Elemental failure forces layoffs

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 6 September, 2010

Stardock laments "disastrous" launch.

The "disastrous" launch of turn-based fantasy game Elemental: War of Magic forced layoffs at publisher Stardock.

"Technical issues" at launch led to poor reviews and sales, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell told Joystiq.

"Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team," Wardell wrote in the Elemental forum.

"Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off.

"No one is being fired. None of these people did anything wrong. Stardock is a small company and each person here is truly amongst the best and brightest. So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone.

"We haven't had to lay anyone off since our migration from the OS/2 market in 1998. It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it.

"No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.

"Elemental's rocky launch can be summed up (IMO) as follows: Our QA process was insufficient to handle a brand new platform (Elemental = Kumquat 1.0 versus say Galactic Civilizations II was using Pear which was the same engine, modified, from 1997's Entrepreneur) + my own catastrophic poor judgment in not objectively evaluating the core game play components."

In October last year Wardell warned Games for Windows - Live will collapse if Microsoft continues to let the Xbox team hack away at it.

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About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (14) Latest comment 1 year ago

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  • HisDudness #1 1 year ago

    That really sucks.

  • Spekingur #2 1 year ago

    Disastrous launch? It is still disastrous. They have already broken their own laws that they themselves set down (their Gamer Bill of Rights) and Elemental is still producing the same OOM errors since launch. If you use a user created .exe that removes these errors the game won't run since "patch versions don't match to the ones on their server".

  • kestral #3 1 year ago

    I didn't know about this game until last week (it's been out since february i believe?), and after trying it I don't understand how to play it because it doesn't tell you how to play it but just dumps you in the story mode. As apposed to GalCiv2 where I know far in advance that it would come out and the tutorial was excellent.

  • MrChuckles #4 1 year ago

    I was playing ver 1.07 and that seems to hold together pretty well, even the enemies leave their cities, hehe...

    If a user 'has' fixed the oom errors then as they are releasing patches every few days i expect it'll appear in an official patch soon. i quite like the fact pirates really have to put effort in to play the game...

    Tis bad news that anyone loses a job, but they really did release an unfinished product and financially, someone has to pay the price :(.

  • Spekingur #5 1 year ago

    I don't know, I thought the reason they did so well previously was because of the so-called pirates? If you had downloaded the game and liked it you had the choice of donating money to them and that was it.
    Now they have a patch-comparsion feature that is basically DRM - which they don't agree is DRM. So yeah, company is losing out because of their sudden change in attitude.

  • MrChuckles #6 1 year ago

    I don't know a single pirate that has ever donated to a game they have downloaded. That's why they are pirates, because they don't want to pay for things.

    I do however know people that have pirated a game, liked it, but not been able to patch it, so just given in and bought it.

  • Spekingur #7 1 year ago

    I know those kind of people too, MrChuckles.

    I believe that what I wrote above happened with Sins of a Solar Empire.

  • Setaro #8 1 year ago

    If they'd just make another GalCiv game I'd buy that in an instant, this Elemental thing just doesn't interest me in the slightest.

  • Antsy #9 1 year ago

    @Spekingur

    No, thats not what happened with Sins.

  • Roamer #10 1 year ago

    ... I was looking forward to this. Didn't even know it was out. Where's the review, Eurogamer?

  • StooMonster #11 1 year ago

    Rather than laying off staff, what they should've done was swallow their pride and publish their games on Steam.

    If they chucked in Steamworks integration, with Achievements et al, which wouldn't take long to implement (other devs have done it in a day) I reckon they'd sell a tonne of copies to people who've never seen the Stardock equivalent of Steam or don't care to have yet another download service on their PCs (I know plenty of PC gamers in that category).

    Just look at the story of Introversion software being saved from bankruptcy being having a Steam sale.

  • immateriaux #12 1 year ago

    Been playing this off and on since it's release two weeks ago. I like the whole ambience of it, the art work and concept, but am stuck with an over riding sense of "what the fuck is going on?". As mentioned above, you are dropped into the game and pretty much left to muddle along. Some of the patches have introduced a little more hand holding but not enough. I still have no idea why certain city improvements can't be built, they just sit shaded out, annoying beyond reach. Only last night i figured out how to go create new cities. At least I think I have, have yet to test the theory! And so on. Not enough happens that you can ignore this feeling of god like ignorance, you're all the time hoping something will happen that then makes everything fall into place...

    There could be a really nice game there eventually and I hope they stick with it. Shame it's been a mess so far.
    Edited by 1 at 06/09/10 @ 18:43

  • Spekingur #13 1 year ago

    @Antsy: I remember seeing a lot of talk about donations at the time Sins was released as well as seeing the donation button myself on their website. At the same time people were talking highly about how Stardock did things and thus they recieved a large number of donations. I can't say weither some were from pirates or not - or if it was really related to Sins or not. I just assumed it had been (assumptions are evil, so I must go punish myself).

  • Terrorvision #14 1 year ago

    For the first time I pre-ordered a game without seeing any reviews and it turned out like this. Oh well, Civ 5 is coming out soon...It will be even harder for Stardock to save Elemental after Civ 5 is launched. People will simply play Civ instead of dealing with this buggy game.