This week GateWorld asked Stargate executive producer Brad Wright about the current status of the game — and the franchise’s lack of a title in the multi-billion dollar video game industry. (Wright and fellow Stargate executive producer Robert C. Cooper have been serving as creative consultants on the title.)
“We don’t know,” Wright told GateWorld, regarding the future of Stargate Worlds. “It’s a shame. If it doesn’t happen — and, let’s be honest, it should be happening now if it was happening. It’s a shame. It’s a terrible shame.
“They had an opportunity and they got our support, and they obviously had significant funding, and it didn’t happen. It’s kind of a drag for the fans and the time that we invested — what little of it there really was, in comparison to what they did — was still a shame that it was wasted, because it should have happened.”
Stargate Worlds hit financial trouble last year, and according to reports was unable to pay its employees for several months. The anonymous Web site days-since-cheyenne-mountain-employees-have-been-paid.com was taken offline within the last few weeks. The company was seeking new investors when that story broke — an effort which may have faced even greater hurdles when the economy went south in the fall.
Meanwhile, the game’s production studio, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, is being sued by a data center business called IO Capital Princess for an unpaid account, according to the Arizona Business Gazette.
Now fans are wondering if the studio will be able to finance the game to its completion, when it can finally see some income from customers.
The official status of Stargate Worlds, according to Cheyenne Mountain, is that the game is still development and will be released as planned. But the fact that it is now April of 2009 and the game is not out — nor has any firm release window been announced — is troubling. The game’s official Web site, however, continues to remain silent on the studio’s financial problems and the widespread concern over the game’s fate.
Should the game fail to reach the market, it will be the second major Stargate video game title to suffer such a fate. Stargate SG-1: The Alliance was in production by Australian developer Perception, but canned in 2005 following a dispute with the publisher over its quality at the beta stage (story). The cast of SG-1 had even lent their voices to that title.
“Now MGM is back in a position where they don’t have a product in that marketplace that they should,” Wright said. “There should be a shiny Stargate game on the shelves right now and there isn’t, and it’s wrong.”
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I want Stargate Worlds! >< But I would prefer it as a PS3 or 360 game, it'd be better. ;) But I would still play the online one. :P
I was afraid of this. This is what happens when they pick morons to make games. The first company was incompetent the second was too ambitious. An MMO was never a good idea, Especially for a first game.
P.S. Consoles are crap.
I was affraid this would happen but i was also looking forward to Alliance far more than worlds, i would much much prefer a next gen console game to a PC game. Halo Game and Stargate universe combined would be perfect, in fact i would prefer that to stargate universe.
I was beta testing an MMO game last fall.
It was franchise piece as well, but I don't think it would have been very appealing to a mass audience, especially in the state it was in. For something that had an opportunity to have a broader appeal like LotRO, it appeared to be written on, I will say, an 'odd' choice for an MMO game engine. Like someone was trying to turn a first person shooter into an MMO. Would have been fine for a title called "Timmy's Afterschool Fiesta" or "GTA 29" or some other such nonsense, but not something, in my opinion, genre or franchise fans would have been interested in.
Perhaps when they were showing it to investors and other industry folks, they saw what I saw and refused to fund it. With games like WoW and LotRO out there, I would expect something on that scale for this other franchise game I was testing. It seemed to me like the development team was in completely over their heads, but maybe they were cheap to work with. At any rate, I haven't heard much about that game I was beta testing either.
Perhaps something similar has happened to Stargate Worlds?
More to the point, if SGW has gone pasta legos, I would hope that 'their' franchise would be smart enough to pick up the pieces, and go with a better, more established studio, to bring justice to their franchise. Will it probably cost more money? You bet! Do we deserve it? Indeed.
Come on MGM! Either buy CME out or give it to a more experienced developer and keep what they have so far.
I can't say much(NDA), I was helping on this project and have been concerned that i have not heard anything asking for our group to come back to finish what we started. I cannot say much more, but it seemed to me that the development does know what they are doing, they are good folk and are trying hard. I am unsure of what the problem actually is like everyone else but you can rest assured that the developers will release this if it can be released. I am going to write them a letter offering to work for free. Other developers with serious talent and time might want to drop CME an email you never know some community involvement on the level of save Dr. Beckett, if they will let us might help.
Unless Stargate Universe is as big a hit as Battlestar Galactica was, which seems unlikely to me, I think Stargate Worlds is our last hope for a major video game set in the Stargate universe.
Whats sad is the fact that this game looked so promising, but every time you turned around you heard the developers out at conferences talking about the future of gaming and a bunch of stuff that seemed more like vacationing than it did work. We saw them appear at more "conferences" about the gaming industry than we did actaul content from the game. I just feel like they thought it was a big party and then were shocked when the money ran out.
Yea the game look promising but at lease we had one Stargate console game even though it was not based on SG1. Anyone remember "Stargate" for the SNES/SEGA circa 1995. See http://tiny.cc/FRB9v for a refresher.
I was in on the Beta testing and saw this coming. To me the game did not look promising, clumsy controls and boring combat mechanics. They stated that they didn't want it to be a FPS ... possible the worst idea they had.
Stargate is custom made for a great FPS. It could be the next in line of the FPS sub-genre of tactical squad based game play to follow the lines of Rainbow Six and SWAT games, I think those game mechanics would fit the established Stargate universe perfectly.
Think of an empire building game, you start out as a Goa'uld choosing a host and try to rise to the rank of System Lord; massive RTS space battles, RTS battles on the ground to control the Stargate, oh what fun.