PopTop folded into Firaxis?

By Tor Thorsen, GameSpotPosted Mar 7, 2006 5:06 pm PT

Take-Two executives tell analysts that the Shattered Union and Railroad Tycoon developer has been merged with the Civilization studio.

Among the various nuggets of news revealed in the conference call following today's Take-Two Interactive earnings report is an item that relates to one of the publisher's internal studios. Speaking to analysts, executive vice president Cindy Buckwalter said that PopTop Software's operations had been merged with those of Civilization-maker Firaxis as a cost-saving measure.

"One example we gave was combining the two studios of PopTop and Firaxis," she said. "We think there's a lot of synergies between the studios that we can take advantage of."

Buckwalter did not say how exactly PopTop, developer of Railroad Tycoon 3 and last year's Shattered Union, would be merged with Firaxis. However, given the latter's larger size and greater prestige, it appears likely that the former will be folded into the Firaxis organization. Unfortunately, Take-Two reps were unavailable for comment on the matter as of press time.

4 Comments

  • Igiss

    Posted Mar 9, 2006 1:41 am PT

    Firaxis won't benefit from this at all. I wonder why all those major studios like Rockstar and Firaxis don't run away from Take-Two yet... financial bonds should be very strong to keep them staying.

  • peterzhao333

    Posted Mar 8, 2006 1:54 pm PT

    Not interesting

  • SouthpawSamurai

    Posted Mar 8, 2006 1:36 pm PT

    So Railroad Tycoon comes 'home' (at least, returns to its maker, Sid Meier). I wonder if he'd take a stab at working on it again.

    No one seems to care because PopTop made some really fun games that few even bothered to look at about because they weren't in genres the lowest common denominator gamer can appreciate and Firaxis would be in the same boat if El Sid didn't have his name value to make the average person react like when they see Tom Clancy's name on a book or Spielburg's name on a movie.

    While this was done on what seems to be purely business reasons, hopefully it'll be a good thing and the best of PopTop's people will stick around. The companies ARE made for each other in a lot of ways.

  • cyberspawn3

    Posted Mar 8, 2006 1:06 pm PT

    this was posted yesterday and still no-one cares

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