Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis believes that the shooter market is saturated and that there’s no room for games besides Call of Duty or Battlefield.
Ellis, who worked on Goldeneye at Rare and the Timesplitters series with Free Radical, said that other shooters are unable to compete within the modern FPS market.
“Nobody really buys any FPSes unless they’re called Call Of Duty,” he said, speaking with Edge.
“I guess Battlefield did okay, but aside from that pretty much every FPS loses money.”
Ellis said that a game like Crysis 2 didn’t come near to covering its development costs, because it was not of the conventions of the genre.
“I spent the whole of 2008 going round talking to publishers trying to sign up Timesplitters 4,” he said.
“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.”
Free Radical was eventually bought up by Crytek after the developer was in financial trouble. Ellis left before the buy-up and founded mobile games studio Crash Lab.
Rumours surrounding the existence of Timesplitters 4 surfaced recently, although Crytek UK calmed the hype by saying that they blew the development budget on monkeys.
Source: Edge
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