Why Ironclad is so successful so quickly

Scott Tortorice

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This is an insightful (and candid) blog entry from an Stardock dev:

Why Ironclad is so successful so quickly

I work at Stardock and those of you who follow my journals know I’m pretty opinionated (see “Kudos to Good old Games”, “Happy about Steam”, “Don’t blame the pirates”). So let me give my 2 cents on why the young studio, Ironclad Games is already so successful. I’m not speaking for them. This is just my opinion on what makes a new studio successful.

Who is Ironclad?

The founders of Ironclad Games are industry veterans. They worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm and other pretty well known projects over the years. When they got together, they decided to focus on something they were very passionate about and very familiar with first: Space strategy.

This is the key distinction that I know others in our industry are familiar with: FOCUS. Sins of a Solar Empire is a PC game. Period. It made no compromises. They didn’t spend money on things that would have diminishing returns like cut scenes (the cut scenes in Sins were made by Stardock largely for marketing reasons). As a result, the game was a lot less expensive to make than other games while delivering an incredible gaming experience.

Choosing to make a GAME

I’m the designer of Galactic Civilizations and I will say this: Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity is a better game than Galactic Civilizations. It has better game mechanics. It is more fun single player. It has multiplayer. It has a vastly better user interface. It has a more cohesive experience.

Obviously, the games do have a different set of appeal (and when I get back to some future GalCiv sequel I’ll happily steal a lot of ideas from Sins but that’ll be some years from now). But what Ironclad did with Sins of a Solar Empire was, imo, revolutionary.

Let me walk you through a few of the innovations in Sins of a Solar Empire....
Brad Wardell commented:

We've learned a lot from working with Ironclad that we're applying to Elemental.

We don't have quite the same level of "adaptive" UI that Sins has in Elemental but the cloth map, while a natural evolution of what we did in Galactic Civilizations was certainly more focused on usability thanks to Sins.

Another thing that Sins helped us with is in the way Elemental is being developed - it's pure PC. As it exists, it couldn't realistically be ported (you might have a game called Elemental for a console but it would be a different game). We have focused on making Elemental a PC exclusive game.
 
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