GRIN was a Swedish game development studio, best known for their work on the PC versions of the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter series and the two new Bionic Commando games. GRIN closed their doors August 12th, 2009.
Here's the tech demo, everyone judge for themselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOobVWeRJd0 i think it had potential to be great, you don't ask a developer for something different then get pissed when they do just that. i wish i knew how to embed stuff
I don't get it. Why, if you haven't be payed for a month or two, would you just sit back and say 'No problem'? That doesn't really make sense.
Up until this past December, I worked at a tech start-up. i was laid off because they no longer had the financing to continue paying everyone on staff. The writing had actually been on the wall for well over a month, given some oddities that had occurred in the previous two months. But the fact is that they didn't lay people off until the board of directors said it had to be done.
If what I was told by fellow former coworkers is accurate, the remaining members of the company's staff were laid off just this past week. No advance warning. No, "hey guys, we're going to be laying some of you off in the near future because we don't have the money." They waited until it was no longer financially feasible to continue paying everyone, and then made the cuts. And the initial lay-off that I was a part of took place just before a scheduled move into a new office space. They were evicted from said office space in April after being unable to pay any rent beyond an initial down payment for the first month and are currently being sued by the facility that owns the building.
If I'm guessing right, the higher-ups at Grin knew that shit was about to turn bad, but refused to divulge the information to the general employee population until they could no longer sustain themselves. Because how would anything get done if the workforce found out that their backer for their current major project had refused to provide them further funding for whatever reason?
If Grin needed Square Enix's money in order to stay afloat after the disappointments of Bionic Commando, Wanted, and Terminator Salvation, it says more to me that their past was catching up to them than anything else.
I'm sure the part where the only GRIN game of that 2 year period that actually made any money was Bionic Commando Rearmed definitely didn't contribute to them failing horribly. Yes, Square-Enix is backwards as all hell, but it's pretty clear that GRIN was in a rut anyways.
Well if this were former Square who still made good games they wouldn't be in such a shitty financial situation and wouldn't have to crush smaller developers like GRIN. I'm not saying GRIN were going to make a wonderful game but Square should have held up their end of the deal, but instead they were in panic mode because of how much they blow now, and the economy going to shit made it even worse for the previously awesome company.
Well if this were former Square who still made good games they wouldn't be in such a shitty financial situation and wouldn't have to crush smaller developers like GRIN. I'm not saying GRIN were going to make a wonderful game but Square should have held up their end of the deal, but instead they were in panic mode because of how much they blow now, and the economy going to shit made it even worse for the previously awesome company.
I'm not sure they crushed GRIN. The article implied that they had a contract that allowed them an easy out of the financial responsibility to GRIN if they felt that GRIN were the wrong company for their franchise. Once they saw how Bionic Commando and Terminator Salvation performed financially and critically they weighed their options and dropped the contract. It looks as if GRIN weren't guaranteed anything from Square-Enix. GRIN should have either worked for a better contract with guarantees financially or from a development perspective or they should have been looking for more publishers to make new games outside of Square-Enix. Waiting months upon months to hear back from your publisher was a dumb move by GRIN. I still think Square-Enix was well within their rights to do what they did. It sucks for GRIN but that is how that business works.
RIP GRIN. I really dug their Bionic Commando games. Rearmed had me smiling so damn much (yes, that was a pun on the company's name) and I really enjoyed their newschool Bionic Commando sequel, as much of a departure as it was from the source material in terms of mood, atmosphere, and Rad's appearance. I was tired of Square and Enix before they joined, but now-- man, that article had me angry, let me tell ya.
I'm now officially worried as shit for Eidos. I knew SE were a couple of bumbling fools but this takes their cluelessness to a whole new level. On the other hand, Grin making shitty games had more to do with Grin shutting down than this. They can put it all on this, make it their straw man, but when Grin shut down few were surprised based on their output.
So it seems like the same newspaper posted a new story from "a source with great insight in GRIN" . I feel like there's some shittalking going on here, but I just wanted to summarize a bit of what this man had to say anyway.
The source that the newspaper talked to
"My comprehension of the matter is this - and many of the workers at GRIN shared too: GRIN was hit by arrogance. They were incredibly good sellers, especially Bo. However, they couldn't back up the selling with the quality in their products. GRIN released three mediocre games in a row, of which only one was okay. " Terminator" was the game that we knew probably wouldn't turn out that great and that it at most would be okay. Even the owners of the brand entered the discussion by saying "as long as there is something in the box, it's okay".
"GRIN aimed for Bionic Commando to be a great AAA-title at least. GRIN's profile was based on that they were one of them best developers in the world and when the results came in and they showed something else it's not surprising that the distributors said "This isn't working, since you're not giving us the results you're saying that you can make". That together with the arrogance that GRIN was relaying to their customers ended up with no further arguments to why one should work with GRIN."
How exactly was GRIN arrogant?
"They always seemed to have the opinion that they always knew what made a game good. And that the distributors didn't know that. They had a kinda rock star mentality over them. And that might be okay if you can live up to it, like VALVE saying that "We don't give a shit of what you say because we made Half-Life 2 and Portal and now we will do whatever we like". If you have such a track record, you can do that. GRIN didn't."
How come they couldn't go all the way?
"The studio missed talent to end things, to focus what's really important with the game. To understand what deeper values that makes a game good. With other words, there was a very good and deep talent for game mechanics, how to implement such things. However, there wasn't much talent in understanding how those systems would cooperate. They seemed to release the games when they still was in a state without a real identity."
"Fortress" was a pretty big project. According to the bankruptcy documents Square Enix was meant to pay 16,5 million dollars to GRIN. But they never paid.
"I think that GRIN made the mistake that they handled the situation with Square in the same way they handled Capcom. That is by using an attitude of "shut up and let us make games". Doing that to Capcom is risky, but doing it with Square? You're basically asking for trouble. I'm guessing that Square thought something like "Let's see how it looks after they've met some goals of the development and then decide what to do". And the game then probably didn't take that direction that Square was thinking. Also; GRIN released three mediocre titles in the same quarter and thought "Why are we doing this?". There wasn't anything pointing to that this was going to end well for them."
The article ends with Bo Andersson commenting that they had to producers on this project that they had daily contact with and that he thinks that the source doesn't seem to have such a great insight to the matter.
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