TimeGate Studios, the co-developers of the highly disappointing Aliens: Colonial Marines, has laid off a number of its staff, TimeGate President Adel Chaveleh has told Polygon.
“Today, we had to make the difficult decision to let go of some great game developers. This is never easy, and we’re doing all we can to assist those developers affected. TimeGate is preparing, as is the entire industry, for the transition to next-generation consoles and new business models. As part of this reinvention, all projects and strategic initiatives continue to move forward at the studio.”
Sources at Polygon claim that the studio has had to lay off 25 off its staff due to a publishing deal falling through last month. Previous games TimeGate have developed include Fear Files and Section 8, neither of which experienced much success.
Although Aliens was advertised as a Gearbox game, recently Randy Pitchford announced that TimeGate developed as much of the game as Gearbox did, much critique has been placed upon that fact and that the shared development has had a huge negative affect on the final product.
It is always bad news when anyone loses their jobs, hopefully a lesson can be learned from this that sometimes joint development of a game can lead to a less than stellar product. However I’m not sure we’ll ever know the full story of the relationship between Gearbox and TimeGate during the development of Colonial Marines.
