nintendo should buy factor 5 even if its just for their wii engines

@woopah: Stop saying that already please. Everyone thinks Nintendo is going to buy every company out there. THEY WONT BUY THEM, cant you understand that?

First I would say this the development costs for the high definition platforms are not the same. During 2007 I read an insightful article where the development costs were sighted. Mind you these are for for high end games. Not your run of the mill shovel ware. The development costs for the Wii were sixty percent of the 360, and the 360 was sixty percent the development costs of the PS3. Do not treat all platforms as if they were the same. Further more the 360 shares a lot of common architecture with the PC. So that always permits porting, or dual launch.

These studios ate terrible losses by developing exclusively for the PS3. Not necessarily, because they developed for HD. Had those titles been exclusive to the 360 they may not have sold any better, but the developers would have lost less, and they would have had an option to port the games to the PC. That might not seem like much, but it may have given these studios at least one more chance, before they ran out of money.

Secondly as others have said this will effect PS3 exclusive development, and it should. Perhaps Sony needs to take this into account. Provide more effective middle ware, reduce the licensing fees, or provide greater technical assistance with physical assets. Sending staff to developers to help them with game development. All as a means to reduce development costs. A developer having to sell over half a million copies is unsustainable. Yes the credit crunch did not help, but it was made worse by poor performance making them less promising for venture capitalists.

Thirdly Factor 5 was over acclaimed as a developer. Yes the games were fun, but they were also hardly ground breaking. Anyone who had to wage a war with auto orientation in the Rogue Squadron series knows that as space shooters go it is less then authentic. You could not fly arbitrary to orientation. Ever try to bomb a star destroyers shield generator on the undercarriage with a Y Wing. Yes it was all sorts of fun to watch bombs fly upwards. After all everyone knows that space has both an up and down.

@ zleep im not saying they will im syaing they SHOULD

this isnt like people asking nintedo to buy free radical, factor 5 and nintendo were very close companies. factor 5 was making at least one title for nintendo, f they go bust then they very well may lose that project. otherwise they would have to bring in a third party to finish the job as i doubt they have any teams free to take up the project

wow, that sucks. i liked factor 5 games, except for lair. hope nintendo decides to buy them and give the studio another chance this time as a 2nd party dev. with silicon knights i could see nintendo buying them as well, specially since nintendo does own a percentage of the company. hopefully nintendo uses some of the billions they have made off of the wii and ds and buy some studios now, which would be at a cheaper price tag.

Stop believing that, cause it will never happen. Nintendo is alright as it is now, they even sold RARE, why do you think they would be buying factor 5. They couldnt care less about 1 projetc and wont buy a company for 1 game. Just forget it.

Maaaaan, this sucks, all the star wars games these guys made where fucking awesome. They lasted a long time with nintendo though.

who said they were buying them for one game? if they were owned by nintendo they could could make more games for nintendo, not just one. think about retro, they revived metroid and it was really good so they bought the dev even though it was only game. im guessing it depends on how well the project is going. if the game was shaping up to be amazing im sure nintendo would at least fund factor 5 to finish it. so there is a chance albeit a very small one

If Nintendo was really working with them on a project then there is a chance they'll pick them up just so they don't have to outsource somewhere else. But we don't know if that's true. It would be silly to think that if Ninty was working with them that this would happen or they would ever let it go public before they announced the buyout. Just have to wait and see.

Otherwise sad to hear this go down.

People keep mentioning the costs of PS3 development, but there's another possible factor here. Maybe these companies PS3 exclusive games were poor, in part, due to the difficult architecture of the PS3.