Joystiq: It's no secret that baseballer Curt Schilling is a huge MMO fan, but you might not know much about his 38 Studios game development company, formed with artist Todd McFarlane and fantasy writer R.A. Salvatore. They've been working on a massive MMO code-named Copernicus, which they haven't said too much about yet. This week at Austin GDC, Vivox announced that it would be providing the voice application inside the game, and five pieces of key concept art were released at Comic-Con earlier this summer.
We sat down with CEO Brett Close in Austin to find out what we could about Copernicus, and what's in store for the new company. Check out the full interview after the break.
Kevin from Denkiphile: "The first I’d ever heard of Titan was at the height of my World of Warcraft career, which was also the same time that several games, touted as WoW-killers, came onto the market and failed miserably. It made sense to me at the time that the only thing that could kill WoW was Blizzard themselves, but this also eventually changed with the advent of session-based, microtransaction-supported games like League of Legends. Titan was supposed to revolutionize and revitalize the MMO genre, but it certainly was not the first to crash and burn before its first flight. Here are some MMOs whose ambitions flew them too close to the sun."
XMNR: 38 Studios founder Curt Schilling released some new screenshots of the Project Copernicus MMO.
being from boston and a die hard redsox fan, i hope everything works out for him
Those screens look pretty great, really love the art style. I hope the project gets a chance.
XMNR: 38 Studios reportedly laid off all of its employees including subsidiary Big Huge Games on Thursday. The layoff letter sent to employees was leaked not long after confirming the news and filled with the kind of odd corporate speak we all have come to love.
I highly doubt everyone is "fine", especially the ones with families. Not to mention not being paid since May 1. Wish the best of luck to the employees.
Another company down. Just goes to show you how careful you have to be. It's expensive making games and you can't afford to fail over and over. Not any company. This is why exclusives don't matter. Too much risk involved. When they don't sell you hurt your company. A few failures are fine when you're doing well otherwise. But when the company is struggling, no one can afford a series of failures. I know this wasn't an exclusive. But it makes the reality of the importance of making games that sell clear.