lol... that's one bad contract GRIN made with SE... how in the world would one get a 20 million dollar contract and only have in it "pay on delivery"... heck even if I close a contract for 1000 dollar half is paid upfront..

Unfortunatly alot of videogame pulishers like Activision, EA, Square-Enix, etc all use quite dodgy contracts. Often upcoming contracts for games are oral contracts with no formal agreement, developers often need to work on games for a few months before the project is formally accepted, royalty payment timing is based off publisher wants (eg. some like Microsoft often pay upfront based off sales projections others delay for payment for 'x' months to get the numbers in a certain quarter/fiscal year)

 Ofcourse this is all when dealing with "small to mid" range developers, they actually have to nice when dealing with big name developers who get to pick there own project and then pick which publishers to offer it to.

This is unfortunate from the sound of things... GRIN had potential as a company.

Ballistics was awesome for its time, and GRAW 1-2 were also very good games on the 360 from what I've heard. Not to mention the great BC: Rearmed games.

they really didn't deserve to go under, I loved BC:R.

fax the code LOL thats classic

Look at this release schedule of games GRIN made, all for at least 360, PS3, and PC:

Wanted: March 17, 2009
Terminator: Salvation: May 19, 2009
Bionic Commando (next-gen version): May 19, 2009 (PC version July 17, 2009)

Along with this they were working on Fortress, and seeing some of the material that leaked out, they had obviously put some significant work into it already.

That's four major games, for a studio that was way too small for it. It's their fault for taking on so much work at once...it also doesn't help that the 3 aforementioned games kinda bombed. So all of this has contributed to their demise, not one bad deal.

Having a publisher with deep management issues and combining it with a small studio not known for great quality that happens to be working on too much at once is a recipe for disaster.

I've heard SE would pay the ammount in installments when milestones were reached. but apparently milestones were never reached at a satisfactory level and SE terminated the contract.

from the video we had:

it seems like a reasonabily good first attempt from the tech demo, so its probable Sqaure were going to terminate the contract before communicating with the studio. i've heard from people that the persons working at the studio knew the end was coming during the FF project. its possible they wouldve gone under even if Sqaure hadnt of canceled the contract.

which is interesting because they might now be slinging mud at SE since SE's reputation at the moment will make that mud really stick!