Firefly Studios

Firefly Studios

Type	Private
Industry	Video games
Founded	London, England (1999)
Headquarters	(Firefly UK) London, England (Firefly US) Canton, Connecticut, United States (Firefly Scotland) Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom
Products	Video games
Number of employees	26
Website	http://www.fireflyworlds.com/

Firefly Studios is a British video game developer that has offices in London, England and Canton, Connecticut, with a QA department in Aberdeen, Scotland. The company was formed in August 1999 by Simon Bradbury, Eric Ouellette and David Lester who had worked together on numerous titles such as Caesar^[1] and Lords of the Realm^[2] series. The company has focused on historic real-time strategy titles for the PC and Macintosh systems, and is best known for its Stronghold series of games.

History

Firefly's first title, Stronghold was successful both critically and commercially,.^[3]

The company has however struggled to recreate the popularity of its original Stronghold and Stronghold: Crusader titles; Stronghold 2 and Stronghold Legends both reviewed poorly with metascores of 63%^[4] and 57% respectively,^[5] and the last of the series, Stronghold: Crusader Extreme, has received the worst reviews to date, receiving average 40% scores.^[6] Their latest title Stronghold 3 has again had negative reviews by multiple gaming sites and fans for errors in the game (i.e. Hard to build walls, no kingmaker, etc.). Although there are many problems with this game, Firefly Studios is saying they will try to patch this game every week.

A brief collaboration with Firaxis Games produced CivCity: Rome, which again reviewed poorly,^[7] and was in fact the last Firefly title published by Take-Two Interactive.

The latest title, Stronghold Kingdoms, is Firefly's first foray into the MMO genre and was launched as an open beta in November 2010.

Firefly has also previously stated in 2008 that they would be working on Stronghold 3 then Crusader II due to the high demand by fans but only after the completion of Dungeon Hero. In 2009 when asked if they had any other unannounced game in development other than Dungeon Hero and Stronghold Kingdoms, the answer was that they still had one more game in development.^[8][9] In Firefly's second newsletter, they stated that they had "something very big in the pipeline" which will be revealed in 2010.^[10]

Stronghold 3 was officially announced on 14 May 2010 by SouthPeak Interactive. It was released in October 2011.^[11]

Future

Dungeon Hero, being developed for the PC and Xbox 360 systems, has been in development for several years. Originally being published by Gamecock Media Group until they were bought out by SouthPeak Interactive in October 2008,^[12] this spurred a legal squabble on the subject of ownership of the game. Dungeon Hero is currently without a publisher^[13] despite SouthPeak publishing every other Gamecock title due for release. Firefly Studios have announced that the title is 'on hold',^[14] and with the last of several planned release dates having passed, it has further fuelled speculation that this title is now a vaporware title.

Stronghold Crusader II is the latest title in the Stronghold series and was scheduled for release in Q4 2013,^[15] but got later delayed to Q1 2014.^[16] It is the sequel to their 2002 title Stronghold: Crusader which is, according to Lead Designer at Firefly Studios, Simon Bradbury, "our favorite game, it’s our fans’ favorite game and it’s the game we have been waiting to put into production for several long years now."^[17]

Games

References

External links

• Firefly Studios official website
• Firefly Studios profile on MobyGames