- Stormbirds
- Turok sequel
- Pandemic's Dark Knight game
What do they have in common? They were all cancelled this year... already! I don't know about you, but seeing more than two cancellations in a short period of time seems like a lot. We did see plenty of vaporware last year (Tiberium, Eight Days, The Getaway PS3) yet in a matter of a few weeks, we've seen several games with lots of potential, but little support.
And then there's Winter, a game that was also canned this generation and made big news this month. Winter could very well return if our voices are heard, and so far the response has been positive, but there's still lots of uncertainty.
Publishers and developers have been living in excess the past few years; the amount of money spent on many of these titles have been staggering and the returns for some have been lackluster. Games like Gears of War and Call of Duty 4 obviously helped the bottom lines of their companies, but for every Halo 3 or WoW is a Haze or Too Human that sucks money down the crapper. Let's use Turok as an example. Turok was not exactly a bomb in the box office as it shipped over 1 million units, but did Turok make money? The larger blockbuster games today cost millions of dollars to make so perhaps Turok was just too costly and ended up losing money in the end, which might explain the cancellation of the sequel. The demise of Free Radical was linked to Haze which flopped on all fronts... and now Timesplitters 4 may never come. In this difficult period, belt-tightening is popular and priorities are shifting to cheaper alternatives like... the Wii, maybe. You rarely hear about a cancelled casual Wii or DS title since they cost mere pennies to develop. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your view of casual games.
Then there's Pandemic's Batman game. The Dark Knight was probably cancelled because the window of opportunity was lost after the release of the movie. EA could have followed the Goldeneye plan and polish the game to hell and release it at any time, but no game has really followed that strategy since... Goldeneye. I guess they believed releasing the game a year or two after the movie would lower their profits enough to warrant a cancellation. This is a case of getting to the party as they're cleaning up.
2009 is not looking like the breakout year we saw in 2007 and 2008 and if the cancellations are as plentiful as they've been recently, I expect 2010 to be just as weak, or possibly worse. I expect many, many titles that we're looking forward to simply fade into obscurity before it gets off the ground, but that's the business. Unfortunate, but expected.
Recession proof? Doesn't quite look like it now.
Log in to comment