News Rodeo Games closes following poor Deathwatch sales

Always saddens me when a game studio has to close. Even when they're creating games in a genre I'm not playing. The gaming world is poorer for it.

 

Games are only there as a business these days which makes it tricky if your game tanks in sales. Same can be said for the entertainment industry as a whole though.

 

When you make a game for iOS, sell it to iPhone/iPad owners for a quid or two and then have the cheek to port it (badly) to Windows/PC/Steam and charge £25 for the same product, you should not be surprised when your game doesn't sell.

 

Though I feel bad they had to close, this doesn't surprise me. They pretty much picked the worst possible platform to put this game on. iOS tends to appeal to middle-class social conformists, and the games for iOS are usually casual. Warhammer is a complicated game that tends to appeal to nerdy people, who are much more likely to use Android or Windows. Even if Rodeo managed to sell a copy of this game to every single person who both has an iPad and owns some Warhammer pieces, they still probably wouldn't make enough money.

 

if they sold to that many people they would be making a sequel. It was £4 on IPhone / IPad and £9 for a joint pack of both quiet expensive in many respects. Then they launched a awful PC port which was very badly done.

 

It's not always that simple or honest though. Although it is not always like this, it is an easy escape clause for the 'company' as when the product fails and they incur debts (as I am sure they did paying themselves, etc) they close the studio and file bankruptcy. Then they regather under a new studio name with a clean slate where they don't have to carry the weight of the previous product failure.

It's a constant merry-go-round... and going by Matthew Spencer's comments, they have moved on and haven't bothered to keep in touch or up to date so they hardly seem bothered by the outcome.

 

Further update on the story on touch arcade where one of the co-founders insists that they "aint dead yet", tho "aking a break from developing any new titles" sounds like a more polite way of saying the same thing

http://toucharcade.com/2016/02/16/rodeo-games-insists-theyre-not-dead-yet/

Good to hear they are still around tho, hopefully their attempts to spread to new platforms will help improve their cashflow so they can continue to support their current games and develop new ones, their Warhammer Quest and Deathwatch apps were excellent and worth every penny and it would be a shame if they fully folded