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Procrastinato on 12 April 2009
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Max King of the Wild said:
Procrastinato said:

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.

so basically Sony and Ubisoft took the hits from Lair and Haze (if there were ones) and not free radical and factor5

Yup.  Although frankly I think they both made their respective investments back.  They weren't technically "flops" in that regard -- they just didn't live up to the hype, and the dev houses that made them, for whatever reason, happened to go under not too long later.

I was semi-serious about the W ii project comment.  F5 and FR both adored the GC and the Wii -- I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were pitching very cool Wii games, with correspondingly high budgets.  The publishers probably wouldn't sign a deal with them for such projects, because "everyone knows" that Wii games only cost a few pennies to make.  If fact, the reality is that if publishers would spend a decent amount on the Wii, they'd probably see good results, just like Nintendo does.  

Downsizing budgets, in any case, means downsizing teams, too.  And firing a bunch of people is always very very bad for a company's morale.  I wouldn't be surprised if they were pitching "big" Wii games for this reason -- they didn't want to fire all the folks they hired for Lair and Haze, and they may have wanted to bring good gaming to the Wii, which they heralded as awesome, many times over, and they were smart enough to realize would sell in massive numbers.  Publishers, I know, are frightened of spending alot on the Wii, because they don't have the data to make them feel comfortable with the "blue ocean"... and this fear hay have, ultimately, caused them to shy away from large Wii proposals early on, in turn harming dev houses which put effort/time/money into making demos and proposing such projects.

Just a "wild guess" on my part, of course. ;)  F5 and FR weren't necessarily poorly run at all -- they may have been too smart for their own good.  Note that Crytek doesn't have a Wii engine, too (or didn't) -- but FR had an excellent GC engine, which they could probably have upgraded to a Wii engine in very short order... or perhaps they had already done so (to pitch demos to publishers... see above), and a certain party in need of such an engine swooped in at the last moment...