14 DAY TRIAL // Some of you might have heard about the Free Radical development studio, which is based in Nottingham, United Kingdom. Its major works include the pretty popular TimeSplitters series and the recent, but not so well received, Haze first-person shooter.
Although the team was set to have a pretty successful future, with games such as the new iteration of the TimeSplitters franchise and a Star Wars Battlefront, developed in partnership with LucasArts, it seems that things have taken a turn for the worse. A few days ago, when they arrived at the studio, employees found themselves standing in front of a locked door, and were asked via a notice to go to a nearby hotel for a meeting.
During that official encounter, the owners of the studio said that, because of the fact that they didn't find a publisher for the future games, the studio would be forced to shut down. Such news couldn't have been received well by the staff, which was made up of over 200 people. Nevertheless, Cameron Gunn, a representative of Resolve Partners, the company assigned to manage the affairs related to the shutting down, stated that business would continue as usual, and that the staff was just considered to be on vacation.
“We will be spending the next three of four days assessing the financial position of the company, but it's business as usual, although we have asked that almost all of the employees apart from a skeleton crew remain at home. All employees have been paid up until the end of December and we hope to make another announcement before Christmas or very soon thereafter, but we must stress at this stage that it's business as usual.”
This statement sounds like something to ease off the concerns of the former staff, but, according to some sources that have reported the news to Edge magazine, it seems that plans are already being laid out for the employees of the now defunct studio. Representatives of Codemasters and Monumental Games studios have already arrived in Nottingham, in an effort to recruit some of the staff that have found themselves jobless. Furthermore, Steve Ellis, co-founder of Free Radical, is already setting up a new studio, entitled Pumpkin Beach, in partnership with fellow co-founder David Doak, who left Free Radical a couple of weeks ago, before the decision to shut down the company was taken.
Although the Free Radical studio didn't have quite a lot of commercial success, it is indeed a shame that such a measure was eventually resorted to. Let's just hope that its franchises and IPs (Intellectual Properties) will end up in the hands of other studios that will know how to develop them properly.