wideload-games posts

A game developer that tried to do things differently has now been bought out by one of the biggest of the corporate entertainment groups. Disney Interactive announced today that it has acquired Chicago-based Wideload Games for an unnamed amount. It's founder Alex Seropian, who previously helped to found Bungie, will be getting a new job at Disney Interactive as its newly created vice president of creative and will now oversee all of Disney Interactive's games.

Wideload Games tried to develop games differently as it only had a core group in place and hired out most of its development to third parties, much like a movie production. Their first game was the humor-filled action game Stubbs The Zombie and later developed Hail to the Chimp and most recently Texas Cheat-em Poker. Wideload will continue to work out of Chicago on upcoming Disney Interactive projects.

A few months back developer Wideload Games and publisher D3Publisher released the unusual poker game Texas Cheat 'Em via Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Store. Today the PC version of the title has now been released via Steam, allowing folks who feel the need to cheat at card games the opportunity to do so.

While you can play this game as a normal poker title, Texas Cheat 'Em allows the player to gain a number of different "atvantages" over other players via the use of "cheat points". The Steam version comes with 12 Steam achievements along with stats tracking, leaderboards and more. The game normally sells for $9.99 on Steam but from now until August 17 you can purchase and download the title for $8.99.

Everyone knows that even in the best of economic times, people and companies can still go bankrupt. We have remarked in the past few months that there has been a rash of game development studios shutting down their doors even as the industry itself has been declared as "recession free" by many analysts. So why is this happening. Gamespot has a lengthy feature article that looks at the issue.

The article chats with members of the now closed down PC game developer Iron Lore who created Titan Quest and its expansion for THQ. The company had a new $20 million game they were pitching to publishers but were unable to secure a deal before they ran out of cash. The company's now former president Jeff Goodsill admitted they could have kept the lights on if they had done things differently, saying, "We should have been looking at different areas, not just for contract work, but for full products. . . " The article also looks at Wideload Games' approach which is to have a small full time team but out-source a large amount of their work on games to freelancers. However the article claims that at the moment it's a seller's market if you are a game developer; there are still lots of studios hiring so even if you get laid off there's still plenty of jobs available.