14 DAY TRIAL // Codemasters ended last year on a pretty high note, with games like Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and DiRT 2, so it looks like the company is getting used to a higher standard of quality. Its schedule regarding upcoming titles included the action game Heist, but, upon some deliberation, it ended up being canceled, after the publisher decided that, as far as quality was concerned, it didn't rise to the desired standards.
The team that handled Heist was Inxile Entertainment, a California-based studio that also worked on the game that embarrassed all RPGs, Bard's Tale. Inxile also owns the rights to the Line Rider series, from which the developer made Line Rider 2: Unbound for the Wii and Nintendo DS. The company was born in 2002, with Brian Fargo as its creator, one of the founders of Interplay, the one that brought us games like Carmageddon and Fallout.
"After a much extended development period, Heist has been terminated as a project and removed from our release schedule," a Codemasters spokesperson said. "Codemasters is focusing its future portfolio on high quality titles that will, in the majority, be developed and produced by our internal studios."
Other games that were part of the company's last-year portfolio include Ashes Cricket and Formula 1 on the Wii and PSP, and, as an overall year performance, Codemasters had a pretty impressive 2009 report card. But if its business strategy worked last year, there's no guarantee the same trick will work twice, and, as such, the company is making some changes to its battle plan. For 2010, it plans to focus more on in-house projects, fewer in number but better as far as quality goes.
And the company's funds required to deliver results for such plans seem to have increased. In addition to its current investors, Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs, some online reports seem to indicate that a whole-new pot of gold could be heading towards Codemasters, supplied by an undisclosed investor. Hopefully, this will secure an adequate budget for whatever games Codemasters plans to announce in the future.