007 Legends dev lays off more than 150
007 Legends developer Eurocom has announced that they have laid off more than 150 people, citing a decrease in demand for console games. The studio dropped its staff to under 50 employees to focus on mobile development.
007 Legends developer Eurocom has announced that they have laid off more than 150 people, citing a decrease in demand for console games. The studio dropped its staff to under 50 employees to focus on mobile development.
Studio head Hugh Binns said in a statement (obtained by GI.biz) that "we've fought to try and save as many jobs as possible, but the steep decline in demand for console games, culminating in a number of console projects falling through in the last week, left us with no option."
It probably did not help that 007 Legends was so poorly received.
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replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, 007 Legends dev lays off more than 150.
007 Legends developer Eurocom has announced that they have laid off more than 150 people, citing a decrease in demand for console games. The studio dropped its staff to under 50 employees to focus on mobile development.-
Their last three console projects were Bond games (GoldenEye remake on the Wii in 2010, porting the GoldenEye remake to 360 and PS3 in 2011, and 007 Legends in 2012). All of those from Activision. Years ago there was the rumor of a Bond game in development at Raven; I don't remember if that's still on course or if it got canned.
Side note: HogRocket, the indie studio that formed from three Bizarre Creations staffers, disbanded last week. Bizarre's last two games were Blur and 007: Blood Stone.-
Interesting to me that Activision seems to be capable of pulling off a franchise with annual installments that has an enormous multiplayer following, yet one publisher/developer after another flails on a 007 game, squandering even any goodwill that Goldeneye 007 had back in the day, or any good publicity that the recent Bond franchise entries have provided.
I mean, Goldeneye 007 was a ridiculously popular game even on a console that had a fraction of the sales of the dominant competing hardware. It's interesting how no one's been able to recreate that with the Bond license, even when trying to re-do the original.-
The N64 game wasn't good because it was a James Bond game, it was good because it was an incredibly good console shooter *for that time.*
They can't replicate it's success because it's impossible to do. They keep trying to recreate a game of the 90's which, by today's standards, is at best, average. That means that they will get, at best, an average game...-
That's not entirely accurate, part of the fun of that game was in being and fighting classic Bond villains, like Oddjob or Jaws. Golden Gun mode only made sense if you were familiar with the movie. To some extent the "play up 007's past adventures" thing was what this 007 Legends game was trying to do.
That's what I'm getting at, it seems like the 007 IP can be used, to some extent, to make a game better. A random spy game can get dull, a game where you're James Bond can be interesting. I'm saying I figured we'd be in the state Call of Duty is in now where some random developer throws together an annual shooter of top quality production values, even if people are tiring of it.
Maybe the real answer is that the first 007 game after Goldeneye was the lackluster Tomorrow Never Dies game which sort of underscored the value of a strong developer.
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That's a lot of people:
http://chattypics.com/files/iPhoneUpload_7dj6otfnzr.jpg-
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each employee would contribute 1 line of code per month
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Hope those affected land on their feet.
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