You guys remember Auran, don’t you? The studio took quite a beating when Auran Developments, its parent company, went into administration late last year. While blame wasn’t placed anywhere in particular, poor sales of its MMO Fury likely played a significant role in its collapse.
Recently, Australian Gamer decided to take a trip to the company’s headquarters in Queensland for a walk-through and catch-up. Yes, Auran is still plugging away at Fury.
The interview with Tony Hilliam on the second page has everything you could possibly want to know about the state of Fury right now. Boiled down, Hilliam admits Auran made mistakes with the launch and design of the game, such as the difficulty for new players to get into it, and that numbers remain “disappointing”. To counter these points, he says that the new business model, bug fixes and additional features have turned Fury into a “new game”.
If only confidence and positive words were enough.
A Visit to Auran Games [Australian Gamer] More »
Auran is still alive and so is its MMO Fury, despite its parent company Auran Developments throwing in the towel late last year. Even with this setback, Auran was able to produce a hefty content update, Age of the Chosen, that it believed would rectify most of the original criticisms of the game, including its steep learning curve and dodgy performance. For good measure, it removed the subscription fee.
Shortly after the release of Age of the Chosen, Auran was able to confirm that it had even more updates in the pipeline, but surely, three months on, what developers are left have to be operating on two cornflakes and half a can of Red Bull?
Apparently not. MMORPG.COM managed to get a hold of Auran’s CEO Tony Hilliam at GDC 2008, and Hilliam was able to reassure the site that the 13-year old company is committed to Fury. Yet, my eyebrows couldn’t help but elevate at a few of Hilliam’s comments: More »
Over at InvestorTV there’s an extremely eye-opening talk with some of Australia’s most prominent game developers. Included in the all-local mix are Tony Hilliam, CEO of Auran; Tom Crago, CEO of Tantalus and Krome Studios’ CEO Robert Walsh. While Hilliam gets stuck explaining the downfall of Auran, Tom and Robert go over the positives of games development in Oz.
The first part of the interview sees Hilliam deconstruct the failure of Fury, citing poor sales in the US and Europe and the sheer size of World of Warcraft as contributing factors:
“Ultimately, sales of Fury were worse than our low case projections. We did OK in Australia, we were top 10 in Australia, but Europe was a complete write-off. In the US – again the Australian sales have nearly outstripped the US market altogether. When Australia is almost your biggest market, you have a problem.”
It’s not all rotten, though. Tom Crago paints a more alluring picture of the local development scene: More »
In CEO Tony Hilliam’s statement last week regarding the closure of Auran, he stated that he felt Fury had the potential to claw its way into the black, and maybe even make a few bucks profit:
I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we’ll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful.
While this appears to be true – at least for now – when I originally read this it reminded me of something NetDevil’s Hermann Peterscheck said in his MMO talk at the most recent Game Connect: More »
Tony Hilliam, CEO of Brisbane-based developer Auran, has issued a statement regarding Auran’s closure earlier today.
In it, Hilliam confirms that all Auran staff were today let go, and that staff will be paid their entitlements, supporting our anonymous source.
He then goes on to reiterate the recent changes to Fury, including the Age of the Chosen content update and the new free-to-play mode, and his belief that the game will eventually become “successful”.
As you can see, this new statement stands in stark contrast to Hilliam’s comments from last week, where he reassured us that things were fine.
Hilliam also mentioned to Kotaku AU that ex-employees will be compensated under GEERS (General Employee Entitlement and Redundancy Scheme).
Full statement after the jump. More »
Auran CEO Tony Hilliam has made a statement regarding the rumour that the company today planned to let a number of staff go, mainly in its QA department.
While Hilliam confirms that the Fury team will be reduced, it’s more to do with creating an “agile” group of developers better able to address the needs of the game. Contrary to what the original Angry Gamer story led many to believe, the company is not going bust:
As I explained to the staff yesterday, whilst FURY has started off slower than expected, I still see a bright and long future ahead. However, that future will not include the full 60 man development team who have worked on FURY for the past year. The future will focus on a smaller, more agile core team of Fury developers. These are people who are incredibly passionate about the game and work until 4 in the morning to ensure they get things done.
It’s actually fairly normal for a dev team to shrink after the release of a title. The difference here is that Auran is going to the trouble of finding ex-employees other opportunities instead of just casting them into the sea of joblessness.
The statement goes on to mention that Auran plans to outsource at least some of the content development for Fury to China, where it says it has had a lot of success already.
Finally, Hilliam says that Tantalus (who we’re stilling waiting to hear from) is right now opening a new studio near Auran’s base of operations up in Brisbane. The new studio, which will focus on Wii and DS titles, will employ a few ex-Auran folk.
Tony’s full statement can be found after the jump. More »
