Eidos Montreal Founder Bails, Citing Poor Communication About Company's Future

Nice to see candid talk from a company founder/manager, versus the speculation that often happens with a company executive not wanting to burn bridges.

As an international business major myself, these communication issues he speaks of are endemic stuff.

That's the problem. Everyone wants the CoD 5 million+ sales that every iteration gets, so everyone tries to replicate that by making CoD-like games. Take Hitman: Absolution, for example. That game was dumbed down horribly, which turned off longtime fans, and CoD fans didn't bother with it because it's not CoD. Thief looks like it's heading in the same direction. Horribly dumbed down and casualized. I hope this trend stops soon and devs start making games out of love, not love of money.

@deathpooky: No, Stephane D'astous agreed that those games didn't sell enough, that things were going badly, and that things needed to change. He resigned because the higher-ups didn't involve him in a creating their new plan, and because he didn't like their new strategy, whatever it is.

That's a real shame. Eidos has been making great games of late. Maybe if Square Enix Japan can get their stuff together they can stop calling games that sell almost 4 million in a month a failure.

Hard to blame him. Why stick around when you can make pretty great games that sell fairly well, only to be told that they didn't meet expectations and things are going badly.

Without this inside baseball, if you told me the studio that made the new Tomb Raider, new Hitman, and new Deus Ex was in trouble, I'd think you were talking crazy.

@leebmx: The Polygon article linked in the article is decent.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/23/4549404/eidos-montreal-founder-square-enix-makes-great-games-but-needs-to

The Polygon piece is pretty good--they actually talked to him.

Unless Patrick knows something we don't that first sentence is mighty confusing. Someone needs to make a list of Patrick typo's, kind of like a Brad time to death in QL's we could have a Patrick time to typo.

In other news, I still can't get my head around what all the problem is here. They have made some pretty decent game over the last few years which seem to have sold quite well. Deux Ex and Tomb Raider have been among my faves of the last few years. I get that Square aren't doing so good but if someone could explain how releasing highly-regarded, good selling games is a strategy which isn't working I would love to hear it.

@patrickklepek Do you know of any good articles that go into a bit of depth about this whole affair? I would greatly appreciate a link if you know of any.

Thanks, duder.

It's kinda funny that so many people were upset that SE considered the Eidos games financially disappointing, when it it turns out that the developers actually felt the same way. It seems like everyone that works in the game industry simply has overly high expectations.

Well i hope that this leads them to canning Thief 4, i care deeply for that series and everything i have seen thus far has been nothing but moves in the wrong direction.

Damn. that sounds horrible for Squeenix since they bought Eidos in the first place.

Was about to note that.

In the meantime, this is really unfortunate. Square has some good people under their belt and have released a few good games recently. I really hope this isn't a bad sign of worse things to come.

Damn that sounds very bad. They've made some really interesting games, hopefully this doesn't harm the company too much.

Also @patrickklepek there's a nasty typo in that first sentence.

You know at this point I have lost faith in the upcoming Thief sequel; what with all the previews and impressions of the game out there expressing mediocrity and now this.

A shame. Really hope Thief turns out ok, but haven't heard many good things.

Eidos was all that was keeping Square afloat and relevant in my book. You can keep all your melodramatic JRPGs. Deus Ex, Tomb Raider and Hitman were what I wanted.

* In a move that does send encouraging signs *

Think you missed a typo here. I'm guessing you meant to type:

In a move that doesn't send encouraging signs

Their games are just generic that's the problem, all games that people say "it's good" but no one feels anything more than that. Apart from Hitman, that was terrible, not anything like a Hitman game tbh, just made me go back and play BM again.

Too bad, Eidos was starting to make games I cared about again.