How 2K Killed Irrational Games

I worked at Irrational Games / 2K Australia from Freedom Force right up until shipping Bioshock 2. I was a team lead, producer, and even ran the Australian office for about year before I left to make Neptune's Pride.

To me there is nothing really controversial in this article. Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

That's not necessarily true.

Bioshock Infinite in particular was "disappointing" compared to projections:

http://www.p4rgaming.com/take-two-in-retrospect-ken-levines-...

2K posted losses in the hundreds of millions in the year leading up to Bioshock Infinite's release (Bioshock would have been a significant percentage of that) and continued to lose money in the year of its release:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-13-bioshock-in...

People often ignore that these games may cost over a $100 million to develop and the same again to market (Bioshock Infinite ads were everywhere). Selling 5 million copies might only net $100 million back again (after taxes and other distribution costs).

That happens not only in the gaming industry. An approach that works on the small scale may not work on the large scale. If you are small you are forced to take care about your product, customers and employees (maybe not in this order). If you are at a big corp you have to deal with people who only care about company politics and the ego-game, even if you do not care about these things.

It's also should be noted that Ken Levine is somewhat known to be hard to work with, there was a fall out with Vivendi/Sierra and there were issues with employees leaving Irrational after having fights with him (you can find various posts on industry forums) which also lead to Nate Wells (Executive Art Director) leaving Irrational for Naughty Dog.

Now creative personal, can be "unsettling" from that perspective, it might be not that extreme in the video games industry as on the theater-stage, but from the CEO-medieval perspective, the constant fluctuation of signals might seem like betrayal and back-stabbing.

Reaction would be the exactly wrong approach- getting more involved and keeping a tighter control on everything, resulting in content, where the more "extreme" fluctuating personal is leashed. Now the resulting product would miss the extremes, which is exactly what attracts the audience in the first place.

Is "units" normalized to full price or something where "copies" just total games sold even at sale price? That is the only guess I could come up with.

I actually quite liked the game. The problem I think is that there was a market mismatch with that title.

XCOM 2012 caught a lot of flak for it being too different from the 1994 original. Only brilliant execution made it possible for it to succeed.

An XCOM TPS (Which is what Bureau is, to a degree) is just too much of a stretch, most of XCOM's audience are not that open minded unfortunately.

I believe that ultimately the aforementioned market mismatch was too difficult to overcome, even without the publisher's interference and micromanagement.

Buying a studio 9/10 is the end of its existence in any meaningful way.

The sad part is that the real people who made these great games will see none of this continued income.

"...Now to correct one thing, what keeps 2k and Take 2 afloat is Rockstar Games. They produce multimillion dollar games that go on to produce over 700 million dollars from their online mode alone. Their games are the top sellers in their years and even decades. Firaxis Games as of now is a failure of a studio. Years back yes they did develop the wildly successful Civilization 5 which went on to sell over 9 million units and Xcom Enemy Unknown that went on to sell over 3.4 million units. [1] Then they developed Beyond Earth which tanked at 1.4 million and Xcom 2 at .8 million, a game so bad by even it’s supporters admission it needs mods to be playable. Civlization VI is off to a rough start and will probably match Beyond Earth. It hasn’t even broken its first million yet.

Given how poorly they are doing, my money on the next studio closure is going to be them if they are not overhauled instead. I have no clue how their capacity to develop has declined so fiercely but sadly it has. On to your question as to how a game can sell 1.7 million units and not be profitable. I’m going to break this down for you, on console sales the publisher only gets on average $27 for every $60 sold. Digital is more profitable at 70% of total sales. For that 1.7 it turned out $45.9 million, give or take a few million. After development and marketing the fact it sold significantly less than Borderlands 2 is why it is considered a failure. You sold 14% of what Borderlands 2 did.

Worse and I am going to give you the consumers perspective on this, the game is god awful. For starters it story is loaded with virtue signaling, but that’s only a minor annoyance. What truly cans it is the fact it is either the Pre Sequel is canon or 2 and the books are canon. That’s how atrociously written the presequel was. Even the voice actor of Handsome jack sounded miserable spewing out those out of character lines. The game was received so poorly that within months it was being bundled with Borderlands 2 to desperately sell units.

While I understand that development on The bureau wasn’t your fault it also was atrocious. I must say I loved their original version of the game that was first shown off. The final red flag for the games low quality should have been the YOLO trailer, but sadly I still purchased it, much to my regret.

Autralias other projects aren’t exactly well recieved. At best they are controversial, Bioshock 2 is hated by half the community at least, CodShock was an embarassment that alienated the entire original audience for the game and came with a story only the greatest of idiots thought was intelligent that ultimately damage the continuity of any future Bioshock games going forward in the manner of public perception. It sold well on the hype of Bioshock in the Sky, instead it was Call of Duty with color. I understand that people put a lot of passion and work into those games, but that doesn’t make them by default good or profitable.

Thanks for giving us insights into what transpired though. Even if they are through tinted lenses it is always great to see insights into what transpires behind closed doors inside the industry."