Warcry has an exclusive interview with Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam, and Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter, on Fury. The guys answer pretty much all the questions running through everyone's minds at the moment about the liquidation of Auran Developments, what it means for Fury, what they're aiming to achieve with the Age of the Chosen expansion, and where exactly did it go all wrong...
Auran: There are really two things here and the both contributed equally. First was the lack of advanced planning and design. We didn't have a proper prototype or pre-production phase where the game itself was planned out and we didn't have enough funding to finish the game. As such, only short term planning was done and it was very difficult to develop effective designs in the absence of knowledge that they would be implemented.
The second issue was the difficulty in developing a business model that would support our target market...
It's also quite extraordinary and rather telling of Fury's sales performance that the game sold more copies in Australia than it did in North America. For the rest of the interview, head on over to Warcry.com!
1. Anonymous Thu, 20 Dec
"lack of advanced planning and design. We didn't have a proper prototype or pre-production phase" - The game was in development for 5 years and they couldn't do any advanced planning or have a proper pre-production phase? This just shows the inexperience of the 2 guys running a project who have no business making any kind of decisions....and supposedly they fired one guy who had the necessary experience and another left out of frustration?
This sounds like the Australian game development industry in general. F*cking clueless ;).
You could say that about the industry in general, it's not much better overseas, just more money.
yeah the games industry has ALOT to learn from the film/tv industry in regards to planning and preproduction etc... if u guys want your 40% rebate your gonna have to fix a few things up ....
Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
Yeah, the film industries a great example to follow......god, so much success there... :l
I do however agree we have a lot to learn, hopefully some small lesson may be learnt from such a crappy situation.
Yeah learn that if you have lots of tax breaks and handouts that you can keep making crap products and not have to worry about job security.
It's no surprise that the game sold more copies in Australia with all the advertising and promotion that was done here. Why was all this promotional money spent in Australia, though, when it's such a tiny market? A truly bizarre marketing strategy.
I would have thought that the brunt of the advertising would have been in South Korea. Especially as the publisher is a Korean one, and the title had a very Asian market target audience... :/
The Korean publisher pulled out, hence Game C0ck.
Selling a Unreal 3 PvP game to the Koreans who both prefer PvE and have old computers is not a smart move. Production went from high detail to low detail to high and low again cos no one had any idea who the game was for. As a result, it was for no one and no one bought it.
ha. well.. I know some people who worked at auran and they both say tony and adam were clueless idiots! what a disgrace.. the problem with this industry is that people are too vague with what they want to achieve with a game. There isn't enough focus as there is in other industries. It is common in the game industry to get some talented guys who want to make great games, only to be fooled by some used car salesman who think they can run a games company and make some money because they can talk good.
One thing that frustrates me is that tony and adam refuse to admit there own failings and take any blame.. they are the ones running the show and then they are trying to make excuses. If they had worded it differently, just said.. I admit I could have done things differently and better and it was a learning experience I will learn from then I would respect them more.. but to say well.. we had a lack of money and no proper pre-production phase blah blah.. that guy should have got the pink slip long ago....