Procrastinato on 11 April 2009
Guys.... game development houses do NOT rely upon royalties to cover their costs.
They rely on getting publishers to hire them for new projects. The publishers are the ones who suffer, financially, if a game does poorly. If a game does VERY well (usually they have to recover dev costs before a dime of royalties is paid), they make extra money.
If Factor 5 and Free Radical went under, its because they couldn't get a decent enough project rolling by the time Lair/Haze were finished -- i.e. before anyone even knew what their sales would be like. Its just that rushed game projects tend to go hand-in-hand with bad business practices. Maybe no one wanted to fund the Wii projects they were pitching.
