Your donations keep RPGWatch running!

Stardock - All News

Show news in a year(yyyy), month(yyyy/mm) or day:
Show news of type:
Friday - August 29, 2014
Saturday - October 19, 2013
Wednesday - September 11, 2013
Saturday - September 04, 2010
Box Art

Friday - August 29, 2014

Stardock - Dog Days of Summer Update

by Couchpotato, 21:42

Thanks to Farflame for sending the following update, It seems Stardock has posted a summer update with information on the development of their games.

Some of the new games might be of interest as one is set in the Fallen Enchantress world called Elemental, and the other is an unannounced project.

The marketing people hate when I refer to something involving Elemental.  That’s because every press article seems focus on the original Elemental:War of Magic (which did suck unfortunately).  Elemental remains the most enjoyable programming experience I ever had.  It’s a good reminder that you can’t mix up fun working on and fun playing.

Anyway, we just released an update to Legendary Heroes last month and we’re working on the next game in that fantasy universe.  It’s going to be incredibly sweet. We’ve decided to embrace its single player style and really focus the game about you. So we have some real RPG-ish stuff coming.

Our biggest, most ambitious project ever is not announced yet.  It’ll likely be announced as CES 2015. This team is a combo of people who worked on Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations, Civilization V and LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth.  It’ll require 64-bit and need Mantle/DirectX 12 to really shine.  We haven’t even hinted about this game yet in any form so don’t bother to try to guess. It’s something completely new.

Saturday - October 19, 2013

Stardock - 20th Anniversary Sale

by Couchpotato, 00:14

Stardock is having a new sale to celerbate it's anniversary. You can buy them direct from them, or on Steam.

Save 50-75%* on all Stardock titles during the Stardock 20th Anniversary Weekend!

Explore the farthest reaches of space or the remnants of a magical world. Battle in arenas with godlike titans, or as political candidates with godlike egos.

Titles include:

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes
Galactic Civilizations II
Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity
Fallen Enchantress
Galactic Civilizations I Ultimate
Demigod
The Political Machine 2012

Wednesday - September 11, 2013

Derek Paxton - New Head of Games Development

by Couchpotato, 01:00

Stardock announced today that Fallen Enchantress Producer/Designer Derek Paxton will take over as Vice President of Games Development and Production.

A modder-turned-studio-leader, Paxton was most recognized for his work on the Fall from Heaven mod for the popular Civilizations IV strategy game prior to joining Stardock as lead designer in 2010. Derek joined Stardock after a decade-long career working with Fortune 500 company Novell in the technology sector. Since joining Stardock in 2010, Paxton successfully brought to market the last two titles in the Elemental franchise – both of which earned positive critical receptions from top international games media and fans.

"Derek has really transformed the game studio," said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. "His experience at managing multiple projects combined with his amazing design skills has resulted in not just better games but a better working environment for our teams."

As part of the company’s 20th anniversary this October, Paxton and Stardock Entertainment will announce a series of new projects from the studio which will include new titles and more.

"I'm looking forward to the incredible opportunity to lead a studio with a legacy of creating award-winning strategy games," said Paxton. "Games are a passion for everyone who works at Stardock Entertainment and it's an honor to be able to work with such talented developers, artists and designers. I look forward to continuing the tradition of creating incredible games with the amazing team at Stardock."

PC Gamer has a interview with Derek Paxton to talk about the promotion.

Stardock has gone through ups and downs, in terms of publicity. What do you think the studio represents to the PC gaming community right now?

DP: I think that Stardock is in a unique position. We’re bigger than you’re typical indie. We’re smaller than a triple-A. We are privately owned. We self-publish everything. We’re not on store shelves. What that allows us to do is to create games that we love and that we’re passionate about. They may be more niche-y. We see lots of games that we could make, and some of them would frankly make more money than the games that we make. But we love the kind of games that we make.

So I feel like we can appeal to an audience that isn’t necessarily getting addressed in the marketplace, by and large. That’s not to say that there’s no other company out there like Stardock. There is. There’s a wide variety. But I like that variety. I know where the business tends to go. You see the games that have $20 million, $50 million budgets. If you’re going to make a game of that size, you have to sell 2 – 5 million copies to break even. If you’re going to sell 2 million or 5 million copies of your game, there are certain things you have to do to appeal to that wide audience.

We make games with more reasonable budgets, and because of that, we don’t have to sell millions of copies. We can sell 200,000 copies of our games, and that means that we don’t have to go for that mainstream appeal. We can create more niche-y games that have more minutiae or details, the kind of games that we love. We fully understand that not everybody loves them, but we do think that there is an audience out there that loves that and is looking for it, and it isn’t necessarily being addressed by some of the bigger releases out there. I don’t think that we shouldn’t have those bigger releases. I play games like that too. I just think we should have a mix. That’s the beauty of the PC community.

Saturday - September 04, 2010

Stardock - Layoffs? [Updated]

by Dhruin, 03:14

Shack is reporting layoffs at Stardock, though I hasten to point out staffing realignments aren't uncommon when a project ships:

Shacknews has received an anonymous tip claiming that several employees of Stardock, developers of the recently released Elemental: War of Magic were let go today in a round of layoffs.

Those let go included developers, designers, and salespeople working on Elemental. The tipster, supposedly one of those laid off, claims that the layoffs were due to Elemental's "disastrous launch". Though post-launch layoffs are common in this industry, it sounds like these cuts were due to the game's launch and reception.

[Update] And it's true, according to Brad Wardell himself:

It is true.

Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off.

No one is being fired. None of these people did anything wrong. Stardock is a small company and each person here is truly amongst the best and brightest.  So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone. We haven't had to lay anyone off since our migration from the OS/2 market in 1998. It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it.

No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.

Elemental's rocky launch can be summed up (IMO) as follows: Our QA process was insufficient to handle a brand new platform (Elemental = Kumquat 1.0 versus say Galactic Civilizations II was using Pear which was the same engine, modified, from 1997's Entrepreneur) + my own catastrophic poor judgment in not objectively evaluating the core game play components.

Information about

Stardock

Homepage
Country: United States