Working Designs closes its doors.

[Romier S]

Posted on the front page of the site. Here is a link to the news section:

 

http://www.lcvg.com/news.php

 

December 13, 2005 - RPG fans will no doubt weep after hearing the news that Working Designs is no more.

 

"There's no easy way to say it, so I just will. Working Designs is gone. All the staff has been laid off and the office is closed and has been for some time," said company president Victor Ireland in a post on the companies official forums.

 

Ireland spoke of difficulties in getting Working Designs titles approved for US release, and had some not so nice parting words for Sony it seems.

 

"Sony has made it clear that they do not want the details of their dealings with any publisher made public," Ireland wrote. "Suffice to say that you would buy what we wanted to sell if we could sell it."

 

Ireland did note that while Working Designs is now dead, he plans to continue working in the industry with other Working Designs staffers on various projects. He also noted that he would like to help bring more Japanese RPG's to the Xbox 360 in the US.

 

Another one bites the dust.

[dogbert]

"Suffice to say that you would buy what we wanted to sell if we could sell it."

 

What they've wanted to sell for a long time is a US release of a real crappy Goemon game.

[GreenMonkey]

I was sad to see this. They brought us Lunar 2, which I consider my favorite PS1 game, and in my top 5 list of RPGs.

 

 

There's a good thread at cheapassgamer talking about all the games that Sony USA wouldn't approve for publishing here...(I don't attest to the veracity of this source).

 

http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=77820&page=3&pp=20

 

Here's that partial list of games that SCEA has denied' date=' that I made in August.

Vib Ribbon, Goemon (the previous Goemon), Dodonpachi, Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon, Curse: Eye of the Isis, Shadow Tower: Abyss, Ys 1+2, Syberia 1 and 2, Still Life, Tales of Symphonia, Policenauts, and a complete collection of all the Langrisser games.

 

Syberia, Syberia 2, Curse, and Broken Sword 3 all came out in Europe on PS2, but not here. Still Life was slated for PS2 but was cancelled in all regions when it was rejected for the US.

 

SNK's games were being rejected by SCEA, which was the only reason they went to Xbox... And MS not only welcomed them with open arms, they reportedly sent a guy over to them who wrote all of their XBL code.

 

And yes, WD wanted to do Langrisser, but Sony said no. And yes, Policenauts was actually going to come here (sequel to Snatcher), but Sony, in their infinite wisdom, said no.

[/quote']

 

Interview with president on why they had to shut down:

 

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1867&Itemid=2

 

Did you see this coming? What was the first indication that the situation was dire?

 

Looking back, the first clue was getting both Growlansers and Goemon rejected the same day shortly before E3 2001 (or was it 2002?). We had never had a single rejected title out of all the games we'd ever submitted to NEC, Sega and Sony. To get three in one day was a shock--especially when they were right down the middle of the kinds of games we always did that sold well and were well received. We spent years picking the seeds out of cotton in the efforts to get the games approved, and eventually succeeded in two out of the three, but the cost in both time and money was too great. I should have seen what was happening and cut and run to another set of titles, but I believed in them 100% . I still do; Growlanser is one of the

freshest RPG series out there.

 

 

....

 

What was Working Designs' ultimate undoing?

 

Me, probably. If I were Mr. Corporate, I would have cut and run when those three games were rejected. But I believed in them strongly, as I do all the games we licensed, and was convinced that if I could just show them what was special about those titles they would approve them. That belief led to three years burning money and stagnating when we could have been doing other games. It was quite hellish. That said, I did manage to get Growlanser II and III out here, and hopefully left the door open for I, IV and V, all of which are even better than II and III.

[JoeyN]

So their games were rejected, when a ton of crap comes out for game systems all the time. Go figure