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]

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:

Tony informed me that the game has done pretty well in Australia, and wasn’t far behind their expectations for that region.

According to previous comments by Hilliam, Australian sales surpassed that of the States, which the man himself conceded was far from a good thing. It also seems that Oz sales have been upgraded from “okay” to “[have done] pretty well”.

Obviously the game isn’t going to go much farther without additional funding or a sale, and Hilliam says that Auran has a few options:

Tony said that there were several interested parties, but he couldn’t say much as nothing had been finalised at the time of the interview.

I’m surprised there’s any activity at all after the sledging Hilliam gave the Oz development scene not long ago. Still, you have to give the guy credit for not giving up on his baby.

Catching Up With Fury [MMORPG.COM, via Blue's News]

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:

“I think the game development industry in Australia is in a great place in terms of the growth we’ve enjoyed,” said Crago. “Revenue-wise we’re in excess of $130 million.”

Understandably Hilliam doesn’t completely agree with Crago’s outlook. In fact, he’s quick to direct developers away from our sunny shores:

“I’ve spent a lot of time in China and once they … they’re very good at copying things at the moment and I think once they get a bit more creative, they’re really going to be a force to reckon with.

“Asia and Eastern Europe are going to replace Australia as an outsourcing post. I don’t see a lot of confidence in seeing the thing grow and grow as it has done in the last 10 years.”

Ah man, Tony, why do you have to go and be so down on Oz?

Don’t worry, there’s more to the chat than Hilliam’s negativity, so be sure to check out the InvestorTV link for the entire article.

Boom or gloom for battle-hardened video game studios [InvestorTV, via Sumea]

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:

Success is not incremental … Think about WoW, [with] 9.5 million [subscribers], then Lord of the Rings [with] 200,000 … There’s very few games with 3 million or 650,000. They tend to fit in defined categories of success, depending on the size of the audience that they reach.

It’s very dangerous to think “Well, we’re going to get some number in between because we’re almost as good”. “Almost as good” also means that you’re the next category down.

Fascinating, indeed. But it’s what Peterscheck had to say next that made me think of Fury:

Slowing dying is a very painful thing, I can tell you that.

There are exceptions to these rules, but not a lot. I don’t like planning that I’m going to be the exception.

Now Peterscheck was not speaking specifically about Fury – not at all – but I feel his comments are very relevant to its current situation.

While I wish Auran and Fury all the best, I find myself agreeing with Peterscheck. It’s hard to reverse the damage word of mouth and negative reviews can cause. Auran could transform the game into something entirely different and innovative, but as long as it’s called “Fury“, the bad memories will linger.

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.

Auran: the facts

The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.

Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.

Trainz is the world’s leading rail simulator and has a community of more than 250,000 registered users around the world. It is published in dozens of countries and there are many products in the market today. The bulk of the Trainz team will continue to work on current projects and these projects will be released next year.

With Fury, we built up a team to make a world beating game and sadly we have not reached our goals – yet. Our performance to date has meant we could no longer fund the 70 strong dev team. However, FURY: Age of the Chosen will be launched as planned Friday 8pm GMT. We have put together a small but committed team to continue developing FURY on an ongoing basis. This core team, as we announced last week, are a passionate group of people committed to making FURY a success. We will be releasing bug fixes, content and feature updates on a regular basis and in fact they will be more frequent with our new agile team.

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.

I expect the naysayers will have different thoughts, but they haven’t played the new build…yet.

]]> http://www.kotaku.com.au/2007/12/tony_hilliam_the_facts_about/feed/ 12 http://www.kotaku.com.au/2007/12/tony_hilliam_rumours_of_auran/ http://www.kotaku.com.au/2007/12/tony_hilliam_rumours_of_auran/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:30:00 +0000 Logan Booker http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2007/12/tony_hilliam_rumours_of_auran.html 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.

Several websites have circulated rumours regarding impending doom at Auran. Here is the official comment from Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam:

Auran has grown from 30 to 70 staff over the past few years, and in the past few months we’ve released FURY, Battlestar Galactica for XBLA and the 6th Edition of the long running Trainz franchise. In addition to game development, we also have a successful publishing business and release around 40 titles each year in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, we have just started licensing Australian-made titles to take to the world market.

Fury has been operating for 6 weeks and our first Free content update, the “Age of the Chosen” will definitely be released on December 14. Fury: AotC addresses many of the issues identified by players and reviewers in the original release. We’ve greatly enhanced the new player experience and made huge improvements to a number of systems. There will be another major FURY announcement next week about further changes that will be very exciting to all players (unless of course one of the staff under strict NDA decide to leak those details as well).

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.

FURY has been a big part of our lives and the core team will be doing everything they can to make sure it reaches its full potential. Anyone who has played a close game of Vortex or come back from 2-0 down to beat the opposing team in Elimination know of that potential. Sadly, too many players have only experienced a savage beating at the hands of veteran players. Perhaps they may pick up their bloodied corpses and return next weekend to see what we have done to help them get into the game.

Regarding China, during the past two years we successfully used several outsourcing companies and will be looking to China to create much of the new content that we will release in future updates. Furthermore, we’re talking with a number of publishers in Asia regarding co-development deals.

In addition, Auran and Tantalus are working together with a view to selecting a number of Auran staff to be part of new Tantalus studio (in Brisbane next to the Auran studio) working on DS and Wii titles. In fact, those interviews are taking place right now.

So the rumour mill got a number of things right or close to it, and I am happy to be able to add a little more detail. As they say in the classics, the death of Auran and FURY has been greatly exaggerated.

Tony Hilliam
CEO, Auran Games

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