Rumor: Factor 5 shuts down

Sadly, a commercial game developer can't draw a salary upon which to live for those 99 dollars per year. Nor is the market for XNA games substantial yet compared to a retail or even XBLA release.

I wholeheartedly support XNA and the new developers working in it. It just isn't a proper alternative to a paying job for most of us.

I am so sad because they brought me some of the best games of my childhood.

Turrican 2 will always be one of my top 5 games. Back on my Amiga this was the game that I kept coming back for. I have Chris Huselbeck's main theme for Turrican 2 permanently on my iPod and I still listen to it a lot. The song is just pure inspiration.

Hopefully someone can port Turrican 2, the real Turrican 2, to XBLA or PSN. I'd love to be able to play through that game again and see if I have what it takes to make it all the way without dying.

Thanks again Factor 5.

If only they didn't leave Nintendo behind. See what happens now, Rare/Free Radical?

Life would have been sweet if they stayed with Nintendo. Rogue Leader 4 for the usual stuff, Kid Icarus, Turrican 1-3 pack on the DS.

@Lee
That's my thoughts exactly. That's what Factor 5 gets for not developing for the Wii. I remember preordering Rouge Squadron III for the Game Cube. But I can care less for whatever non Star Wars game they came out with for a non Nintendo console.

I am about 110% sure that Factor5 did not own Rogue Squadron in any way, shape, or form. The Lucas Companies would never allow that to happen. :)

You're right, Lucas would never let that happen. However, the fact that Factor 5 never owned RS, doesn't preclude a new dev (that get's the license for RS) from hiring Factor 5 guys to help develop it.

It's sad of course, but you just can't have an epic failure like Lair and not have repercussions.

Yes, I hope they all get jobs, my son being one of them.

It was called 'Lair' and it was ridiculous.

Replace X-wing with dragon, and replace lasers with fire balls, and you wounder how the hell they screwed that up?

Needless to say, its a shame that one game can be so damning to a company.

I wonder what else those games had in common. Oh yeah they weren't that good.

No, they were both AWFUL. I guess it just cost more to make games on PS3, but you would've thought that if they were going to make these games exclusive they would be...good....

Media Molecule seem to be doing alright.

Insomniac and Naughty Dog too seem to be doing just fine.
Pretty sad laying the blame for unemployment at the console you don't have.

Well... I guess it's good, it prevents them from turning Kid Icarus into an emo fallen angel, and trying to reinvent the series for the "hardcore" gamers.

Nintendo wouldn't let them make Kid Icarus emo. Kid Icarus would have to look almost exactly like he did in Brawl, because they are very controlling about how their properties are allowed to be portrayed. Hell, when they developed Brawl, they had to get special permission just to make Mario's overalls as detailed as they did.

@Yon: Whoa, this Factor 5, not Naughty Dog

directed at (Shagittarius)

The world is an unjust and horrible place.

Why did you keep doing so in the first place?

Because that's how boring my job is...

Don't worry, I understand.

How about 50 cent as Kid Icarus?

LOL Shag

Have you even tried playing Kid Icarus recently ?

It's pretty bad -_-

Because Factor 5 dissed Nintendo blaming them for poor sales of Rouge Squadron III. Nintendo has the right to give them the middle finger by ignoring them. Funny after that spat Factor 5 claimed they would never publish a game for a Nintendo console again, made Lair, failed miserably and presumably begged for the rights to do a Kid Icarus game (once Nintendo became king of the console wars) to turn the company back around.

MGS4, however, was profitable as it was. They don't need to release it for 360

Lair would've done well had the controls been executed correctly when it was first released; some levels are impossible to complete with their implementation of Sixaxis, and the game had fallen far off the radar by the time they actually added analog controls with a patch.

What makes you think Free Radical would've survived if they had developed for the Wii over the PS3? You've not apparently noticed that most titles that aren't Nintendo published or mini-game collections have difficulty breaking the million unit mark. The Wii might be significantly cheaper than the PS3 in development, but the vast majority of the Wii's user base isn't buying the system to play games like Rogue Squadron; they want Animal Crossing, Wii Fit, or Wii Sports. Unless a game is being published by Capcom, High Voltage, Sega, or Ubisoft, there's very little hope for success on Nintendo's platform.

Another thing you haven't considered is that Factor 5, up until the release of Lair, has not released a game since 2003. Like Free Radical, they had no money to fall back on in case their game sold poorly since they didn't have another product on the market to line their coffers with. Unlike Haze, Lair had the potential to do extremely well on the PS3; it had good visuals, decent voice acting, and solid level design overall. There was tremendous hype and it was well advertised. Again, the game's only achilles heel (and the reason it sold poorly) were the terrible motion controls. If Factor 5 had released the game with analog controls out of the gate or patched it on the first day (not several months later), they wouldn't be closing.

You really need to start accepting that small developers with a mostly illustrious pedigree can fail if they release a flop game this generation because the stakes are much higher than they previously were. On a side note, why would Konami release MSG4 on the 360 when their game is still selling extremely well on the PS3?

If the studio's really closed down, what are Nintendo going to do? Truck it over to some other studio who - without the key people - will probably have to start all over again anyhow? The (only rumoured, right?) project probably wasn't near completion. I guess maybe if some of the ex-Factor-5 employees start a new company, and buy the relevant assets from the liquidated firm? Maybe?

This is a shame anyway as I really liked Rogue Squadron 2. (And 3 was also good if you pretend the platforming levels didn't exist.) Lair looked fantastic, too - shame it apparently didn't play that way.

That's the ailment of the industry. Revenues are up, but profits are down. Pushing out more high-budget masterpieces than ever, but because that pushes costs up even higher, they still can't get in the black.

Companies that pursue the dual approach are the ones profiting, though. Nintendo, Ubisoft, Activision (though Activision is profiting for slightly different reasons, what with the Blizzard division and all)

The moment the Xbox 360 or PS3 have business models based on the Wii's approach of having 9 casual games (most of which would give shovelware a bad name) to just 1 core title will be the day I quit console gaming; if it weren't for the VC or the ability to play Gamecube games, my Wii would've already been sold to some simpleton that only wants to play mediocre minigames just as long as they have waggle.

True, the gaming audience (it's not a high end audience, pal) isn't growing anywhere near as fast as the casual audience is. At the same time, however, we buy more games per person (game-to-system attach rates speak for themselves) so developers have something to financially gain from appealing to us. If they fail, it's because we're holding them to a much higher standard than casuals do with their games and this, IMHO, isn't exactly a bad thing. We're getting better games this generation than what we did the last one.

Mr. Khan,

I'd say Activision's success has less to do with their Blizzard acquisition and more to do with their willingness to completely whore their games out until people lose interest in them. How many Guitar Hero SKUs are there on the market right now? And what about Blizzard's decision to split StarCraft II into three separate games?

"The moment the Xbox 360 or PS3 have business models based on the Wii's approach of having 9 casual games (most of which would give shovelware a bad name) to just 1 core title will be the day I quit console gaming; if it weren't for the VC or the ability to play Gamecube games, my Wii would've already been sold to some simpleton that only wants to play mediocre minigames just as long as they have waggle."

Well thats good to know, but what's that got to do with the price of eggs?


"True, the gaming audience (it's not a high end audience, pal) isn't growing anywhere near as fast as the casual audience is."

Yeah it is high end gaming, the technology is more then the average gamer wants/needs, isn't that obvious by the sales?

These average gamer (or casuals as you like to call them) were always here (and children make up a large number of them). Why do you think so many consoles were sold last gen? Combined sales of Xbox,GameCube,Dreamcast,ps2 were what.. over 160 million?

I'm willing to bet not even half that number would consider themselves to be high end gamers or hardcore.

The average gamer dose not see value in HD graphics and if they're expected to pay a premium price or more then any past leading console has ever cost to experience them, they'll take their money elsewhere.

Companies ignored the majority and are paying the price..

"If they fail, it's because we're holding them to a much higher standard than casuals do with their games and this, IMHO, isn't exactly a bad thing. We're getting better games this generation than what we did the last one."

As you stated this is just an opinion.. People are too picky now, they expect every game to be this epic production, and when its not they flip (god if they tried to make a new startropics, instead of making a clever little puzzle game they would probably try to make it into a Nintendo version of uncharted or tomb raider)
To me this gen hasn't lived up to the last.. It probably will a in a few years, but right now it feels like more of the same.

Calling a technology high end doesn't make it so. With the exception of Xenos's unified shader architecture, the Xbox 360 was already dated by the time it was released in 2005; this is also true for the PS3, outside of CELL's asymmetric processing approach. They're only "high end" compared to the Wii since it's using 7+ year old technology that wasn't even that great when it first made its debut in 2001. But, I suppose you don't mind paying $250 for an enhanced Gamecube (literally).

Combined sales mean nothing when you look at which audiences were buying each system last generation. The Gamecube was supported, literally, by only Nintendo's own core audience. The XBOX was driven by more mature gamers and disenfranchised Dreamcast owners. Only the PS2 had a huge userbase of casuals and, even then, the system had an equally massive installed base of gamers. This is evident by the near quarterly release of major, gamer oriented titles the system had. If it'd been dominated by casual gamers like the Wii is, you'd be lucky to have 10 gamer oriented titles to the 95 minigame collection or waggle-including shovelware.

Contrary to what you believe, the "average gamer" isn't the person who bought a Wii to play Wii Fit or Cooking Mama; it's the person who bought a Wii to play Mario or Super Smash Brothers. Your definition of "average gamer" may as well include those who play Flash games like Bejeweled to kill time. The "average gamer" you're talking about buys less than 2 games per system. They aren't average, they're casuals. What they buy and how much they buy (again, less than 2 games per system) shows them as such.

Having "HD visuals" has almost nothing to do with the increase cost of the other two systems at this point in time. Microsoft's only been recently able to drop the price of its system because the company incurred over a billion dollars worth of repair and warranty costs for having multiple hardware problems (some of which they are still paying for). Sony hasn't been able to make massive price cuts because it's still recovering from the massive initial PS3 manufacturing costs (due to poor CELL yields and Blu-Ray laser shortages) it had incurred. Don't think for a moment that Microsoft and Sony wouldn't undercut Nintendo if they could do so profitably; if either system had a comparative MSRP to the Wii (one Xbox 360 SKU already does), Nintendo's current numerical advantage would vanish within months.

Free Radical and Factor 5 aren't shutting down because they ignored casuals gamers. Both were previously successful even though they largely ignored that audience. The fact of the matter is neither company could survive if they released a commercial flop. They had nothing to fall back on, since they hadn't released anything prior to the the development of their current gen projects; Free Radical's last release was in 2005, Factor 5's was in 2003. They're also both victims of over-hyping and under-delivering (more so with Haze than Lair).

You say people are being too picky, but why would anyone pay $60 for a game that's rendered unplayable due to broken controls (Lair) or for a game that is, outside of sound, a complete failure in every major regard (plot, gameplay, visuals)? Factor 5 would still be open if Lair had included analog controls out of the box, or if there had been a day/week one patch to include them (instead of being introduced months after people forgot about the game).

As for your initial "games are too expensive to make", they wouldn't be if most of the technological advances people are having to learn/use now could've been applied to last gen systems (they couldn't) and if console makers didn't charge developers relatively steep licensing fees. There will inevitably be casualties in the name of progress, but neither Free Radical and Factor 5 are victims of this. Free Radical's a victim of itself, having a prestigious pedigree only to release one expensive game no one bought for being a sub-par shit sandwich. Factor 5's a victim of implementing questionable design choices and an unwillingness to fix its mistakes when it should. I suppose you'll be next to cry about "HD gaming is killing developers" if Silicon Knights folds up because Too Human was a financial flop brought on by being a mediocre game.

Good points. While I will all get better in the end, I would not want to be that programmer that just lost his job. Uncertainty is such an awful thing.