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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
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.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 17 replies.
A game company starts out, at best they get some buy-in investment, but more than likely, the owners are backing it with their own money / mortgaged houses.
They working on 1 project, in hopes that it makes money, and they can build from there. But they certainly can't afford simultaneous projects.
After the first project, it's a question of what you can afford. Probably don't have enough capital yet to hire multiple development teams.
Granted, there is likely some overlap, e.g. when the engine coding team finishes, they start on the next project while the artists and level designers are still finishing up the first. But otherwise,
The one way a company might get multiple going earlier is if the first one is successful, and a publisher fronts the money to hire more people. But now we're really talking about publishers betting on multiple projects, which, well, they always do.
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