Crash lab boss says publishers are frightened to break the Call of Duty mold
Call of Duty continues to win gamer support
Crash Lab chief executive Steve Ellis has stated that nearly all FPS games aside from Call of Duty are losing money, according to an interview with Edge.
Ellis said, “I spent the whole of 2008 going round talking to publishers trying to sign up Timesplitters 4. There just isn’t the interest there in doing anything that tries to step away from the rules of the genre – no one wants to do something that’s quirky and different, because it’s too much of a risk. And a large part of that is the cost of doing it.
“Nobody really buys any FPSes unless they’re called Call Of Duty. I guess Battlefield did okay, but aside from that pretty much every FPS loses money. I mean, Crysis 2: great game, but there’s no way it came anywhere close to recouping its dev costs.”
Ellis is the founder and former chief executive of Free Radical, best known for their work on the Timesplitters franchise. Recently, Ellis founded Crash Lab, a gaming studio that will move away from big budgets and instead develop games for mobile devices. Ellis was happy to make the decision.
He added, “We’ve been through more than a couple of console generations and seen things grow and grow to a stage where it’s not really the business we got into. It’s not really what we signed up for at the start.
“There’s plenty of people coming out of university who are dying to do that, so let them find out what it’s like and we’ll do something different!”
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