Former Pandemic Leader Says Studio Was Victim of Industry Shift

Pandemic Studios, the developer of such video games like Mercenaries and The Saboteur, has officially closed down two years ago but the man who served as president and was also a co-founder still believes that the studio did good work and was a victim of a wider shift in the industry.

When asked directly about what happened to Pandemic Josh Resnick told Gamasutra that, “It's not something I've thought about or even been talking about a lot. I think it was just a combination of things. The timing and the reasons why we sold to EA totally made sense. And strangely, even make sense today. I know that's an odd thing to say, when Pandemic is no more. But I think a lot of things happened at once.”

The former studio head believes that the tendency to create bigger and bigger games using more and more resources was unsustainable and that Pandemic, which was at the time working on a Dark Knight game in addition to those it managed to ship to players, was a victim of culture change coupled with the start of the economic crisis.

He added, “Yeah. There were some things that we didn't get to see through to completion, unfortunately. We were working on some really, really amazing stuff with great teams, but I don't think all of those necessarily fit or align with where EA needed to go, and where the industry was going. And again, on Pandemic's side, I think we stretched ourselves too thin.”

At the moment Josh Resnick is working on developing social applications for mobile devices with a smaller team that involves some of the veterans from Pandemic.

Electronic Arts acquired Pandemic in 2007 and a lot of gamers blamed the publisher for the fact that it was closed down, saying that it never got the support it needed to deliver great games.