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Activision recommends shutting down Bizarre studios

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Activision is recommending that the studio behind the incredibly entertaining Blur be shut down in the coming weeks due to the commercial failure of Blur and the lack of interested buyers in the developer.

Blur was released last year to generally good reviews after many delays but unfortunately it never captured the heart and minds of the average game and has ended up with mediocre sales.

Activision put Blur into a 90 day consultation period last year where they discussed selling the developer to numerous possible publishers, pretty much everyone in the industry, but in the end there wasn’t a single dedicated buyer and the group has now recommended closure. Something Bizarre studios appears to be agreeing to.

It’s really sad to see yet another studio go down and hopefully we’ll see a new, better, studio rise up from this.

In other closure news Disney is closing down the developer being Turok and Tron, Propaganda Games. Unlike Activision, Disney isn’t revealing the reasons behind the closure but I’d venture to say that they are being closed thanks to Turok and Tron both being pretty standard titles and neither setting any sales charts on fire.

So all in all we lost 2 studios with a combined headcount of 270 developers today… I wonder if Respawn are still hiring?

Source: IGN and develop

Last Updated: January 20, 2011

4 Comments

  1. Cleric

    January 20, 2011 at 11:17

    What’s saddest of all is that Bizarre Creations made their name making the incredible Geometry Wars games. Had they stuck to great XBLA games, they may still be around.

    Reply

    • Exalted Overlord Geoffrey Tim

      January 20, 2011 at 11:42

      Actually, they gained their fame by doing the F1 games on the PC and PS1 in the early to mid nineties, furthering their credibility with the EXCELLENT Metropolis street racer on the Dreamcast. MSr was the forebear of the PGR games on the original xbox, which are still some of the highest rated racing games today.

      Reply

  2. DieJason

    January 20, 2011 at 11:57

    MSR was amazing.

    Reply

  3. Kohana

    January 21, 2011 at 00:00

    I rather liked Blur. That’s a shame that they might shut down, though. They’ve been a great dev, and were something special back in the Dreamcast days.

    Reply

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