So, Hartsman is back, cleaning house apparently. "Trion shuts down San Diego office"

[thinice]

If cost alone is what constitutes 'AAA' in a title, there have been a lot of expensive duds in recent years.

And there have been some AAA duds in very recent times.

[A s0t]

And there have been some AAA duds in very recent times.

halo cod gow
hopefully star citizen wont be a dud

[Carnak]

Sad that Trion needs to do things like this, but good that they're doing what needs to be done.

I still have my fingers crossed that they can whip Defiance into shape and look forward to playing when the DLC hits.

[ralisti]

This does not surprise me at all. The San Diego office, judging by its track record with Defiance, was full of utterly incompetent management prone to making the worst possible decisions. Restructuring like this will allow, hopefully, competent management to keep Defiance under the microscope and prevent future idiotic decisions.

It also allows the tapping of better developers to peer review code to, again hopefully, prevent bug ridden and shoddy code from being pushed to production.

Given that Trion San Diego was following the path well travelled, building a game for 10 year old specifications and not doing anything overly original, their failure shows that the office there was a total liability.

The main issue is that Trion San Diego has so damaged Trion's reputation as a whole, I am not sure they can save Defiance. The amount of time that it will take to not only fix the game but repair the damage done, combined with the new consoles on the horizon and being woefully simplistic for many PC gamers, is likely to mean the death for the game as people will have moved on.

[Rasczak]

This does not surprise me at all. The San Diego office, judging by its track record with Defiance, was full of utterly incompetent management prone to making the worst possible decisions. Restructuring like this will allow, hopefully, competent management to keep Defiance under the microscope and prevent future idiotic decisions.

It also allows the tapping of better developers to peer review code to, again hopefully, prevent bug ridden and shoddy code from being pushed to production.

Given that Trion San Diego was following the path well travelled, building a game for 10 year old specifications and not doing anything overly original, their failure shows that the office there was a total liability.

The main issue is that Trion San Diego has so damaged Trion's reputation as a whole, I am not sure they can save Defiance. The amount of time that it will take to not only fix the game but repair the damage done, combined with the new consoles on the horizon and being woefully simplistic for many PC gamers, is likely to mean the death for the game as people will have moved on.

It is a possibility in the end that Trion Worlds would want to cut its loses on Defiance once the bean counters are done assessing the overall investment needed to fix the game, market it again, and so forth. However, Defiance the game was also 50% funded by Syfy for development, so Trion Worlds is not the sole financial investor of the game. Also, the show has a Season 2 for June 2014, and it is quite possible that the contract with Syfy (coupled with their 50% pre-launch development funding) doesn't simply allow Trion Worlds to shut it down so easily.

Trion Worlds could very much be stuck with Defiance for a bit, yet.

[Azimov]

It wasn't massive layoffs, they're moving the studio to the Redwood City studio, which is a smart move in my opinion.

The problem there is that even though the Studio may move, some people on that team will not. Imagine if you were told at short notice you job was moving that distance.

[Valethar]

It is a possibility in the end that Trion Worlds would want to cut its loses on Defiance once the bean counters are done assessing the overall investment needed to fix the game, market it again, and so forth. However, Defiance the game was also 50% funded by Syfy for development, so Trion Worlds is not the sole financial investor of the game. Also, the show has a Season 2 for June 2014, and it is quite possible that the contract with Syfy (coupled with their 50% pre-launch development funding) doesn't simply allow Trion Worlds to shut it down so easily.

Trion Worlds could very much be stuck with Defiance for a bit, yet.

They also stated early on, when people doubted the show itself would last the whole first season, much less get a second one, that the game was not tied to the show and that Trion had the resources and the commitment to keep the game going regardless of the fate of the TV series.

I suppose we're just going to have to see what happens, once they get around to spin controlling whatever information they're going to release about what happened in SD, etc....

[Phaius]

They also stated early on, when people doubted the show itself would last the whole first season, much less get a second one, that the game was not tied to the show and that Trion had the resources and the commitment to keep the game going regardless of the fate of the TV series.

I suppose we're just going to have to see what happens, once they get around to spin controlling whatever information they're going to release about what happened in SD, etc....

I always doubt when I hear players telling of impeding doom and near future shut down of any MMO. I've heard it with so many, including even sandboxes like Second Life and yet, it fails to pan out. Personally, I'm just going to wait and see what happens. I'm not an insider at the company so I can't claim to know what will happen.

However, you (general you) might find this interesting. Kevin Murphy of SyFy talks a bit about the game which says they have a strong and keen interest in keeping the game going, in terms of SyFy's interest:

http://youtu.be/bSuIsuUzOno

[WhiteCell]

Well that was unexpected...

Only if you were oblivious to Defiance's poor sales, terrible player retention rate, and horrid reduced pricing.

This was completely expected. Defiance was a major flop for Trion and it was apparent a couple of days post launch when players stopped logging in because the game was missing standard MMO features and has no substance to it.

Remember shortly after launch Trion literally fired nearly all major managers of of Defiance's team due to lack of content and quality of content.

[Harnace]

I'm quite happy about this, the san diego studio had no idea how to run a MMO properly. The redwood studio have done some amazing things on Rift so them working on Defiance is a huge improvement. I forsee a bright future for this game now!