junction-point-studios posts

Publisher Disney Interactive Studios has been going through a lot lately. The division of Disney shut down a major game development studio, Propaganda Games, earlier this month and this week a large amount of the company's team was laid off. Now comes word that there is a new person in charge of Disney's internal game studios.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Alex Seropian, who previously founded Bungie, will now oversee Disney Interactive's game development as well as be in charge of its many internal developers, including Junction Point Studios and Black Rock Studios. Seropian came into the Disney Interactive family when the division acquired Seropain's Wideload game development studio in 2009. Meanwhile the article claims that the many layoffs at Disney Interactive are just the first wave in a series. Disney Interactive's execs are looking to cut costs and that may mean more people could lose their jobs in the coming months.

Earlier this week, it was reported that massive layoffs had occured at publisher Disney Interactive Studios. Some of the internet reports, which used unnamed sources, said as much as half of the company's 700 team members had been cut. Now a Disney rep has told IndustryGamers that while there were layoffs at the division this week it was not as brutal as first reported.

According to the story, the rep would not give out an exact number of team members that were given their walking papers this week but did say that the numbers were "significantly less than 50 (percent)." It is known that the company shut down one game studio, Propaganda Games, earlier this month and that another dev team, Junction Point Studios, reportedly had a "minimal" amount of layoffs this week.

Publisher Disney Interactive is in the middle of a large layoff but the company is being silent on exactly how large the company's restructuring will be like. Reports on the net, including our sister site Joystiq, suggest that the company could be cutting as much as half of its team members.

The company has a number of in-house game developers and already one of them, Propaganda Games, has been closed. Another online report suggests that Junction Point Studios, founded by industry legend Warren Spector, have had "minimal" numbers of layoffs in this restructuring. The fate of Disney's other in-house developers, including Black Rock Studios (makers of last year's racing game Split/Second) remains unknown at this time.

While Eidos Montreal is working hard on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we could have had a spiritual successor to the first two games in the sci-fi RPG series from the man behind those classic games Warren Spector. In a new chat with the Develop web site Spector admits that he pitched such a game to the higher ups at Disney Interactive.

However he figured beforehand that the Disney execs wouldn't go for his game idea and he says, " ... I was right. The guys started texting in the middle of the meeting. I was convinced they were not interested." Instead Disney pitched an idea to Spector that eventually became his next game, the upcoming Wii exclusive Epic Mickey. However that sci-fi game idea might still happen in some form. Spector says, "Disney now owns the IP to it. So who knows – I certainly have ideas of how they would work in a Disney context."

Warren Spector, despite the fact that he has (temporarily we hope) left the PC game space to work on some Wii game called Epic Mick-something-or-other, is still in love with the Deus Ex game franchise. How much? So much that, according to a new Variety article, he tried to buy the rights to the series from its current owners Eidos. Unfortunately for us, he failed.

Spector clearly wants to work on the franchise saying, "There were and still are 'Deus Ex' stories I would like to tell. That story is not done for me." Eidos' Montreal studios are currently working on Deus Ex 3 but they have been extremely quiet for the most part on their progress since the game was announced two years ago.

For the past few weeks we have been learning more about Epic Mickey, the upcoming Wii exclusive RPG that's being developer at Warren Spector's Junction Point Studios. Yet the man behind the Thief and Deus Ex series said that the game actually started out a a PC game (alongside the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles).

So what happened? According to a chat with Spector at the Official Nintendo Magazine he didn't want to make a Wii port that wouldn't be as good as the other versions. He would also like to concentrate on one platform. The solution turned out to be simple. Just make the game for the Wii and the Wii only. Still, it will be great when and if Spector decides to return to PC game making. One can only hope.

Over a year ago we did a feature article about all those games that were currently known to be in development but were unannounced (and did a sequel adding even more of those games a few months later). We referred to them as "Black Ops Games".

Since those two articles have been released there have been lots of developments. So it seems appropriate to look back now on our previous two articles to find out which games on the list have been revealed, which ones are still secret and which ones we can now add to the "Black Ops" list. First, we will take a look back at the games on our first two Black Ops game lists that have since been officially announced or now known to have been canceled.

We've all heard comments from game industry reps saying how "cheap" PC and video games are compared to other entertainment media. However the fact is that no matter how many hours you may spend with a game you still have to deal with higher prices up front compared to renting or buying a DVD or downloading music.

Legendary game developer Warren Spector (currently head of Junction Point Studios) says it's time that the game industry take a good hard look at the pricing of their products. Gamesindustry.biz reports that Spector, speaking at GDC last week, stated, "We've been a niche medium that over-charges for its product and therefore generates a lot of revenue which makes us a little bigger than Hollywood, which is crazy."

Spector says the industry should go after the impulse entertainment market for its prices. He says in the article, "If I've got a 20 dollar bill in my pocket I can go buy a book, go to a movie, but I can't buy a game. I can buy a CD, I can do so much even now, but you cannot buy a game." To be fair you can in fact buy some games for $20 out of the box or wait until their prices go down months or even years after release. However it's clear that Spector's comments go after the vast majority of retail game products that are priced at $40, $50 and $60 (even more if you talk about collector's editions).

There's more bad news on the game industry layoff front today as Gamespot reports that Disney Interactive has let go of a number of its team members at three of its internal developers (Propaganda Games, Avalanche Software and Fall Line Studios).

According to the story, less than 30 team members were let got from Vancouver-based Avalanche, the developers of 2008's FPS Turok. A Disney Interactive rep stated there are still two teams at Propaganda and hinted that a sequel to Turok is still in development. Meanwhile the Salt Lake City-based Avalanche Software and Fall Line Studio have been consolidated into one group with less than 20 team members lost in its wake. Apparently there were no job losses at Junction Point Studios, another Disney Interactive dev team that's headed up by Warren Spector.

We have been waiting for a long, long time to find out some real details on the first game from Junction Point Studios. The Austin based company was founded by Warren Spector way back in 2004 but has yet to produce one game. In 2006 the company was bought, unexpectedly, by Disney Interactive.

Now Gamasutra is reporting that they have seen concept artwork that they believe may be from Junction Point's first game which they say is code-named "Epic Mickey". One such image has a scene where "machines wearing the faces of the Seven Dwarfs deposit old-fashioned renditions of Disney characters onto the beach with mechanical hands." All of this info tracks with earlier statements by Spector himself who on his own blog predicted some of his Deus Ex and Thief fans might not care about his next title. At the time he stated, "I'm sure a lot of the hardcore folks are going to be up in arms and I'm really looking forward to getting into that discussion with them".