Former Free Radical big cheese Steve Ellis has shed a little more light on the fate of TimeSplitters 4, revealing that all attempts to attract a publisher to sign the shooter fell flat.
Speaking with EDGE, Ellis said that his efforts back in 2008 to get TimeSplitters 4 signed up failed due to publishers’ reluctance to take risks in a FPS landscape dominated by Call of Duty.
"I spent the whole of 2008 going round talking to publishers trying to sign up Timesplitters 4," he said. "There just isn’t the interest there in doing anything that tries to step away from the rules of the genre – no one wants to do something that’s quirky and different, because it’s too much of a risk. And a large part of that is the cost of doing it.”
"Nobody really buys any FPSes unless they’re called Call Of Duty," he continued. "I guess Battlefield did okay, but aside from that pretty much every FPS loses money. I mean, [look at] Crysis 2: great game, but there’s no way it came anywhere close to recouping its dev costs."
Ellis’ comments don’t really bode well for the likes of BioShock: Infinite and Dishonored, but we have a feeling that they won’t go quietly into the night.