GameShark.com has published a developers interview with IronClad Games Blair Fraser.  The interview is mostly Sins of a Solar Empire, and a bit about the PC gaming platform.

It’s all a very good read.

Getting off topic for a second --all we hear is that the PC is a dying platform and that if you shun console development you are doomed to fail. How are you guys making it work?

If everyone is moving to the console or releasing substandard PC ports that leaves a niche for us to fill. And it’s not really important to us how small that niche is relative to the console market. That’s just about bravado, not business. The question that’s important to us is, “Are there enough people willing to pay for a high quality, PC specific real-time 4x space strategy game such that we can make a decent return on investment?” In order to maximize that, we needed to make a fun game, keep our budget reasonable, make the game very user friendly, stable, scalable to run on a wide variety of machines and kept out things like DRM that only serve to annoy our legitimate customers and do nothing to hinder pirates. Basically, we tried to do all the good things people expect from a PC centric title and get rid of all the annoyances of PC gaming. We obviously didn’t succeed 100% in either direction but in following that approach we did as well as we could given the resources at hand.”

Read the full interview at GameShark.com.


Comments
on Feb 27, 2009

That was a great read.

on Feb 27, 2009

Yep, good read.

on Feb 27, 2009

"We obviously didn’t succeed 100% in either direction but in following that approach we did as well as we could given the resources at hand.”

 

I dissagree with that line! SoaSE is a complete success..no if-and or buts and it deserves the 100% because I've personnaly never seen a game in which the devellopers take so much time to rectify mistakes, listen to their players..even chat with them! We basically get the game WE players are asking to be forged..and that deserves top grade!

CONGRATULATIONS STAR/IRONCLAD on this incredible marvel of a game

BTW ENTRENCHMENT FTW!!!!!

 

on Feb 27, 2009

"we felt it would be appealing and somewhat nostalgic to the aging demographic"

Ouch. I mean really. Aren't we all technically "aging"

on Feb 27, 2009

Ahhhh.. GameShark, I used to Moderate that forum, does MadCatz still own it?

on Mar 03, 2009

It was worth a topic, does anyone have an answer? just curious, as I used to know the original guys, FNG and Nick, who now work for Datel [Action Replay] and then MadCatz took over, not very nice people at all.. after all, they were a plastics factory, creating plastic attachments for game devices such as the Gameboy, etc.. I actually bought a light you could clip on, it broke within 5 minutes.

 

Ahh yes.. GameShark, a company so paranoid, it has it's mods edit out the word 'Datel'.