Ex-Midway guys: Unreal Engine 3 tinkering put Midway in “spiral of doom”
To be frank, things aren’t looking so hot for Midway. But according to Variety, at least now we have something to blame: Unreal Engine 3.
"The mistake we made was, instead of just taking the base Unreal 3 engine that Gears of War was made on and building games off of that, we let our tech and product development guys try to really modify the engine to add all these diff things," an ex-Midway employee said.
"It was a ton of new technology which they just weren’t capable of doing. It put all the games way behind schedule."
And thus, Midway was forced to grab a few hundred shovels and dig itself into the hole in which it now resides.
"The delays of next-gen titles pushed them into a window where money became very tight for the company," said former CMO Steve Allison.
"When that happens decision-making can become focused around not always what is best for each title, but how to fix cash flow issues. This is a spiral of doom in videogame publishing because you can't ship compromised titles against the exceptional quality level of competition that is on the shelves."
Hopefully, we won’t be getting the full-disclosure treatment from any more “former” employees, since we imagine Midway would prefer to keep those they currently have. Good luck, everyone.
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