When Epic Games endeavor Bulletstorm hit store shelves last February, it generated a considerable amount of buzz and critical acclaim due to it’s uninhibited use of crude humor, stylized violence, and points system rewarding players on the creativity they demonstrated when killing enemies. Epic however, stated that the game had failed to turn a profit. Epic Games president Mike Capps recently told Gamespot at PAX East that a sequel had initially been planned, but developer People Can Fly eventually moved on to another project.
“We thought a lot about a sequel, and had done some initial development on it, but we found a project that we thought was a better fit for People Can Fly,” Capps said. “We haven’t announced that yet, but we will be announcing it pretty soon.”
Capps stated that while Epic was proud of its achievements with Bulletstorm, the game simply didn’t live up to the expectations mega-publisher Electronic Arts had set for it.
“I think Bulletstorm was very critically successful, and I think a lot of folks really enjoyed seeing something new,” he said. “From a sales perspective it was good, but not amazing. I think EA was hoping we’d do better.”
As for the PC version that had received the lowest critical scores across all three major platforms, Capps said that piracy became a major concern. Thankfully, he subtly admitted that the port was crap-tastic.
“We made a PC version of Bulletstorm, and it didn’t do very well on PC and I think a lot of that was due to piracy,” he said. “It wasn’t the best PC port ever, sure, but also piracy was a pretty big problem.”
Though Bulletsorm‘s venture to the PC was extremely forgettable, Epic fails to mention a key component as to why the game essentially failed. Bulletstorm had a relatively short campaign and did not feature any competitive multiplayer modes – a vital aspect in today’s industry in terms of ensuring that a product has a lengthy life-cycle. What could have been more fun that shooting your buddies in the genitalia and earning points for it? Bulletstorm suffered as a result of having little to no replay value and players struggled to find the incentive to go back to it after they had completed the game’s campaign. Also, Epic/EA charged $60 for a game that in all likelihood should been priced at around $40 at launch.
But yeah, piracy, let’s go with that.
Source: Gamespot
