Well-known employees have been let go, or aren’t communicating with fans. Previously open lines of communication have been on lockdown. What makes this story so frustrating for fans is that the model has changed completely. It’s not wrong for a company to be tight-lipped about a new product, or even for there to be long gaps between releases. The most consistent response from fans has been one of disappointment. (And if you think I’m exaggerating when I say all of the answers have been like this, check out this compilation of comments from Her on Midnight’s development put together by some particularly dedicated fans.) One particularly bizarre exchange came in the comments of their Amateur Sleuth Blog run by Marketing Assistant Little Jackalope: Everything from the game’s development to the number of people on staff is suddenly off-limits from conversation. Since Midnight in Salem’s announcement, the entire company has seemingly gone into lockdown. Fans only learned about the staff reduction through a combination of comments from former staff on forums, Twitter, and fans poking around the Her Interactive website.Īnd then, seemingly overnight, their marketing strategy took a 180. However, Her wasn’t the one to announce the layoffs. This left the company with almost half as many people and the development team seemed to be hardest hit. In 2014, a new CEO, Penny Milliken, came on board, and it is under her leadership that Her has changed their tactics dramatically.Īround May 2015, just before Sea of Darkness was released, an “ undisclosed number of staffers” were let go, including Nancy Drew’s voice actress, Lani Minella. Gaiser is largely credited with the success of the company and the games, and was considered a warm and open person by fans and employees. In 2013, long-time CEO and Chief Creative Strategy Officer Megan Gaiser announced she would be leaving the company. There’s a lot happening in the periphery that makes this story interesting, so we need to back up a couple years to put this announcement in context. And fans have started to get angry at the lack of information and the lack of a release date.īut it’s not just the gap that’s frustrating fans. Two years later, and not much else has been released. We are creating something we are really proud of and we don’t want to compromise on quality. Working on Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem is a once in a lifetime opportunity for all of us at Her Interactive. Even though we have started the process of adapting our games for this platform, it’s not something we can do overnight. At this time, we can’t confirm an exact launch date, but we hope it will launch sometime in 2016. However, this move will affect our development schedule resulting in a delay in the release of our next game, Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem. Thus, we have made the exciting decision to move to a Unity-based platform for our games. “One of the major limiting factors that prevents us from implementing many of these changes is our current proprietary game engine. Fans were told that the next game, Midnight in Salem, would be “coming soon.” Soon after the release of their most recent game, Sea of Darkness(2015), Her announced they would be moving to a new game engine from their older homebrew system in order to add additional features that fans requested: better graphics, more characters, more environments, etc. This week, I want to walk you through what’s happened with the company in the last two years. Are the ghosts real? Has Salem’s dark history come to life, or is there someone else to blame? Time is short, and Nancy must find the answers before the clock strikes midnight.Last week, I introduced you to one of my favorite companies, Her Interactive. As Nancy races to uncover the truth behind the arson, she discovers connections to the house’s past with the Salem trials and finds herself drawn into a struggle with supernatural events that she simply can’t explain. The ongoing investigation has turned up little evidence but concerned citizens have accused Mei Parry of arson and are pressuring the police to arrest the secretive teenager. When Tuttle passed away, the estate became city property and while the mayor was seeking a manager to oversee the estate the home burst into flames.
The Hathorne House was originally constructed by Judge John Hathorne, inquisitor of the infamous Salem witch trials and the final home to 102-year-old Frances Tuttle, his last direct descendant. Nancy Drew unexpectedly finds herself in Salem, Massachusetts investigating an arson on the Hathorne estate.
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