Well, it looks like another pioneer gaming company is going down the tubes. Sources tell me to expect an announcement very soon that Sierra's being pared down to a "small studio" level, just a couple of projects kept in development. Unknown whether the label will still be used for outside stuff, or if we'll see Half-Life 2, etc. published under the Universal name instead. Still rumor at this point. (But it's up at f*ckedcompany now.)

What's not rumor is that what was left of Dynamix got the axe earlier this week. :-(

Sir-Tech runs out of cash, now this. C'mon, guys, I still haven't finished mourning Epyx!

As far as I'm concerned, Sierra died long ago, about the time Al Lowe left and they started releasing titles under various subsidiary labels.

- Alan

Wow, big news. Thanks Denny.

Crud. For some reason, Sierra has always been a favorite of mine. Their PR folks have always been superb (my experience over many years with them)and the company as a whole has always been very friendly, open and approachable.

And the death of any large PC gaming company is obviously always a Bad Thing.

I guess the lacklustre sales of Tribes 2 certainly hasn't helped their situation.

What a bummer! G.O.D certainly had an interesting perspective on gaming. I'm sure we're all going to miss the G.O.D. lot at next year's E3.

Raphael

For those keeping track, this is the FOURTH such cut at Sierra. So, I can imagine how long this can go on. :)

BTW I though Valve and Half Life were a seperate company that happen to publish through Sierra?

Its too bad theyre dying, since post-HalfLife Sierra seemed dedicated towards real games instead of the mid-90s shovelware they used to produce. For a brief time they appeared to reign as the top publisher, but they never cought up with the trends that computer games were following until it was too late. The WoT adventure game, for ex., was 5 years too late. They were still making, metaphorically speaking, 2d platform shooters in an era of DOOM. Even as early as Diablo they were having expansion packs (for that game) pawned off on them, and more probably to keep them solvent.

That, and their gross mismanagement of the Lord of the Rings license.

Oh, and one more point. They (the French corp.) probably specified to Sierra to 'keep out of Blizzard's way', since owning two game developers betrayed the possibility of one competing with the other for the same market. It also no doubt helped that everything Bliz touches turns to gold financially.

This may even be connected to bliizard unanounced project. Something that typically would ahve been made, two or three years ago, by Sierra, but now by the ever growing Andromida Strain that is blizzard.

Yeah, Valve's independant of Sierra. I was just pointing out that Sierra might not get Half-Life 2.

You know, Valve's inability to get Team Fortress 2 done in a timely manner probably didn't help Sierra any.

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Crud. For some reason, Sierra has always been a favorite of mine. Their PR folks have always been superb (my experience over many years with them)and the company as a whole has always been very friendly, open and approachable.

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Wasn't Sierra named last year (or maybe the year before) as Havas' most profitable division? I remember everyone being so surprised that it wasn't Blizzard. Of course they got there by brutally purging their staff and outsourcing everything, so I don't know how laudable that distinction should be. Somewhere in there I really think quality of life and value of life should come into play.

I've been railing against Sierra for years. Their management style has been awful, their commitment to consumers awful, and their treatment of their own people draconian. I'd say good riddance, but for the fact that I have lots and lots of great Sierra memories from the old days. File it under "That's a shame," I guess.

Does this mean we won't see the long-awaited Version 2 upgrade of SWAT3 ?

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Does this mean we won't see the long-awaited Version 2 upgrade of SWAT3 ?

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"Yeah, Valve's independant of Sierra. I was just pointing out that Sierra might not get Half-Life 2."

Not true, Half-Life is a registered trademark of Sierra, so I very much doubt Valve could take it to another publisher.
There are very few developers that get to own the IP of what they create, unless they are rich enough to self-fund development. Its rumoured Ensemble wanted to own the IP to RTS3(Age of Mythology) and thats why they briefly looked for another publisher before being assimilated :)

BTW, Sierra also passed on publishing Relics Sigma:The Adventures Of Rex Chance (my what a catchy title) but time will tell if that was a good move or not...

Valve owns the Half-Life IP. They self funded the entire game as the founders are Microsoft millionaires.

>Not true, Half-Life is a registered trademark of Sierra, so I very much doubt Valve could take it to another publisher. There are very few developers that get to own the IP of what they create, unless they are rich enough to self-fund development

Valve actually is one of them -- they specifically reserved the right to publish Half Life 2 with another publisher in their original agreement with Sierra (which is apparently one of the most developer-friendly agreements ever).

Stefan

Then can you please explain to me why Sierra is the registered holder of the Half-Life trademark?

As I heard it (rumor only), the only projects that will be left at Sierra (besides outside development like the Valve stuff, which may end up marketed under one of the other company names such as Universal) will be SWAT and (ugh) Hoyle's card games.

Third-hand info, but from a well-connected friend.

Thank God the Hoyle games have been spared the axe!

Sierra's nutty. They essentially abandoned their core audience by completely ditching the adventure games. I can understand that they didn't sell as well as hoped, but why not make a Gabriel Knight action-adventure? Have what's her name write the story, which is probably all she really wants to do anyway, but otherwise have someone else develop it.

Al Lowe told me he got his games in on time and within budget and every one made a profit for Sierra. So what do they do? See ya, Al.

And the whole Lord of the Rings nonsense. Geez, talk about a fumbled opportunity. They should have a LotR MMOG ready to come out now to capitalize on the movie. Instead they have some Xbox game in development where you play as Frodo and run around whack orcs with a sword.

Sierra doesn't have that much internal development anymore, unless this affects Impressions and Papyrus.

This could also be a move away from PC gaming into being purely a console company, which is where Univsersal has more experience.

I know Sierra doesn't have that much internal development, but 300 job cuts is the figure being tossed around. One hundred of those may be Dynamix, but what are the other 200 doing at Sierra if not game development?

Maybe they're going to use Sierra as a brand or an intermediate layer between Vivendi Universal and the actual developers? Pehaps the idea is to rely on Blizzard, Valve, Papyrus, Impressions, and third party developers, and have a skeleton Sierra staff to coordinate publishing through Universal? In that case there would be no development work being done at Sierra, just brand management.

200 people in QA, marketing, production, that sort of thing. If a lot of that moves to the developers, there's your head count.

Any idea how this might effect the development and release of games like Empire Earth?

Probably not at all. Stainless Steel Studios is doing all of the work on the game, as far as I can tell. They have a deal with (probably) Vivendi Universal for publishing. What other name--Sierra, Havas, McDonald's--goes on the box is probably immaterial to them.

McDonald's lol.

I've just got an email reply from Rick Goodman at Stainless Steel Studios, and he seems to be unaware of any rumours about Sierra.

Rod at Takedown/Sierra emailed me about the situation. He said things are fine at his end, and his division hasn't been affected. As a matter of fact, he said he'd be taking on more projects in lieu of the circumstances. We'll see what happens....

Raphael

So what projects did Sierra have going on internally?

I had a meeting set up with Mike Jacobs of Sierra/Dynamix at E3 - he's the producer of the PGA golf series. They were preparing to announce a new development partner for the franchise (Headgate left them to go to EA Sports) but we never met up - I had to cancel to visit the lovely LA police station due to my "incident."

I'd guess he's one who would be hit - I haven't hear a reply to the note I sent him this week.

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I had to cancel to visit the lovely LA police station due to my "incident."

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I had a new $900 digital Canon camera + $200 memory card + $150 battery in a camera bag, which I had snapped pretty tightly on the handle of the duffel bag I was carrying. It was tight enough I'd use two hands to unsnap the bag when I needed to use the camera. I was chatting with a guy at the Disney booth, in front of the roller coaster sim exhibit, in the walkway. I got bumped real hard about three times in a row, moved out of the walkway, looked down and the camera bag was gone. I couldn't beleive it. I looked on the ground, but it had obviously been ripped off.

When I talked to E3 security they told me that there was quite a bit of organized theft going on at the show. E.g., someone sets their notebook bag down to make a cell phone call, someone distracts them, someone else grabs the notebook bag and slips into the crowd. They told me that they had never had the level of theft they were seeing this year.

To get a police report for insurance, the LA police made me go to the downtown LA police HQ. And then I couldn't get a cab to come pick me up down there, so I walked the sidewalks a few blocks until I could get to a location where a cab would stop. It was a real adventure. Ugh.

Jeff

Holy cow, I was laying down perfectly expensive stuff all the time at the SFI booth this year.

Note to self...

--- Alan

Hey, Jeff, we got $400 for that camera! Man, you should keep it cleaner--the fence wouldn't give us any more than that because of the peanunt butter on the lens!

Jeff,

Was it a G1 or Pro 90? Canon has released some sweet digital cameras this year.

Very sorry it was stolen.

-DavidCPA

"I guess the lacklustre sales of Tribes 2 certainly hasn't helped their situation."

Tribes 2 being a lackluster GAME probably didn't help, either.

What has Dynamix done for me lately? Yeah, T1 was great and way ahead of its time. But what, other than that?

http://www.dynamix.com/products.html

I like the Pinball stuff.
Too bad the pirates out there don't. Not that I'm condoning piracy here, but I'd love a -nocd crack for the 3D Ultra Pinball series. Playing a 5 minute game of pinball and searching out the CD don't go hand-in-hand for me.

DormOnkey

David - it was a G-1.

Bob - um, could you at least erase some of the more embarrasing photos that were on there?

Tribes 2 has sold over 200,000 copies. That's probably better than 90% of the PC titles released each year.

Dynamix is probably a victim of a change in corporate philosophy more than anything else. They probably want to outsource development to better control costs.

"Tribes 2 has sold over 200,000 copies. That's probably better than 90% of the PC titles released each year."

Fair enough, but only 5,000 of those people are playing the game at _peak_ times according to the gamespy stats page. That's aich tee tee pee colon, forwardslash forwardslash.. ah, screw it. You know the URL by now.

5k out of 200k is 2.5 percent! What are the other 97.5 percent of the people doing with their game? Playing the single player training missions over and over?

I know Chet has implied there's some kind of international gamespy conspiracy to cover up the actual number of Tribes 2 players and everything.. but if you ask me, the most damning figures for this ONLINE ONLY game are the number of real-world players.

Jeff,

I think 5,000 is a good figure considering the minority of gamers who play online.

Ok, so 2.5% of the Tribes 2 players are playing online at any one time? How many copies has Half-Life sold? I'm guessing maybe 2 million now? But let's play it safe and say 1 million. So if 50,000 players are playing CS, that represents a whopping 5%. What a failure!

What are the latest figures on Ground Control multiplayer? I guess that means that game sucks too, eh?

Well, if only 2.5% of Tribes 2 players are playing online, what the hell are the other 97.5% doing? Other than a very lame offline tutorial thingy, the game is online only.

Jeff, those photos are safe with me! Now, about that loan....

Half-Life is a single player game. The online component is gravy. Many people played HL solo-only, and were happy to do it.

Tribes 2 was designed from the ground up to be online-only (single-player campaign? Come on--it had about as much of a single-player camapaign as the first Tribes did). If 2.5% of the people who bought it are playing it online, then only 2.5% of the people who bought it are playing it at all.

You can't use those numbers to come up with anything more accurate than 2.5% of the players are playing at that particular moment. It's mostly a meaningless stat unless you have some others you can compare it with. Heck, we don't even know if GameSpy's stats capture all the players or just the ones playing on GameSpy's servers.

How much time per week do most players devote to any one single game? Is it higher than 5%?

Regardless of whether 2.5% of the gamers are playing online or 100% are playing online, that has nothing to do with how the game has sold--the fact remains that it sold 200k copies. (Which isn't great, but isn't too shabby, either.)

I'm also very suspect of the online figures because it doesn't factor in the activity of Tribes 2 clans, which play on private servers and LANs.

Oh, and Half-Life has sold over 2 million copies.

--Billy

200k seems really high for this game. Are we sure this is the number of copies SOLD THROUGH and not the number of copies shipped?

--Dave

I asked Sierra and was told it was sales. It's been out for awhile and it was a highly anticipated game. Those numbers don't surprise me. Sierra has very good distribution, too.

I wouldn't call it a ringing success, but it has sold better than the majority of PC titles.

"You can't use those numbers to come up with anything more accurate than 2.5% of the players are playing at that particular moment. It's mostly a meaningless stat unless you have some others you can compare it with. Heck, we don't even know if GameSpy's stats capture all the players or just the ones playing on GameSpy's servers. "

Something people like to do is hide numbers in time. 2.5% online at any given time is over a 24-hour period. If you figure each person on for, say, an hour a day, then you really have (2.5*24=)60% online in any given day. Is this free, or pay-to play?

Also, that is probably an average, over the course of a day. If you logged on during "Prime time" (probably 6:00p ET-11 or midnight ET)you'd see much higher percentages of players than at 4 in the morning.

Tribes 2 is free. The bottom line is that it's just as popular as Q3 and UT if you go by GameSpy's numbers, and far behind CS.

In other words, it's one of the most popular online shooters when measured by GameSpy's stats. There are very few games that ever get anywhere near 5000 players all playing at the same time.

"Also, that is probably an average, over the course of a day."

Guys, 5,000 was a PEAK number; I was giving T2 the benefit of the doubt by quoting the highest figure I've seen. At any given time there are typically far less players than even that. Right now it's at 3,500. So if you want an average, take 3,000 or so. Probably less if you factor in the whole day.

"There are very few games that ever get anywhere near 5000 players all playing at the same time."

Fewer still are designed to be ONLINE ONLY, as Tribes 2 was. Those numbers are positively pathetic for a game that has no singleplayer component. Its whole reason to exist at ALL is online multiplayer.

Heck, even Quake 3 has a _decent_ single player game, assuming you like playing bots. And Unreal Tournament is even better in this department.. Half-Life? Fuggedaboudit.

What exactly is your point? That 200,000 in sales is nothing? That 3500 players online at any given time as measured by GameSpy is a failure? Funny, it seems to be doing just as well as UT and Q3 as far as online play goes.

And anyway, are sales figures and online game figures the measure of critical success? If so, I guess that Ground Control you like so much must suck.

It's easy to play games with numbers. Half-Life's sold two million copies. The pool of 50,000 CS players online according to GameSpy represents 2.5% of that number. Guess CS isn't very popular with Half-Life owners, eh? Only 2.5%? Pathetic!

And yeah I know -- you hate Tribes 2 and CounterStrike is the best game ever.

I actually uninstalled Half-Life+Everything yesterday. It was a momentous event as I have had Half-Life installed since it was first released back in - late '98 ? 2+ years of solid Half-Life gaming represents great value for money.

Great engine for its time but I just don't play it anymore. And Flashpoint has completely squashed my addiction to CounterStrike.

"If so, I guess that Ground Control you like so much must suck."

Hey! Wumpy doesn't even like GC all that much, so don't tear it down in order to get a shot at him. I love that game (he just loves the camera).

"And Flashpoint has completely squashed my addiction to CounterStrike."

Amen! When the online game becomes viable, will people be cheating at this game like they do in CS?

If an online game is popular, people will try to cheat. You can count on it.

That would be the only good use of the Bioforce controller -- if we could somehow detect a cheater and zap his ass through the controller. Heh.

I remember a guy I knew once who lived for cheating at games. He was a programmer, so it may be a real term, but he called it "finding the most effective degenerative scenario" for cheating. He used to play Mechwarrior 2, and would often win by taking a light mech with jump jets maxed. He'd jet, and the other lechs would follow. He'd just go high, and wait for them to run out of fuel and crash.

I don't know if this is precisely cheating, but playing to a game's flaws rather than the strengths always seemed kind of opposite the point of the whole thing to me. If you aren't playing it the way it was intended to play, won't you miss most of the intentional entertainment value that the designers coded in?

Computer Gaming World has a monthly cheater's corner. I don't play the games they have described in the articles, but I hope I never play with the guys who provide the most devious ways to cheat. They have described some real rat bastard cheating strategies.

-Davidcpa

"What exactly is your point? That 200,000 in sales is nothing? That 3500 players online at any given time as measured by GameSpy is a failure? Funny, it seems to be doing just as well as UT and Q3 as far as online play goes."

Precisely, but UT and Q3 aren't online-only games-- they have major singleplayer components. They're playing with one hand tied behind their back, so to speak, and still pimp-slapping* the hell out of Tribes 2 with their other hand. They're defeating T2 on its home court without breaking a sweat.

That's bad. But Tribes 2 isn't a very satisfying game for 98% of gamers, so I don't expect it to perform. The linux analogy is dead-on; I don't know any better way to say it than that.

* this phrase brought to you by Billy, Apache, and the other kids from VE

I know that most companies would be delighted to have a game sell 200,000 copies and be played online every night by thousands of players, but obviously that means nothing to you. Your own math can be used against Counter-Strike to show that 97.5% of the Half-Life owners choose not to play it. But I'm done arguing about it. You win.

"I know that most companies would be delighted to have a game sell 200,000 copies and be played online every night by thousands of players, but obviously that means nothing to you."

Yes-- so delighted, in fact, that they're shutting Dynamix down!

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870,2804068,00.html

This says volumes about the "success" of Tribes 2. It's a crazy mixed up world we live in where such a "successful" game coincides with the closing of the development house behind it. I don't see id, epic, or valve closing their doors.

Sure, sierra says the closure "will not affect the _support_ of the Tribes [series]" blah blah blah (are they done patching the thing yet, anyway?), but "Sierra will announce any schedule changes for other dynamix projects at a later date". Eg, don't hold your breath for Tribes 3. Then again, I wasn't exactly holding my breath for StarSiege 2.

Stop the MADNESS ENOUGH! (the spamming JUICE post)

Anyway, back to the original post.. it doesnt look like Sierra neccesarily is folding, most of the layoffs, so they say, are management.

But still, I feel that the early pc game developers/publishers biting the dust is kinda...sad. The worst of it being Microprose and Origin for me. Sierra, though it did start stinkin up with Outpost and those Phantasmagoria games, still has some backbone... i mean they are the ones publishing Empire Earth, Arcanum and who-knows-when TF2.

Also, Starsiege was a good game! sorta a "simplified" mechwarrior 2 when released. Also the manuals that came with the last one were awesome! Two manuals, one for the game and one for the history. Also, the RTS/Turn based Starsiege games weren't so bad.

And whats up with this make money the lazy way poster? what the hell? its gay.

etc

These boards seem to be on some kind of spam list. Sucks. Don't know what to do about it.

Kinda dumb to spam people when you're leaving your address like that.

Anyone live in that area wanna go knock some sense into him?

But, on the other hand...There's a way for you to make some money for the site, Mark!!

I hate to say this, but we probably need some anti-spam legislation and a few prosecutions to deter some of this crap. I'm all for an open Internet that's full of worthless, offensive bullshit if I choose to seek it out, but mass spamming should be curtailed somehow.

Missouri has a law now that lets you sign up and say you don't want to receive unsolicited sales calls over the phone, and the state Attorney General is prosecuting some companies that have ignored the list and called people on it.

That's cool. I never thought I'd say it, either, Mark, but there ought to be something that could be done about this.

At least with e-mail, you can block addresses and stuff. When people start doing crap like this -- well, it actually costs you guys money, and there's no really good way to prevent it. And that sucks.

I guess that's why so many message boards require you to sign-up to post. But I know that you guys don't want to do that, and I don't blame you.

Email spam's mildly annoying, but it only takes seconds to deal with. Deleting the spam posts on the boards takes a couple of minutes for each round of spamming. In other words, just long enough to be really annoying instead of mildly annoying.

Yeah, exactly. And if you don't delete them, they suck bandwidth (granted, only mildly, for one occurrence) and then it starts costing cash. So, it either costs time or money. That kinda crap just shouldn't be legal.

http://www.junkbusters.com is a friggin' godsend.