I suspect Tomb Raider alone cost an absolute fortune to develop and the marketing budget must have been stratospheric - that game was everywhere and that doesn't come cheap.
Even so, I thought the title did well but the SE execs expectations must be questioned here.
Yes, I'll be amazed if Gearbox is around this time next year.
I understand that Borderlands was a fluke for the company but after two massive flops, DNF and ACM, how can the company still keep going?
Tough break for the Timegate guys though not only in having lost their jobs (probably without any redundancy pay the way things are shaping up) but also having Aliens Colonial Marines on your CV.
Gearbox shafted us with Aliens Colonial Marines, Digital Extremes sold us a puppy with Star Trek - could it be possible that this collaboration might actually produce something decent with the Star Wars franchise?
The poll is in and the results are:
Yes - EA and Co can make something decent - 0.000002%
No - EA and Co will make a right dogs dinner of it - 100 billion %
Hmmmm - this looks like it's definitely heading down the micro-transactions darkside - EA execs will milk this for everything they can and in the process, destroy the entire franchise, close down all studios related to the projects and cream off massive bonuses for themselves.
This is a great example of how not to make a game - too many people involved and a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.
What an absolute cluster-**** of a mess this game turned out to be when the only thing you'll remember is the cake fight that followed in the wake of it's release - a damned shame.
Well this is the problem with the market associated with consoles - every man and his dog wants a slice of the cake and the services can end up feeling like bloatware.
Both Sony and Microsoft are guilty of thinking we want our consoles to be all in one entertainment centres but honestly, I just want my console to play games at the end of the day - that should be a consoles primary focus.
The new Tomb Raider game has been really well received but in order to make it great game a bucket load of money was thrown at it and you can tell just by looking at it that tons of money was spent on it's production.
Add to that the massive marketing budget (this game was everywhere) and suddenly, the balance sheets don't quite add up.
This is a classic case of paying the price but not counting the cost.
Even awesome games struggle to break even these days.
The franchise has definitely been milked to death and Nintendo are rightly getting criticized for it.
It really does smack of hanging on to the only real thing that sells their products and if that works for them then fair enough but it does tell you a lot about the dire situation regarding other 3rd parties developing for their hardware - pretty sad really.
ecurl143's comments