12 months ago they had 400 staff. Now it's closing.

Good luck fellow Kromans.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
12 months ago they had 400 staff. Now it's closing.

Good luck fellow Kromans.

Yikes. Is that all of Krome Studios - Melbourne and Brisbane? That's a real kick to the Australian industry, not to mention the developers now out of a job.

Yep. I've been drinking for 12 hours so it'd be wise for me not to offer much opinion as to the circumstances right now.

Tsumea has picked up on the story though.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Yep. I've been drinking for 12 hours so it'd be wise for me not to offer much opinion as to the circumstances right now.

Tsumea has picked up on the story though.

Oh, man, that's bad. :C

I haven't ever heard good news about Australian dev studios unfortunately. I used to play an Auran game "Fury" which I enjoyed.

I really hope things work out for you!

Best of luck to everyone affected by this. It really sucks; Krome has been around for a seriously long time (including as Beam Software, which made a lot of Super Nintendo hits).

To shutter suddenly like this is incredibly awful.

Wow. So is that the end of Melbourne House? They've been around since forever. I had a few uni mates who went to work there when I graduated - got a job offer there myself but went to work for someone else. That's really sad - they're an iconic part the Australian game industry. It's the end of an era.

I also haven't been hearing that many good things about the Aussie game industry for a while. I hope things will sort out alright for you and other Kromans.

Now I'm really glad I was "overqualified" for the position they were offering.

I feel for you man.

Quote: Original post by BLiTZWiNG
Now I'm really glad I was "overqualified" for the position they were offering.

That probably translates to "we're hoping for someone cheaper" ;)

Quote: Original post by M2tM
I haven't ever heard good news about Australian dev studios unfortunately. I used to play an Auran game "Fury" which I enjoyed.

Hehe, ironically, Fury was the game that killed off Auran :(

Quote: Original post by Ravuya
(including as Beam Software, which made a lot of Super Nintendo hits).

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
Wow. So is that the end of Melbourne House? They've been around since forever. That's really sad - they're an iconic part the Australian game industry. It's the end of an era.

Yeah Krome Melbourne just celebrated their 30'th anniversary recently, going back to the Beam Software / Melbourne House days... They'd also been owned by Infogrames and Atari in the past too. Krome Adelaide was basically made up of the Ratbag staff, after Midway bought and dismantled Ratbag. So there's quite a bit of the local game-dev history dying along with Krome's own history. Definitely a new epoch for the local industry.
I'm probably forgetting some studios, but in recent years we've now lost, Krome Brisbane, Melbourne (House) and Adelaide (Ratbag), Auran, Pandemic, Transmission and (most of) Red Tribe.
On the bright side, some of the hand-held studios seem to be thriving, like EA Mobile and Firemint :)

Quote: Original post by Hodgman

Quote: Original post by M2tM
I haven't ever heard good news about Australian dev studios unfortunately. I used to play an Auran game "Fury" which I enjoyed.

Hehe, ironically, Fury was the game that killed off Auran :(

Oh, I know. The game had potential, but they miss-marketed it as an MMO when it was an arena combat game (counterstrike players who also enjoy mmo style gameplay would enjoy it for example), and they suffered from an identity crisis when they realized this and ended up alienating the hardcore players who did enjoy the game in an attempt to bring in more casual players and the game kind of shuttered and collapsed under its own weight after trying to spin both directions at once.

It didn't help that a direct result of these conflicting and sweeping patches done under duress seemed to cause a lot of bugs to creep in and major stability issues which made the game actually technically unplayable due to game queues breaking for days at a time.

Even still, I was there on the last day of Fury's up-time mourning the loss along with everyone else who enjoyed the core game mechanics.

[Edited by - M2tM on October 18, 2010 10:37:33 AM]