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Rebellion, developer of Aliens vs. Predator (and the awesome Sniper Elite) has announced that it will be closing its Derby studio as well as cutting some staff in its Oxford office. CEO Jason Kingsley said that they “couldn’t find any solution other than the closure for the Derby studio.”
Kingsley said that the developer, which created the original Aliens vs. Predator game back in 1994, has “two unannounced titles at different stages of development” which they hope to be unveiling soon. He also said that they’ve done well with some of their back catalogue titles such as Sniper Elite and the original AvP. Kingsley continued to say that they will now focus on DLC for the newest AvP and are “thinking about the potential for a sequel and how we can make it an even better game.”
Kingsley also said that they were planning to produce smaller, digitally released games through services such as Steam, where “we can explore with some smaller, more indie type game ideas.”
Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley isn’t afraid to blow his team’s own trumpet. After topping sales charts in the UK, the Aliens Versus Predator developer told Develop “We wanted Aliens Versus Predator to be a critical success as well as a commercial success, which we think we have achieved.” Whilst clearly happy with the title’s financial return, a quick scan of review aggregator Metacritic calls into question exactly what Kingsley considers “critical success” with a spew of middling scores and quotes dripping consumer bathos.
Noting an optimistically reduced “three totally shit reviews by some Americans” which were “inexcusably bad”, Kingsley comes across as a child launching his toys from his pram. A single, perhaps biased, negative review could at a stretch be tagged as inexcusable. A torrent of averagely poor, pan-global reviews mean a developer should at the very least, stand up and take note of a product which must concede to containing some deep, underlying flaws. Read more →
Well Germany, are you happy? It looks like Sega have finally given up and Aliens Vs Predator isn’t going to get a release over in the land of ultimate censorship. The move to ignore the German market came about as Sega are concerned that ratings board USK (Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle) would refuse to rate the game due to it’s inherently violent nature.
The costs of both translating the game and toning down the violence through editing the content would apparently incur more of a cost than would be made in the territory after editing. On top of the physical costs, altering any aspect of AvP would seemingly be counter-intuitive to the “coherence” between the Alien and Predator brands and their obviously mature themes.
Via: The Escapist
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