Category Archives: Foundation 9

Foundation 9, developer of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for XBLA, reckons that around 30 percent of all 360 owners purchase games from the Marketplace.

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Foundation 9 has cut back on staff, closed its Fizz Factor studio and merged Amaze and Griptonite due to the slowing market.

“It’s important to F9 to remain a strong and profitable studio, so that we can continue to provide the best possible services to our publishing partners and employees,” read a company statement. “From time to time we make decisions to grow or shrink capacity in relation to market conditions, and we do not make public comments on these decisions.

“We can confirm that we recently merged the operations of our two Kirkland studios, Amaze and Griptonite. Having separate ‘console’ and ‘handheld’ studios under the same roof simply didn’t make sense in light of the convergence in capabilities of modern game hardware.

“J.C Connors, studio head of Griptonite, will lead the combined studio. As part of that restructuring, and our normal practice of monitoring business conditions, we made the decision to close our Austin, TX handheld studio, Fizz Factor.”

Currently working on Assassin’s Creed II and Where the Wild Things Are, Foundation 9 plans to make addition cuts at Double Helix Games and suspend matching payments to the company 401K fund.

More through GI.biz, VentureBeat.

Peter Molyneux has been announced for GDC Europe where he will provide a lecture on ‘Choice: The Ultimate Game Mechanic’, using the Fable franchise along with Black & White to show “how choice can be a compelling game mechanic so long as player decisions have tangible effects on the game world.”

Interesting.

Also of note, it was announced that Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov will speak about ‘Creating Visual Identity for Games’, by analyzing “the elements and tools that designers use to enhance storytelling and gameplay: space, architecture, light, color and stylization.”

Senior execs from Bruckheimer Games, Capcom, Disney, Foundation 9, Microsoft, Namco Bandai, and Paramount will also be on-hand for a panel called ‘Ask the Decision Makers: Find Out What Publishers Want And How To Get What You Want’.

GDC Europe and GamesCom takes place August 17-19.

More over on Gamasutra.

We thought we’d leave this last night as some of the details involved seemed less than solid.

The confusion focused mainly on a Kotaku story that claimed six publishers were to quit E3. The story’s been edited since publication – as you can see from the original URL – with the headline now reading “Five Publishers Drop Out of E3 This Year, Some Blame ESA President”.

The six publishers in question were Activision and Vivendi (both confirmed as quitting both the show and ESA), Codemasters, Foundation 9, NCsoft and id Software. After Kotaku published the story, ESA contacted the site to say Codemasters would be attending the show, and a note was added at the bottom of the original piece.

The story took another hit when id PR contacted Gamespot to say that it too would be attending E3, but then later contacted the site to retract its statement and promise a further update. As you can see, the Gamespot piece carries three updates at the bottom. The Kotaku story still claims id won’t be there.

The other aspect to Kotaku’s story centred on Mike Gallagher’s ESA leadership, but we wouldn’t go near it with a bargepole, frankly.

Foundation 9 and NCsoft have now both issued statements to Gamespot confirming they won’t be attending this year’s show.

An NCsoft spokesperson said, “The timing wasn’t right for our products, so it really doesn’t make sense for us to go.”

The Foundation 9 comment said, “”Our decision not to exhibit at E3 this year, was in no way in response to Activision’s decision.

“We came to the decision on our own at the end of 2007. Some of our business development folks may actually go to the show as attendees, we’re just not investing in the exhibit space. In addition, we just want to be clear that we have nothing against the show or the ESA in any way; exhibiting at E3 is just not something that fits with our marketing strategy this year.”

The firm make a similar confirmation of non-attendance to Joystiq.

In summary: Activision, Vivendi, NCsoft and Foundation 9 definitely aren’t going to be at E3 this year. Codemasters is going. Atlus isn’t. Not sure what’s happening with id.

There’s a list of companies listed on the official site so far – which at the moment is password-protected – here.