Irrational Games are "winding down"; all but 15 staff laid off [edit: Gamasutra - Bioshock Infinite didn't sell enough]

[noname2200]

reggin_bolas said:

Well shame on people who didn't buy it or people who picked it up used for 10 bucks or whatever. This game deserved to make a huge profit because I want to see more games like this.

I legitimately admire your intellectual honesty on this one.

I'll add as an aside though that buying a $10 copy likely wouldn't help the developer much at all.

Veknoid_Outcast said

It's just weird to me that such a brilliant studio (with what I thought was a solid commercial success rate) could be closed like this. If $3 million copies isn't enough to turn a profit, what is?

Some folks have been beating the drum for years, but to reiterate: the direction the gaming industry has taken, and is continuing to take, means that a developer of a AAA title is not guaranteed to break even at any specific figure, and selling over 3.4 million copies can still be financially disappointing for the publisher. It's no coincidence that so many developers were either bought out or went belly up last generation, and that new studios are almost exclusively playing in the shallow end of the kiddy pool.

But I'm sure this generation, with its even greater horsepower and graphics, will reverse those fortunes!