So I'm going through the news of the last couple days, and not one but two RPG companies have gone out of business.  Both Iron Lore (Titan Quest) and P2 Entertainment (Gods and Heroes) have shutdown.

It sucks when any company goes out of business.  Even if you don't like a particular company or their products, there are still a bunch of individuals involved that don't deserve to lose their jobs.  Hopefully all of their employees will land new jobs in the industry pretty quickly. 

But neither one of these are really surprising.  Typical retail game developers start and usually stay in a really bad business position.  Most developers can't survive without a publisher contract paying their current overhead and typically the contract ends when your current game ships.  So if you can't sign another contract soon enough after the first game ships, you tend to go out of business.  They basically live paycheck to paycheck and the paychecks might stop at the end of each game.  I have no idea if this happened to Iron Lore, I just know it is extremely common.

As for P2, what does everyone expect?  All of the MMO people seem to be trying to compete directly with WoW.  This not only means you are trying to beat out WoW which is very unlikely, but you are competing with the other tons of companies trying to do the same thing.  It's just common sense that most of these companies are going to fail.

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