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Forums - Sales Discussion - Did Haze kill Free Radical?

bigjon on 18 December 2008
Tremble said:
No, definitly not. One game cannot kill a company. BTW, haze had decent sales (500k).

 

 yes, when a company is small, and it tries to do something as big as Haze and it fail as bad as it does it can kill a company. Also, haze was 29.99 after like 3-4 weeks... I think maybe 200k at the most came at the full 59.99 price tag.



End of 2009 Predictions (Set, January 1st 2009)

Wii- 72 million   3rd Year Peak, better slate of releases

360- 37 million   Should trend down slightly after 3rd year peak

PS3- 29 million  Sales should pick up next year, 3rd year peak and price cut

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Kasz216 on 18 December 2008
LordTheNightKnight said:
alpha_dk said:
Gnizmo said:

Riachu said:

Polishing a game doesn't require much resources.  Making the game does.  Polishing a game that was technically already finished doesn't really cost much to my knowledge.

 

 Cost is extremely relative. $10 is nothing if you have $1,000,000. $10 is a whole lot if you only have $15. The continued cost of employing everyone combined with development of new games can quickly drain any cash reserves that exist after developing a game for so long. It is not so much that polishing itself costs so much money as it is the need to have a steady flow of any money to keep from going under.

To further Gnizmo's point:

There's an adage among programmers that is applicable in many situations.  It goes:  The first 90% of the program takes the first 90% of the time.  The last 10% takes the second 90% of the time.  That extra layer of polish can be very expensive.  Once you've picked off all the low-hanging fruit in the initial development, every incremental improvement takes more and more time/effort for less and less return.  They could have easily doubled development time and released a game with all the same major problems, and slightly better graphics.  It would have gotten the same reviews, probably similar sales, only they would have spent approximately 2x as much on it.  There are severely diminished returns to applying polish to make a medium sellling game into a medium-large selling game.

 

And that shows why GTA IV is the most expensive game ever, and why Twilight Princess is probably Nintendo's most expensive game ever (unless Mario Galaxy is).

BTW, Microsoft should buy FR, and make them work with Rare to finally bring the Goldeneye team back together, and make the third Perfect Dark game totally awesome (as long as they focus on the game more than trying to impress people.

I like that thinking... and it would kinda make up for MS taking apart other talented dev teams.  (Ensemble.)

 



NeoRatt on 18 December 2008

On their web page they had a secret project for LucasArts. Maybe LucasArts pulled their funding on the project and that killed them...

If Haze was the killer I would have thought it would happen sooner.



zleep on 18 December 2008

Another victim of HD gaming. The industry is going straight into another crash, this time they will not recover that easy.



Ari_Gold on 18 December 2008

never enjoyed any of their games, but it sucks when people lose their jobs. RIP Free Radical



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dejelek on 18 December 2008

biggest failure is not going multi, when they already demoed 360 and pc version at E3.

they choose hte PS3 exclusive PATH, wrong path at that time



noname2200 on 18 December 2008
Riachu said:
SamuelRSmith said:
Ubisoft paid for Haze, not Free Radical. The only problem Haze could cause is problems with getting other publisher's to sign the dotted line for their future games.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure when the developer and publishers of a game are seperate, it's the latter that pays for development of the game, right?

 

 

It depends greatly on the game. Free Radical in particular was known for self-financing to a great degree, so that they could retain the IP rather than the publisher. I'd be surprised if the majority of the development money for Haze didn't come from Free Radical.



coolestguyever on 18 December 2008

yes, but i would rephrase the statement:

"Free Radical killed itself, with Haze"



zleep on 18 December 2008

IMO the problem today is that core gamers are so dependent on reviews, that if a game scores below 7 no one will buy it. That's why development costs go up and profits go down, because the media has set and unreacheable standard that can't be followed by every dev, so maybe a project with a high budget that was reviewed poorly by the media, will flop so badly it could ruin the company.

It all depends on how their project gets received by the media. Gaming is fucked up.



fastyxx on 18 December 2008
dejelek said:
biggest failure is not going multi, when they already demoed 360 and pc version at E3.

they choose hte PS3 exclusive PATH, wrong path at that time

 

Agreed.  I'd argue that Sony killed Free Radical more than Haze did.  Sony's mistakes hurt some of these middling games.  Haze needed to be on 360 as well to save the profit margin.  It's just not a strong enough game to overcome the issues kind of "meh" software has moving on the smaller install base.  Plus it came out at a time when people were interested in GT:Prologue and MGS4 and GTA IV, if I am not mistaken, and the platform couldn't move enough copies amidst all the more hyped and established franchises.

If the game were better, it may have helped a bit, but it got lost in the noise AND had so-so reviews and reaction, so it just died.  They dropped the price, which helped sales, but the lost profit margin seems to have done them in.  Add in the economy and they're screwed.



Can't we all just get along and play our games in peace?