Comments on: Confirmed – Free Radical is in administration

By: onyxbox

onyxbox — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:00:05 +0000

dark times ahead I fear. FRD won’t be the last to fall victim of the double whammy of ballooning development costs and banks tightening their wallets.

:-/

They might have been in survival mode during the Haze development and then the economic downturn just made it to difficult to tread water any longer.

I hope they find job’s in the games industry because they always knew how to code some smooth and tight controlling games (even Haze had evidence of this).

By: G1GAHURTZ

G1GAHURTZ — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:37:04 +0000

I doubt codies would… They are owned by an equity group who are appartently not the type of guys to ‘take a punt’ on something like that. Especially in the current economic climate.

Anyway, they just failed disasterously with Fall of Liberty recently, so I can’t see them looking to do another FPS in a hurry. Especially as they’ll probably be more than busy with their newly acquired F1 licence as it is.

As for Eidos, they just had to cut like 25% of their work force and have gone through a whole load of re-structuring, including dumping a whole load of projects in order to totally focus on their strongest brands, so I can’t see them being interested either.

Anyway, from the looks of things, these guys were trying to pimp this title all over the place to no avail.

As others have suggested, it looks like the early work they’ve done on it is either
a. Less than impressive (crap). Or
b. Has no USP or original angle whatsoever.

Either way, no-one seems to believe in their ability to make a game that’s going to sell.

By: Hunam

Hunam — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:56:55 +0000

Codies or Eidos might be a potential buyer for TS. Seems more their thing really.

By: mortiferus

mortiferus — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:54:39 +0000

Stick a fork in Free Radical, it’s done. Unless they have a financial nest egg and a hot property to secure some backing, it’s finished. The Time Splitters IP might be worth something to an Atari or a THQ, but Haze, well, let it die a quick silent death. At least the staff got paid through the end of the month, but it sucks to lose your job this time of the year.

By: GordonR

GordonR — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:42:24 +0000

Blerk,

Companies can go into administration and emerge from the other side still in business (I can name you several Scottish football teams who have survived this in recent years) but I doubt this will happen in FRD’s case.

FRD will have few to no assets to pay off their debts – they almost certainly rent their office space, whatever share of the Haze IP they have is essentially worthless and there doesn’t seem to be any takers for the new Timesplitters game they’ve been developing – so, unless a quickie-sale buyer can be found for the whole company, it’ll be wound up PDQ and put into liquidation.

Edit – there’s a post on Eurogamer confirming exactly what you said – FRD skeleton staff kept on to assist the administrator in winding up the company, then it’s curtains. But administration isn’t necessarily a terminal experience in general.

By: Blerk

Blerk — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:26:15 +0000

Maybe I’m misunderstanding here, but I thought that when a company was put into administration it was far from “business as usual”. When the company I used to work for went into administration what actually happened was that everyone apart from a skeleton staff were laid off immediately, and the skeleton staff assisted the administrators in closing down the company and selling off the assets to pay the debts.

Are there different kinds of administration? Because what the guy here is describing sounds eerily familiar.