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Stardock CEO Expects To Lose Money On Elemental
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said in an interview that while the company's latest title is currently profitable, he anticipates to have lost money overall on the project by halfway through this year. Why? Because Stardock is hiring more developers to help fix the game and giving away the first expansion for free.
"We made the decision that we would prefer to lose money on Elemental than betray the trust of our customers and decided to staff up and continue working on it for all of 2011 and into 2012 with a full team," Wardell told BigDownload.
He continued, "The value of PC gamers knowing that if they buy a game with the Stardock name on it means quality and support far outweighs the necessary loss of profitability on one title."
Wardell went on to not comment on upcoming Stardock products and to praise the company's recent hires of Civilization V lead designer Jon Shafer and renowned mod author Derek "Kael" Paxton.
The final interesting tidbit in the lengthy interview is Wardell's statement that the company's digital distribution platform, Impulse, saw 2010 third-party revenue approximately double 2009's numbers. "We anticipate even greater growth this year as the transition from retail to digital distribution migration continues," he said.
I am as disappointed by Elemental's rocky launch as anyone, but I salute Stardock for eating its crow like grown-ups and settling down to work on delivering the product that was originally promised. It's not often you see a company with the stones to dig into a failed game and fix it – almost every time, the title is left in the gutter to rot while everyone involved tries to forget it as soon as possible. It's nice to see that not be the case for once, especially for a game that many fans had such high hopes for.
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