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April 9, 2010

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Windstorm Studios’ MMO on hold – focusing on single player RPG instead

 

Windstorm Studios who are headed up by ex Ensemble programmer Dusty Monk has long believed to have been at work on a futuristic MMO game. There were even some concept art pieces released which can be seen below: 

 

However in an interview with Inc Gamers, Dusty has revealed that the above project has been placed on hold, at least, in its MMO form that is. Instead Dusty’s Windstorm Studios will be pursuing the project in a Single Player RPG form.

“The plan of attack right now is to go forward with a smaller single-player game, and get that out there for people to start playing,”

Why the change of plan? It seems there were problems getting publisher commitment to the MMO project. We know from the past that MMO games have been a touchy subject with publishers including Microsoft who decided to cancel Ensemble Studios’ Halo MMO. Because MMO games are very expensive and take massive development time it can be difficult to get publishers to commit to new games based on new, untested intellectual property. Instead Windstorm are taking a leaf out of Runic Games’ book – the developers behind Torchlight. They started of introducing a game as a single player game and thanks to its success are now using the revenues brought from the single player game to help fund the larger MMO project.

“They put that game out there, and they put it on Steam for $20 USD a copy, and they did really well. And they’re using that game to fund an MMO!”

The single player game has even been tentatively scheduled for the end of this year. Perhaps Windstorm will be the next studio formed out of Ensemble to make the next great game along side iPhone developers NewToy and Fuzzycube.

The full interview between Inc Gamers and Dusty Monk will soon be made available and when it is I shall post a link here in a new blog post. For the moment check out the interview preview article on Inc Gamers here:

http://www.incgamers.com/News/21902/windstorm-studios-mmo-currently-on-hold

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