By Alec Meer on October 30th, 2012 at 3:00 pm.
I would say that it’s not been a great couple of weeks for the Brenda (nee Braithwaite) Romero / Tom Hall / John Romero gang. The Old School RPG Kickstarter was closed early once it appeared that its curiously vague pitch wasn’t resonating with as many folk as hoped, and now the Romeros’ Ubisoft-published Facebook game Ghost Recon Commander has had the plugged pulled after mere weeks. However, the Romeros got married yesterday (in Disneyland, no less), so hopefully it’s actually been a great couple of weeks for them despite all this.
The now Mrs Romero has not rested on her newlywed laurels, however, and has been spending some of what should have been her honeymoon trying to find new jobs for those Lootdroppers laid off as a result of Ghost Recon Commander’s sudden death.
She’s already had a fair bit of a success finding new work for some of the team already via a torrent of Twitter activity, and if you’re a studio in the market for new heads it’s worth a scan of her feed. Lootdrop apparently have another two projects in the works, and a third not far behind.
Ghost Recon Commander, ambitious by Facebook standards but nonetheless faintly horrible, is combination of a sorta-strategy affair that you sees shooting cardboardy men in order to collect GhostBucks and Facebook-traditional Farmville-style building/compulsion loops. It’s still running at the time of writing, so if you want to go and have a curious nose at it now’s the time to do so.
30/10/2012 at 15:08 mentor07825 says:
I vaguely remember thinking to myself when this was first reported that it was going to bomb. Hate to be right though, at the cost of people’s jobs.
30/10/2012 at 15:34 frightlever says:
Nobody wants to appear insensitive but in general things are better when sub-standard or unpopular work is punished and good work is rewarded. Thus, a meritocracy.
Also, no badger cull this year. Boohoo for badger-culling jobs?
30/10/2012 at 15:12 Surlywombat says:
I find most of these facebook games, really push the idea of what a game can be, and not in a good way.
30/10/2012 at 15:53 Simon Hawthorne says:
Facebook games: A shell containing ‘gamification’ with a complete lack of actual ‘game’.
30/10/2012 at 15:59 Shuck says:
I’d argue that the problem, right now, is that they don’t. More specifically, that they’re pretty much all using the same basic mechanics, the same notion of what a Facebook game is, that were set down a while ago and not innovating much. It’s a terrible design constraint and doesn’t do much for the long-term future of Facebook games. They’re broken in exactly the same way, so if you dislike or get tired of one Facebook game, it’s improbable you’ll like any of the others.
30/10/2012 at 16:19 Brun says:
That’s good though, because Facebook games should not have a long-term future.
30/10/2012 at 16:52 Shuck says:
No, they should have a future – but a future in which they’re mechanically and thematically diverse and generally worth playing. It’s too important a platform for games, for multiple reasons, to just dismiss. Facebook has brought a lot of people to games, and I’d like to see them be given something substantial and worthwhile to play with. Both Facebook as a platform and the audience it brought with it have created interesting opportunities to grow the medium (if we can talk about games as a medium, which we really can’t but I will anyways) in ways that we’ve not seen before. Those opportunities have been largely squandered, but that’s no reason to throw the whole thing out. It’s a reason to try harder.
30/10/2012 at 15:12 Serpok says:
I remember giving this a try at the time of release, being starved by lack of TBS at the time, but was imideatly turned of when found out that the only wait to add units to squad was to recruit facebook “friends”.
30/10/2012 at 15:45 skyturnedred says:
This is the fault with pretty much every game on Facebook. I’d like to play a game on Facebook occasionally to kill some time, but as I hate getting requests to play games as much as the next guy, I refuse to bother others with the exact thing I hate too.
30/10/2012 at 15:28 S Jay says:
Kind of sad that such nice art assets are used on Facebook games, which usually are as much a game as clicking a button every 3 minutes.
30/10/2012 at 16:18 Baboonanza says:
That’s a good point actually. Chances are all of those art assets are just going to be locked away on a server somewhere. What shame when there are lots of programmers who could make good games with them.
30/10/2012 at 17:17 wodin says:
yeah looks much better than Xenonauts for instance..but would have fit perfectly into that game.
30/10/2012 at 15:52 Somerled says:
Congratulations, Romeros!
Er … on the wedding. Not on the double belly flop.
30/10/2012 at 15:59 The Random One says:
Sad news for the devs being laid off, and hats off to Mrs. R nee B for being ready to help them.
… But what I find so oddly fascinating is that the Romeros had planned to get married during their Kickstarter campaign. What points to either really poor planning… or really great (but also cynical) planning.
30/10/2012 at 16:00 kwyjibo says:
Was this cancelled because it was genuinely rubbish, or that none of the future war people want to play facebook games?
Take a look at the stats at http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2012/10/29/exclusive-ubisoft-cancels-ghost-recon-commander-layoffs-hit-loot-drop/
The audience was still growing.
30/10/2012 at 16:05 CKScientist says:
Did John Romero make her his bitch?
30/10/2012 at 16:13 noom says:
Dammit. Beaten to the punch by 8 minutes.
30/10/2012 at 16:17 helpleo says:
Wai wai wai, you mean John Romero married Brenda Braithwaite on Disneyland, and that is not the top news? I need my game industry gossip, goddamitt!
30/10/2012 at 17:17 Bhazor says:
So win win then?
31/10/2012 at 08:36 drewski says:
…pictures of spiders?