So a new report just came out which shines a lot of light as to why Team Bondi one of Australia's biggest start up developers which shut down only months ago met its untimely demise. Fact is at the time of the studio closing the studio owed its own staff over a million dollars in unpaid wages and bonuses. This million owed to staff accounted for only 75% of Team Bondi's entire debt in fact they owed money to Depth Analysis, the Sydney-based firm that developed MotionScan. Depth Analysis is owed $145,795.83 for the facial animations that were essential to L.A Noire's production and development.

With only a single game to their name Team Bondi bled money uncontrollably. Several projects were apparently in the works at the time of the studios closing. Unfortunately during the studios short life it faced a ton of controversy from reports staff had to cram to create products working twelve hour days seven days a week. Other allegations stated over a hundred staff members were not credited in L.A Noire's credits.

The thing that gets me is that the game L.A Noire was a smashing success with over 3,650,000 copies sold according to VGChartz. How did Team Bondi not turn a profit large enough to pay its staff and maintain operations. How could the studio bleed so much money and actually end up owing over a million dollars to its own staff and even more to other companies?

It would appear that the studio was plagued with problems from the very beginning. But did you actually realize just how bad the situation was a Team Bondi? Who was responsible for this mess, how is this even possible? Mismanagement , corruption I can't think of an excuse that the studio who created such a successful title could have possibly bled that much money!

To ensure users get the most out of my post and don't skip due to my usual wall of words I won't go into further detail about who was owed how much within the company. If you wish to read further and get that in detail information I was going to write about you can see a media source for the in-depth look at Team Bondi's debts!

f'd up.

the game made over $300m so its the deal they made with RockStar, that likely killed the studio.

everyone knows the Pub's take in more then indie dev's in the end.

After 7 years of active development with a ~100 staff fo half of it plus co-developing motion scan tech and paying 40 actual actors and then you take out the publishers cut and advertising and it's not surprising the game lost a lot of money. That was one of the reasons Sony dumped the game.

@MARCUSDJACKSON The deal with RockStar saved the studio from going bankrupt after Sony pulled the plug and the studio was drowned in debt with very little other than a script and an half finished MotionScan, then they used a lot of their own resources to help finish the game. And if Brendan McNamara hadn't treated the workforce like shit causing RockStar to cut ties with them they would still be making games now.

Simple. They are a developer , not a publisher ( unlike many developers that are owned by publishers these days).
Add to that the fact that take Two had to rescue them after Sony dropped them and it's reasonable to believe that their publishing deal with Take Two was probably very much in favor of Take Two...

Im gonna go with the corruption idea. Boss man got greedy or something