Storybricks Shuts Down After 5 Years

NOTE: No news specific to EverQuest II in this article…

After trying to launch their own RPG on Kickstarter, Storybricks evolved into a middleware/tools developer for game studios such as Sony Online Entertainment. Chief among those tools was a powerful user-generated content system that would allow players to build dungeons, populate enemies, and then give those enemies behaviors, desires, and drives that would make a completely dynamic simulation that would be different every time.

For EverQuest Next, Dave Georgeson and John Smedley each talked about how expensive content design for MMORPGs is and how no company, no matter how well-funded, can keep up with the insatiable demand that players have for content. The silver bullet for this was apparently a partnership and licensing agreement with Storybricks. Instead of individually populating and scripting NPCs, giving them walking paths, adding specific quests, etc. Storybricks would allow players and designers alike to take a more high-level approach. A player-designer would establish an area that’s hospitable to Orcs by laying out the terrain, plant life, animals, and other creature, and then Orcs would just show up of their own accord. And as players interacted with the content, they might scare those Orcs away and see them pickup and move to some other place. If there’s one thing SOE seemed hell-bent on with EverQuest Next, it was putting a stake through the heart of static content.

This of course will make EverQuest Next a very different game than EverQuest or EverQuest II, both of which are still completely hand-crafted. Personally, I came from the world of single-player adventures where everything is not only hand-crafted, but reading the quest text is half the fun, rather than an afterthought for many players. There are strengths and weaknesses to dynamic and static worlds and I’d hate to see either style go away.

So with that background, it was announced last month that Daybreak Games had ended its partnership with Storybricks and was going to continue this development work in-house. With EverQuest Next Beta planned for this year, the lion’s share of this work should theoretically have already been done, although the ending of this relationship pre-launch still sent ripples of concern out to players in the Landmark and EQNext communities. Although the Storybricks connection never had any impact on EverQuest or EverQuest II, it’s still something we’ve been following due to the potential benefits of such a system.

So we were surprised at yesterday’s news that Storybricks was closing shop after five years in operation. A few readers have taken this as an indication of failure by the company, but it’s clear from their announcement and past communications that Storybricks always wanted to be a game developer, not a middleware provider, and despite efforts to launch their own game, efforts to buy Sony Online Entertainment, and a last attempt to sell the Storybricks company to an investor, the interested parties decided to close down and move on to other creative endeavors.

Here’s their original announcement:

So Long, Farewell, Namárië, Goodbye
Dear all,

The journey we took exactly 5 years ago to change artificial intelligence in games has come to an end. We tried our best, the world changed a bit, and now it’s our turn to take a bow and move on. Storybricks is closing down.

Over the past few months we nurtured a desire to go beyond games and find a different vision, one that was more inclusive and could make a difference for a large number of people. This combined with the effect our travel schedule was having on our families made me (Rodolfo) and my co-founder (Stéphane) decide to move onto other projects beyond Storybricks.

It was our own decision and Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Games) bears no fault for it. Sony Online Entertainment had been up for sale for a long time so our exit had no connection with the Columbus Nova acquisition.

We tried to find a new home for our tech so somebody else would have continued our efforts. I can confirm that Storybricks was for sale, but we did not find an agreement with the buyers we wanted. Since this happened over the course of few months everyone affected has been able to find a new job. Brian ‘Psychochild‘ Green is working on Camelot Unchained, Guilherme Töws is at Mediatonic, Wallace Poulter and Brian Schwab are at Magic Leap (but they can’t say what they are up to yet. Super secret stuff) and so on.

Majority of the work we have done is about EverQuest Next and is co-owned by Daybreak. But there are few side projects and a demo that we plan to release for free that are unrelated to EQN. It’s nothing major but maybe some Storybricks tech can live in other games. Give us some time to sort that out.

We would like to thank the EverQuest Next team at Daybreak Games, particularly Darrin McPherson and Terry Michaels, for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have worked on a great franchise and alongside such talented people. We look forward to the release of EQN. We would also like to thank Ken Levine at Irrational and Kevin Bruner at Telltale Games (and their respective teams – you know who you are.), the many game developers who have reached out to us over the years to advance a medium that we love, as well as the players who have shared our dream of better storytelling through gameplay and AI.

Stéphane and I are starting a new venture unrelated to gaming but we won’t disappear completely. We are looking to hire AI engineers and iOS/Android front-end developers in the SF Bay Area (Sunnyvale/Mt View). Please reach out to me at rodolfo[at]metatron.xyz if you are interested.

Rodolfo Rosini & Stéphane Bura

PS. There is one more story to tell before we part ways.

We fell in love with the EverQuest franchise and we wanted the best possible future for it. We knew Sony Online (300+ employees IIRC) was for sale so Storybricks (barely 10 people) tried to actually buy out the whole division.
We retained an investment banking firm as a proxy and they went directly to Sony Corporate bypassing the local executives. We would have been able to raise the necessary capital, and had interviewed new and existing management ready for a turnover.

Alas, it was not meant to be as the terms offered by Sony Japan were unacceptable to us and to our investors. It is my understanding that other buyers had the same reaction and, in the end, Columbus Nova got a completely different deal that the one we were offered, but by then our investor group had moved on.

Make no mistake the company needed cuts badly, and we would have cut and cut deeply. Possibly as deep as Columbus Nova did but maybe we would have cut more senior management and less game developers instead. It was our intention to try to acquire the 38 Studios assets and made them available to players in EQN. Moreover we would have probably changed the server infrastructure allowing people to run their own servers. It would not have been a very canonical EverQuest but we would have done the best to service our customers with the limited budget of an independent studio who wanted to punch above its weight.

We really did try our best. And our best was not enough.

I found the last passage of this announcement to be particularly synergistic with the news I’d reported last month about the Columbus Nova buyout and subsequent layoffs. I then wondered if Storybricks would find themselves in the crosshairs for their candor, and apparently they did as they took to Twitter today to clarify and address concerns:

Speaking of which want to make clear that Sony Online was an amazing partner to us. Epecially @j_smedley

— Storybricks (@Storybricks) March 4, 2015

Without him there would have been no deal. And both @TaliskerDev and @terryjmichaels are making a great game and we <3 them.

— Storybricks (@Storybricks) March 4, 2015

Player-Run Servers?

Finally, I wanted to comment on “Moreover we would have probably changed the server infrastructure allowing people to run their own servers.” I’ve seen more than a few players freak out with an extremely negative reaction to this idea. Even as the “Cloud” becomes more and more a part of our lives, with more of our content stored on Google, Apple, and Microsoft servers, I believe we are in a transition for games. The days when only a huge company can manage and run game servers is long gone. Hardware is cheap nowadays. SOE/Daybreak is currently transitioning the last of its games to inexpensive software. The most exciting game development space these days seems to be indie developers and Kickstarters by designers who have quit big studios.

Player-generated content and player-managed worlds are a reality, and there’s no bigger example of this than Minecraft. This clunky, chunky, Java-based game was bought by Microsoft for a heart-stopping $2.5 billion. We saw how badly EA/Maxis miscalculated by eliminating offline modes and a “Save” feature from its newest entry in the SimCity franchise. After a year of bad press and poor sales, they were forced to relent and add these features back in.

An interesting data point is that in the runup to the early access of SOE’s zombie survival game H1Z1, operators of Youtube channels and fansites were given their own private H1Z1 servers in exchange for their promotion of the game. So private servers is something SOE is already dabbling in.

Players don’t want to see their thousands of hours of gameplay go down the drain because of the realities of game development. I think players are getting gunshy after the closures of FreeRealms, SWG, City of Heroes, and other long-running games. Are these really Persistent, perpetual worlds, or are they merely temporary? Those who have a knee-jerk reaction against player-run servers need to think about what they’d do if they woke up tomorrow and EverQuest II were gone and they had no access to their characters.