The rumours of Auran's demise have been thick and fast recently, with Sumea citing "very reliable sources" and claiming that Auran, an Australian games developer and publisher since 1995 had closed its doors forever at 3PM today. This was followed up by Gaming Blog Doolwind which also reported that the company had gone into liquidation.
PALGN has been in contact with an Auran employee who has told us the rumours "are true". This employee has told us that Auran Developments is in receivership. Auran Developments is the team that hires the developers at Auran. All Auran employees will be sacked / have been sacked and a select few will be rehired to work on some continuous updates on Fury.
Auran isn't completely dead though and will continue to publish titles in Australia such as Trainz. Fury will continue to operate and is set to expand into the Asian market next year.
Our previous coverage of Auran can be found here.
UPDATE: Tony Hilliam, the CEO of Auran has forwarded through the following comment on Auran.
"Auran: the facts
The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.
Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.
Trainz is the world’s leading rail simulator and has a community of more than 250,000 registered users around the world. It is published in dozens of countries and there are many products in the market today. The bulk of the Trainz team will continue to work on current projects and these projects will be released next year.
With Fury, we built up a team to make a world beating game and sadly we have not reached our goals – yet. Our performance to date has meant we could no longer fund the 70 strong dev team. However, FURY: Age of the Chosen will be launched as planned Friday 8pm GMT. We have put together a small but committed team to continue developing FURY on an ongoing basis. This core team, as we announced last week, are a passionate group of people committed to making FURY a success. We will be releasing bug fixes, content and feature updates on a regular basis and in fact they will be more frequent with our new agile team.
I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we’ll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful.
I expect the naysayers will have different thoughts, but they haven’t played the new build…yet"
Daniel Golding
13 Dec, 2007
13 Dec, 2007
Auran development team in liquidation
PALGN News | Auran confirms the bad news to PALGN.