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computers / comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic / Re: State of MicroProse Update 6-21/96

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o Re: State of MicroProse Update 6-21/96Spalls Hurgenson

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Re: State of MicroProse Update 6-21/96

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From: spallshu...@gmail.com (Spalls Hurgenson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic
Subject: Re: State of MicroProse Update 6-21/96
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2023 08:57:50 -0400
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 by: Spalls Hurgenson - Sun, 24 Sep 2023 12:57 UTC

On Sat, 23 Sep 2023 18:04:06 -0700 (PDT), KP2 KP2
<jungletrain@outlook.com> wrote:
>On Monday, June 24, 1996 at 12:00:00?AM UTC-7, Kuo-Sheng Kasey Chang wrote:

a.k.a., documenting the slow decline of a once great company.

But for all their memorable, excellent titles, Microprose was losing
money prior to their purchase (not helped by its largely unsuccessful
foray into adventure games) by Spectrum Holobyte. SH was flush in cash
thanks to the success of its Tetris games, so it could afford the
purchase... but it over-extended itself and soon found itself in
similar straits. (apparently, there were also a lot of difference in
leadership values between the two organizations, which led to a rapid
exodus of staff).

Meanwhile, development costs were skyrocketing, but Spectrum
Holobyte/Microprose games remained fairly niche: high-end sims,
complex strategy games, and almost entirely on PC. They just didn't
have the audience to break even. Spectrum (soon rebranded as
Microprose) tried to staunch the flow by acquiring licenses to popular
IPs (amongst others, "Top Gun" and "Star Trek") but none of this
really helped, and eventually the company was acquired by Hasbro - who
half-heartedly released a few games even as they closed a few studios
- before passing it onto Infogrammes/Atari, where it effectively died.

The thing is, as much as we might like to point fingers, I'm not
really sure /anyone/ could have saved Microprose. It's games were
awesome, but largely lacked wide-spread appeal, and the expense of
developing games like "X-Com" or "Falcon 4.0" or "Civilization" were
quite high. And despite its best efforts, Spectrum Holobyte was unable
to stumble across another lucrative license like "Tetris". Being so
heavily PC based didn't help either.

The mid-to-late 90s saw a culling of a lot of classic PC game
developers for a reason: developing games solely for that platform
wasn't profitable. There just wasn't a large enough audience to keep
up with the expense of making 'modern' games. Ten years later, when
the Internet had exploded and EVERY household had a PC, it was a
different story... but in the mid 90s? You needed a large audience to
support the cost of making cutting-edge games, which meant you either
built for consoles or made games with wide-spread appeal. Microprose
had neither.

Still, they did manage to pump out some great titles while they
lasted. But great just wasn't enough...

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