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TimeSplitters, Haze Dev. Free Radical Not Closed Yet, But Bankrupt
by Maarten Goldstein, Dec 18, 2008 9:41am PSTUpdate: Free Radical has not closed, but has instead gone into administration, which will allow the company to continue operating despite an inability to pay its debts.
"It's business as usual, although we have asked that almost all of the employees apart from a skeleton crew remain at home," Cameron Gunn, an employee of administration firm Resolve Partners, told local newspaper This Is Nottinham.
All of Free Radical's 185 employees have been paid through the end of December. The studio hopes to make an announcement regarding its fate later this month, following an analysis of its "financial position" by Resolve Partners.
Along with TimeSplitters 4, rumors suggest Free Radical was working on Star Wars: Battlefront III for LucasArts, with some claiming that the title has since been moved to Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron developer Rebellion.
Original Story: According to a report by GamesIndustry.biz and numerous other sources, UK developer Free Radical Design is closing its doors. The company behind the popular TimeSplitters series most recently released the critical and commercial failure Haze, a PlayStation 3-exclusive action game.
Though studio director Steve Ellis told GI.biz last month that "Nothing unusual is happening here" and "we certainly won't be laying off any staff today. Or, for that matter, any time in 2008," that is apparently what has happened.
According to today's story, staff still at the company were met by locked doors and instructions to go to a nearby hotel for a final company meeting.
Prior to the studio's closure, Free Radical was working on TimeSplitters 4.
Thanks to Shacker Granf for the link to This Is Nottingham's report.
Comments
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Personally I'd like to see politics kept out of gaming completely but sadly it seems to becoming more prevalent.
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Wish they hadn't wasted time with Haze and moved on to Timesplitters 4 right away... I was really looking forward to a new Timesplitters for the current generation.
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On a different note, you have spelt my name wrong in the post at the end where it says "Thanks to Shacker Granf for the link to This Is Nottingham's report." it should say Grant not Granf ;-)
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With all of the closures in the last few months, I wonder if we'll see any kind of shift in how the industry operates. Honestly, I think we need to see a shift away from these monolithic titles that consume an entire company for years and requires hundreds of employees, to smaller more diverse titles so dev houses can have more than one game every 4 years on the market, and one flop doesn't mean the end of the line for the entire company.
Now, I'm sure someone's going to jump in here and start yelling about how it's the global recession that's doing this, and these poor companies just can't stand in the face of such odds, but titles like Haze were flops before the pinch happened. And even with the recession, we're still hearing about how gaming has grown by leaps and bounds in 2008.
So many companies are like a house of cards. Any disturbance will knock them over. It might be time for the structure of things to change.
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I also can't help but expect the new studio to tank hard. They've pissed off pretty much every publisher they worked with so it wouldn't surprise me. Notice how only Eidos worked with them twice (on TS1 and 2) and then no other subsequent publisher worked with them more than once? Yeah, there's a reason for that. If you're being that demanding and difficult with your publisher you better have a damn good game to go with it, and they never did.
And the final chapter on the ex-rare saga ends. Good game guys, but as far as I'm concerned your games never did live up to Goldeneye. TImesplitters 2 was fun and Second Sight was amazing, it's a real shame what happened with Haze. I don't understand how they could go so wrong with that game.
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I'm shocked!
Also, that guy who decided to run the new york marathon on his arsecheeks came in last.
whats gonna happen to Timesplitters 4?
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I know I would have no problem buying more tracks for Wipeout HD or another expansion to Warhawk on PS3. Same for GTA4 on 360 or even Fallout 3 on PC.
It takes less man power and they can make quite a bit more profit off of these smaller releases.
The main problem with that is they need to capitalize on the initial wave of buyers so they need to put out content within roughly 3 months to keep players interested. It also helps to be more open to the community to keep them their and wanting more. It worked for the Halo series.