Auto Assault Closure Interview

Ten Ton Hammer had the chance to fire over some questions to NetDevil’s Scott Brown about the closure of Auto Assault, his thoughts on Tabula Rasa being taken offline, and more.

Ten Ton Hammer: What happened internally when the decision to shut off Auto Assault was made? What does that do to the development team? Where do the guys go from there? Do people start looking for jobs? Is it a relief knowing that there won’t be any more churning to try to keep the game alive?

Scott: Here’s what we did. NCsoft certainly knows how to make a game, and they committed to a long amount of support for the group to stay on the game for a while after launch. So some of the first stuff that we did was we went up to the Auto Assault team and said, (Look, the game’s obviously not performing well enough to cover its costs. We don’t know what’s going to happen.)

That was the first thing we did, and we tried to be really honest with everyone. We were straight with them. We thought we were going to get more work, but we weren’t sure. We supported people, and the situation was just too unstable for some of our crew. We helped them find new places in the industry, and they were free to use us as references. At that point in time, the president of Gas Powered Games was actually talking to us and reached out and hired a few people that were nervous about being in that situation.

While some people have that sort of entrepreneurial spirit and the (Let’s just keep going!) attitude; some people have families and kids in college and just decided to move on. As a whole, we just wanted to support everyone in the best ways that we could. We didn’t want to shock everyone and just say that we’re out of money and can’t pay them.