Take Two boardroom revolution!

karsten · Post by **karsten** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 10:17 pm

Facing shareholder revolt, Take Two Interactive postponed its annual shareholder meeting until March 29, 2007. It is considering the sale of the company.

Somebody at civfanatics joked that we should all buy a couple shares of TT. As owners we could then demand the features we want to see in the game...

karsten · Post by **karsten** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:27 am

Investors at Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. ousted five of the six board members, including the chief executive. After years of management gaffes and embarrassing marketing stunts, frustrated shareholders said a boardroom shake-up was the only way to correct the accounting and ethical lapses of Take-Two.

The stock price increased more than 25 percent in the past three weeks. The new management think they can squeeze a lot more money out of Take Two, possibly focussing it on new online genres -- trivia quizzes, word games and multiplayer role-playing games. What that means for SMR is anyoneÂ´s guess!

CeeBee51 · Post by **CeeBee51** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 12:15 pm

I'm guessing SMR had a very short childhood and got booted out the door at a young age, never to return. If I was a betting man I'd wager that there will be no more patches, no expansion packs, not nothing. It's, done, finished and gone. I bet we will see a civ 5, 6 and 7 long before we will see a SMR 2, or any other such railroad game from Sid or Firaxis.

jayo · Post by **jayo** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 3:35 pm

I doubt that. Railroads! is owned by their subsidiary. And if Take2 will allow more Civilizations, I'm sure there will be more for Railroads! one way or another.

Daidoji Kaneda · Post by **Daidoji Kaneda** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 11:03 am

It will depend on sales... Subsidiaries do what you tell them to do..

jayo · Post by **jayo** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 11:33 pm

Railroads! has done quite well, and has got its share of awards. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised to see more for it in the future.

dwax · Post by **dwax** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 12:03 am

My two cents... Unless they are building one heck of a patch and or new material for us. I think the game is in the back 40, and there will be no more RailRoads.

jayo · Post by **jayo** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:07 pm

I'm sure they are...

jeffnsuec · Post by **jeffnsuec** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 5:58 pm

Jayo, I think you are either running on one of those lucky PCs that doesn't crash or rarely. I have an older Tecra M2 w/ 1GB of RAM which is too slow to play. I bought a newer laptop with 2GB RAM, forced to have Vista and the program crashes every single game. I would call it being very short sighted to release a game not long before a new operating system gets released and then have no plans to even get it running on that OS. Now I am gun shy about buying any game due to the fact that none of them say "Certified for Vista" You just expect that they should work since there is an XP compatability mode after all.

snoopy55 · Post by **snoopy55** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 7:07 pm

Vista has been a joke for every company making games and just about any other computer related item. Most everything needs drivers of some sort, whether software or firmware. you say that Firaxis should have done software to work in Vista, but Vista doesn't even work right. Does everything in Vista work on your laptop? Vista is way overdue for SP2, and they haven't even got SP1. But MS isn't worried about it because just about every system being produced is coming out with it included, and even if it does cause trouble, MS is getting there money. And alot of the time people are buying XP to replace Vista, so MS is making out 2 fold.
What you are saying is that the minute Vista was announced to be coming out, all software and hardware production should have stopped.

More than likely Vista was shipped before it was even finished.

jayo · Post by **jayo** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 8:53 pm

Well, I have a 2.8 gig p4 with a Radeon x1300 512mb AGP. I have had problems with it crashing, and although I must say the patches did help a bit, I still had crashing. Firaxis says they've had no problems after the 1.1 patch, and said it must be issues with the drivers. I recently upgraded mine to the 7.3 Catalyst drivers, and have played the game for hours without any crashing(but I had a few false alarms). Although it did crash when I tried building track from an unusual perspective, but that's probably just a bug that'll hopefully be corrected. So I just be a bit more careful laying track, and I can enjoy the game with minimal CTDz!

snoopy55 · Post by **snoopy55** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 10:23 pm

When Firaxis wrote and tested the game, to my understanding they were not working with ATI video. While that is not good, not all software companies have all types of all equiptment available to them. To set up every available motherboard with every memory card with every sound card with every video board with every monitor is impossible. I'm not defending Firaxis, they do have some things to deal with, (and I'm not including our wishes) but like any other company in almost any business, there are always thing you didn't expect, plan for or think of. And then there is what comes later. ATI comes up with new drivers because new things come up with new hardware and software. If you look at every patch or update for everything having to do with computers, if companies waited until they were positive everything was working perfectly, we'd be waiting for Commadore 64s while we played with our Vic 20s

And who's to say the problems aren't in the game, but in the systems? ATI puts out an update to fix what??? I have a motherboard that started overheating its northbridge after 7 monthes, which I had to reverse a case fan and add a cowling to cool it. Send it back? And be out a computer for how long?? It's working, and I'll either get my next MoBo with fans on the north and south bridges or put them on myself.

There are alot of people who are playing this game fine, and as long as I don't screw up the programing, I'm one of them. NE_UK ran for a month before Slappy found a crash in it which was a problem in one of the XMLs.

Hey, S**t happens and people make errors and eveyone has a different system. Post what map you're crashing on, along with your system specs and someone will look into it.

We've come a long way with this game, and Firaxis should be paying some of us, or making donations in our names. Maybe after this new Take Two board gives themselves a pat on the back and a raise, they'll have Firaxis do some repairs. (was that a pig I saw fly by my window?)

"gotta get me a new soap box..", he mutters as he pulls his foot out of his, picks it up and walks away.......

gforce · Post by **gforce** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 11:29 pm

snoopy, you're for sure not the moderator for windows,
this may be the case for firaxis but it doesn't make sense to defend one and attack the other...
If firaxis doesn't have enough money for buying multiple graphic cards,
do you think we have enough money to buy for each game (of firaxnix) another graphic card?
go and program for a game-console if you can't manage multiple systems and sell an idea for a game to another company capable of implementing things much better...
let's hope they will throw away all their 3d-engines etc... away before releasing another game... if there's something they can learn from this badly-done-job it's that, and yes, do hire someone who can calculate so all those parameters make sense and do have an impact as it should...
(but those people are just busy counting money, our money)

Dr Frag · Post by **Dr Frag** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:02 am

There have been several things about this game found by people here that really make it seem like this project was not well managed. I don't know when the project was started but more often than not games are pushed out the door before the developers are ready to release them. There was probably a time table and someone forced them to stick to it even though everything was not flushed out. I watched the credits and it was a pretty huge list of people which makes me wonder if they had too many mouths to feed and couldn't afford any more development time.

snoopy55 · Post by **snoopy55** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:05 am

I'm sorry, my main attack was the fact that it wasn't programed for Vista, and you couldn't expect them to wait for it to come out. MS has already announced a SP1 around September....