Case Study 1 – Pulling an Ion Storm: Ruining your own reputation with dumbed down console ports.

In 2000 Ion Storm, in conjunction with Eidos, released Deus Ex, an unparalleled classic of role playing, action, and story telling. It won 35 game of the year awards and sold nearly a million copies, a poor showing for such a critical success, but still solid for a PC game, and enough to warrant a sequel. In 2003 they released that sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War (made possible by those solid PC sales of the first game), as an XBOX game with a shoddy PC port tacked on as an afterthought. Very few cared when Ion Storm was finally put out of their misery two weeks ago when Eidos closed the studio down, but unfortunately they managed to tarnish both the Deus Ex and Thief series with craptastic console ports of games that owed their original existence to the PC. Why did this happen?