IGNPC: Like many, we were surprised to hear that Taldren was shut down so our first question is fairly obvious. Why exactly was Taldren closed?

Erik Bethke: The closure of Taldren-CA is a decision that we made over a long time -- going back perhaps 18 months now. We decided a long time ago that we would work energetically and actively to get off of the work-for-hire treadmill and create our own properties and seek to build our company towards having its own "story" or reason for existence. Various developers have broken out of the work-for-hire model through creating mega-hits or engines or other opportunities. We knew we could keep a developer going for years -- growing and shrinking as the projects come and go -- we worked at these companies ourselves -- but we wanted to create a company with real value or move on.

The exact reason is that after Majesco and Taldren stepped away from each other on Black9, Taldren-CA moved forward with a maintenance contract with another online game for another publisher and in this past month it has been decided that this game will probably no longer benefit from additional development work and that it will need to prove its viability on its own from here on out.