Tue, Mar 10, 2009 | 18:37 GMT
Ensemble was a “victim of its own success” – Bonfire
Bonfire Studios boss David Rippy, has told GI that Ensemble was “victim of its own success” in the RTS genre.
Bonfire was one of the studios to arise from Ensemble’s demise.
“With the cost of creating games so high, studios are almost forced to diversify across platforms,” he said.
“Aside from the financial risk of sticking to one platform or one genre, you also risk being pigeonholed in the industry.”
“Ensemble was kind of a victim of its own success as an RTS shop,” he said, adding: “As hard as we tried, we were never able to have one of our non-RTS prototypes greenlit, largely because we were ‘the RTS guys’.”
More through there.
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Posted in: America, Development, Microsoft, PC, Strategy, Xbox 360
Tags: bonfire studios, david rippy, ensemble
5 comments
#1
rainer
10/03/09, 7:17 pm
That’s pretty much what sunk the flight sim team at MS as well, the unseens games blog had a screens from a (non-sim) prototype or two from that team as well.
#2
Patrick Garratt
10/03/09, 7:57 pm
Surely it’s about diversifying within your own field, though. Epic’s a good example. It has straight FPS, “blockbuster” TPS and an engine business. I’m not in any way surprised that an MMO wasn’t greenlit from Ensemble.
#3
Gekidami
10/03/09, 8:17 pm
In all they had 6 games canned (known of)… Maybe they just sucked…
#4
Patrick Garratt
10/03/09, 8:24 pm
Being owned by Microsoft probably didn’t help so much. Looks as though they’ve all gone on to further things easily enough.
#5
SwiftRanger
10/03/09, 9:06 pm
It’s Microsoft; if a company cans Mythica (did that look ace or what?), dumps Vanguard then they sure as hell won’t fund any MMO, not even one that’s based on Halo.