s, with the chocolate and peanut butter together.”

In the past, Taylor has always made games for publishers. He is a bit of a wild man himself. But the quirky and personable Taylor (who was our goofy emcee at our GamesBeat 2009 conference) might have the reputation to go out on his own. Other veteran game developers such as Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions, Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment, and Jordan Weisman of Harebrained Schemes have raised millions of dollars successfully through Kickstarter.

The setting for Wildman will move through different ages, where characters will fight with everything from primitive clubs to beam weapons. The universe starts at the dawn of humanity, but it includes magic within a fictionalized history.

“We follow the technical evolution of mankind,” he said. “We do the bronze, stone ages. It’s like a page out of Civilization.”

Taylor said he turned to crowdfunding, so he could seize control of his own destiny. His team recently came off a project and downsized from 60 people to about 20. If the Kickstarter succeeds, the company will be able to build up again and work on the new title. The core group built games including Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander, Age of Empires Online, and Demigod. Gas Powered Games hopes to raise $1.1 million.

“There’s a revolution in PC gaming with the indies and a revolution in crowdfunding,” he said. “Being able to work directly for the fans is awesome. It cuts out so much noise. We are not accountable to the guiding light of insecurity. We are accountable to the fans.”

The PC title will release in digital form over the Internet. It will include single-player and cooperative-multiplayer modes. The game will also make use of an interesting web-based technology that Taylor has been developing, dubbed Project Mercury. It is a web-based development environment that stores data in the cloud. It makes it easy to create mods from an in-game menu.

Taylor has talked about making a title called Kings & Castles, but that offering will be much more expensive to build than Wildman. So the company will tackle Wildman first and then build up to Kings & Castles later. Taylor thinks it will take about a year to make Wildman, meaning it could launch in early 2014.

“This game is smaller and more flexible, and it can grow up dynamically,” Taylor said.

Filed under: Business, Games