“Nobody really buys any FPSes unless they’re called Call Of Duty,” at least that’s what former Free Radical MD Steve Ellis seems to think.
Ellis has spoken out about the fate and direction of the FPS market, going so far as to shed some light on just why TimeSplitters 4 isn’t happening.
“I spent the whole of 2008 going round talking to publishers trying to sign up Timesplitters 4,” Ellis told EDGE. “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,” Ellis added. “I guess Battlefield did okay, but aside from that pretty much every FPS loses money. I mean, [look at] Crysis 2: great game, but there’s no way it came anywhere close to recouping its dev costs.”
Ellis is now heading up iOS developers Crash Lab. Free Radical was absorbed by Crytek in 2009.
