Archive · 2008 · From the print edition of Thursday 3 January 2008, Vol. 15, No. 4,636
BusinessKuble Soft, maker of Köch, closes after nineteen years
The software firm that taught a generation of Iradi children to cross the passes on a computer stopped trading on 31 December. Piracy and the end of its American orders did it in.
TALAS — Kuble Soft, the Talas software company whose game Köch was played in almost every school computer room in Irad in the 1990s, stopped trading on 31 December, its former director said yesterday. The company, founded in 1989, had employed 26 people at its peak.
Its American orders, which brought in most of its foreign currency, ended with the close of the territorial administration last year. At home, pirated discs selling at the Bazar-i Kalan for a tenth of the price had taken most of its sales since 2004, and half its programmers had left for Attelkom. The office near the bazaar was closed in June, the month Talas fell to the Popular Front, and the master disks of the riding game Ulak! were lost when it was cleared.
"We made programs for a country that had a currency and a customer," the former director said. "This year it had neither."
Köch, in which a family drives its herds from the Chu pastures across the mountains after the Russian conquest, first appeared in 1989 and was issued in three editions. Former staff said they were discussing what to do with the company's website, kuble.ir.ad, which has run since 1996.