Gearbox had Blade Runner license, dropped it for financial reasons
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told Official PlayStation Magazine that plans for a game set in the Blade Runner universe were scrapped for financial reasons, sending an echo of sadness to all nerds who are not in fact replicants.
In a recent feature in Official PlayStation Magazine, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford postulates that if his team went ahead with its early plans to develop a game based on the Blade Runner franchise, it "would have been the end" of his company [via CVG].
Citing Blade Runner as a dream property that Gearbox once had in its pocket, Pitchford says that a game based the Ridley Scott film--which is based on the on the Philip K. Dick classic novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"--"would've cost like $40m to make and sold about 600,000 units."
That decision, Pitchford says, would have forced Gearbox to close its doors.
Pitchford says that there is "no rational" business model that would have made sense to release the Blade Runner game Gearbox envisioned. "If we'd made it with a business model that did work, it would not have been the Blade Runner game we all would have wanted," he said.
According to Pitchford, Gearbox went as far as to meet with Alien and Blade Runner director Ridley Scott to discuss plans for games based on his work.
Though it was once thought to be canceled, Aliens: Colonial Marines is still in development and will arrive on the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 next spring.
I guess that means we're stuck with only one awesome Blade Runner game, folks.
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Shacknews
replyXav de Matos posted a new article, Gearbox had Blade Runner license, dropped it for financial reasons.
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told Official PlayStation Magazine that plans for a game set in the Blade Runner universe were scrapped for financial reasons, sending an echo of sadness to all nerds who are not in fact replicants.-
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This is all I want.
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Possibly the best thing to ever happen to the Blade Runner license.
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I 100% fucking agree with this post.
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It was and I'd love another Blade Runner game, but off the top of my head I can't think of a single modern studio I'd entrust with it.
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If they teamed up with Cd Projekt I could almost see it happening. Almost.
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I bought it years ago and never opened the box. I still have it sitting around somewhere.
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we'll see ifwhen they release the thing. Seeing a vertical slice is a lot different than seeing the actual end result.
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Never trust anything coming from any studio before the game is launched. Shit is doctored up, cut, pasted, and scripted to look awesome.
The best thing to look at is past games. Gearbox makes medicore games. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts (don't know what that means tbh) that A:CM will be average or slightly above average at best.
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lol Thank goodness. Gearbox's low common denominator sense of humor and writing wouldn't fit at all in the Blade Runner universe.
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for my money, Prey 2 might as well be called Blade Runner DX, because that looks much better than probably anything Gearbox could have churned out.
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lol reading the article.. Making a good Blade Runner game isn't rocket science. He acts as if it were the hardest game to make/sell. Hell if Heavy Rain could sell millions, then Randy is obviously in over his head as far as imagination goes.
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I watched the final cut on BR the other day. Such a good movie. Also there already was a Blade Runner game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)
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Sales of the game were in excess of one million, and the critical reception of the game was generally positive. Gee, looks like a good Blade Runner game wouldn't sell worth squat, right?
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He knew that in order for gearbox to sell a good Blade Runner game, they'd have to make a good game.
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I linked that very game in the story! Reading is fundamental.
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Fundamentally dying at an alarming pace. You should start doing articles in newspeak so it'll all fit in the comment preview.
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I remember my older sister watched me play that game to shield me from some violence or some nudity. I don't think i ever finished it, but i've got fond memories.
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I think Syndicate was actually a better association if nothing else because of the setting and environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(video_game)
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Good. I don't want a Blade Runnier shooter.
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Just get the developers of LA Noire to make Blade Runner game. It would probably rock.
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Beautiful.
You should write.
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LA Noire technology, but not made by Team Bondi please, not unless they hire a fun specialists first.
LA Noire is a bore and a half, I really wanted to like it but after playing through all the cases I just look back on it as one big snooze with a wtf is this shit ending.
oh, and no bi-polar Blade Runners please. -
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Crysis 2 averted! Sorry.
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Thank god
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Here's a good gearbox game: Opposing Force. Wait a sec....
The mechanics of a lot of games are kind of rounding up to have similar stuff. "Same shit. Different toilet" Scenario. A company I'd trust would be Valve, but they don't do stuff for other people. I think it's up to the fans for that kind of stuff, because max feedback. -
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Agreed.
WTF is wrong with this community?
Gearbox should be lauded for making the decision to not cut any corners, for either stick to their vision or don't do it at all.
Bottom line, Gearbox is a great developer (despite DNF; all they did was polishing someone elses turd - at the end it was of course still a turd). -
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We dislike them specifically because of the issues with Borderlands (on PC).
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yeah the shack hate for gearbox didn't just come out of nowhere. its well deserved. this is a good summary:
http://www.shacknews.com/article/61275/evening-reading-from-the-great?id=21425305
not to forget that randy pitchford is an annoying dude. he has made a habit of dropping by making some laughable argument and run for the hills (look for his bullshit posts about art and fov). his attention whoring through criticism of people like valve and crysis and other publicity stunts makes him highly unlike-able. he made some really stupid remarks about valve exploiting small devs until some of them came out publicly and bitchslapped him with his claims.
his mo is, drop by, make ignorant/false claims whine a bit about people being unfair and that he is trying, goes on make some strawman argument and bail.
my favourite time was when pitchford went out and called valve sleazy and doug lombardi foolish narrow-minded and pretty much a fanboy.
http://www.destructoid.com/pitchford-valve-are-childish-fanboys-that-bash-the-ps3-154301.phtml
few years later look at who is best buddies with sony...
then he had the audacity to give crytek and id software shit.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/15084/news/pitchford-this-is-the-longest-console-generation/
and went back to spout some more on how valve exploits the little developers.
http://www.gx.com.sg/Blog/Blog.aspx?id=29ef9efa-ad3f-42cf-a840-166f4277dcdb
the response of the "exploited" developers was fucking gold:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25595
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/10/12/the-steamy-issue-of-digital-distribution/#more-19483
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actually it started much longer ago than that. It was either Blue Shift being awful or that they botched the Halo port, or the fact that they couldn't even figure out how to do Counterstrike Zero, for me.
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Considering the last decent games Gearbox made was OpForce and Blue Shift, yeah, I'd assume most of the comments would be sour as shit.
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The Brothers in Arms games and Borderlands are acknowledged to be good to great games.
People acknowledge that when they die they are going to heaven, it doesn't mean it's true. I stand by my opinion that Gearbox is a shit developer who should have been out of business years ago. Losing the Blade Runner license is the best possible outcome for them.-
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And Gearbox is one of the bigger more important ones.
I don't think I've ever seen somebody be so wrong outside of politics.-
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I'm not wound up :) What exactly does taking on multiple projects have to do with quality? The Just Cause 2 guys are working on 5 games concurrently, does that make them better than iD who's only working on Rage? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gearbox_Software#Games_developed that's the list of games gearbox has made. I honestly can't see anything on there past Blue Shift that isn't utter bullocks. They worked on the worst James Bond game, the worst of the THPS, the worst of the Counter Strikes, the horrible PC port of Halo and then it's just BiA games over and over and over up until Borderlands and DNF, both of which were questionable quality at best. I won't even bother bringing up the whole Steve lying to us about the pc port of Borderlands, that's a hurt I'd rather just forget.
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I don't think you grasp just how much nerds love Blade Runner. This could have been any other license and it probably wouldn't have gotten 5 responses. Blade Runner is special.
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It was on streaming last week but it appears to be back to disc only. It was pretty much a watershed moment in scifi and should be required viewing.
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Their offices take up three floors of a bank building in Plano, they employ hundreds of people, and they just handed out a five figure quarterly bonus
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/23/eveningnews/main20073815.shtml
Whether or not you liked Borderlands, the fact remains that yes Gearbox is one of the bigger more important game developers. They're the largest independent game developer in the country.
You are wrong.-
The only place I can find mention of Gearbox being the largest developer is that interview. And since the only mention is a Steve Gibson quote, I'll probably have to take that with a grain of salt.
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lol @ the five figure bonus...yeah how many of the artists got that. I bet that was only to the management, while everyone else got free cake.
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actually every single developer is part of the royalty pool here, not just management, and it's based on time spent at the company and time spent on the project, so yeah those checks went out to artists and designers and programmers and management.
you dont get a bigger cut for your job description
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Back when they announced Furious 4 people were up in arms (no pun intended) about how it will sully the name of BiA
http://www.shacknews.com/article/68736/brothers-in-arms-furious-4
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quick glance at the thread reveals more of a lol/thislookslikeshit/l4nazis? reaction with the random 3 dudes saying borderlands was and the first bia was good.
both games were "ok" ignoring the issues they had. looking at how they pimped the series back then with "authenticity" and change of characters over time etc even those who liked it say its odd.
also you are leaning wide out of the window with claims of "greatness". gearbox is known for polishing turds of other companies (cs,halo,bond,duke, hawk etc) the only really good games they ever made were opposing force and blue shift (which were extremely overpriced at release considering that they were glorified addons).
the body of work of the company is rather thin and their reputation is terrible amongst many gamers (for good reason).-
I think they should rename Furious 4 to Bastards In Arms. Everyone wins that way.
It's true that prior to BiA they were a "porting house" - everything they did was a version, port, sequel or expansion to someone else's game. And when they did do an original IP, it was Yet Another WW2 game. But this allowed them to grow considerably and they have a comfortable financial position to sit on now. A game like Borderlands was a risk (as witnessed by the polarizing reactions here on the Shack) and they could only attempt something like that when they're financially secure. But this is why they're to "go-to" developer for things like the Blade Runner license, or the Aliens license, or even finishing up DNF. They have a track record and a large talented team. We may disagree on whether their games are good but really, it all boils down to numbers and their business decisions thus far have been pretty smart.
Compare that to Ritual which made one successful expansion and then made their first original IP game, which tanked and nearly took out the company. And then they got by with expansions/sequels/ports for many years before trying again, which tanked once again and took the company down with it (that's oversimplification since SinEp1 apparently sold briskly but not well enough)-
i'm well aware of the monetary side of the equation. that not the issue we disagree on. the problem is exactly our disagreement on the quality of their games and their conduct in representing those.
if pitchford was a bite less of a douche and they wouldn't have bullshitted the community on the lead platform of borderland or shown the slightest pr skills people would give them some leeway.
the way it is now its a company that is known for shovelware with a exactly 1 "risky" (who are we kidding its a fps) franchise that is apparently liked by some (my guess is more by console fans than pc dudes).
if i was interested in only making money with shovelware as the owner of the licence i'd consider gearbox,
if i wanted a good game or something to further the reputation of it i'd stay the fuck away from them.
the alien franchise has already hit rockbottom with the sequels and spin offs ala alien vs predator.
bladerunner hasn't.
once bladerunner 4: fast future for the furious is released i'm sure gearbox would be the perfect studio for this.
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one less thing to be disappointed about
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There's no less than four cyberpunky shooters of various flavours coming out: Prey 2, this thing: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/11/june/um1.jpg , Deus Ex 3 and the new Blacklight game - all of them shamelessly plagiarize Blade Runner for the visuals and the themes to whatever extent you care to engage with, I don't really feel we're missing out.
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Don't forget the Source indie game EYE.
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Lets continue to milk dead franchises and scrap something that could possibly be the greatest franchise of all time.... boooooo !!!
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Who the fuck are you person with 16 posts? Ahh, nevermind, it's gotta be Pitchfork. Character accounts are not allowed Randy. Please fuck off and die.
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shit like this IS being made. We just don't want Gearbox to make it.
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I'd buy an Obsidian developed game before another Gearbox game.
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Speaking as a die-hard fan of Fallout & Fallout 2: no. thanks.
Obsidian's recent work exemplifies shoddy game design, atrocious art direction and half-assed execution. Once upon a time, these guys had a special place in my heart. With recent steaming turds like New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, and Dungeon Siege, I can only hope they get their business in order before they sink in an ocean of new rising talent. -
...unless I missed the sarcasm in your statement, in which case, well played sir. Well played.
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