Midway - New Unreal Publisher, Inching Toward Profit?

Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting the press release revealing Midway has announced a multi-product agreement with Epic to publish three new Unreal franchise games. The deal is "including Unreal Championship 2 [originally to be published by Microsoft], an Xbox exclusive title scheduled to ship in 2005, and two future installments of Unreal Tournament [previous versions published by Atari] on PC and upcoming next generation consoles." In related news, Midway announced financial results for Q2 2004, with some slightly positive news (the company "expects to have shipped over one million units of NBA Ballers through 2004 Q3"), but disappointment in a "loss [of] $9.0 million", and news that Midway "has moved one of its major releases, Area 51, from 2004 into 2005."

Bad management at companies

[tod_miller]

The games industry is huge - ok it must be very competative right now, but if you are making quality games, you should aim for a decent profit... how badly can a game flop, that has undergone at least 2 years of development and review? Unless they don't actually check if the game is any good...

I think prices need to come down, to increase unit sales of games, currently there is room for a handful of popular games.

I know PS2 owners with about 8 games... 8... thats it... I don't play games on the PC, I will play the Doom3 demo though.

They need management akin to the film industry, as the skills are merging between them.

Hmm.

[13Echo]

I wonder what this means for future Linux versions of the Unreal games?

i miss ed boon and john tobias :(

[h0mer]

My hopes that Unreal Championship 2 will be a good game are now gone. Microsoft was promoting UC2 in all of its press material and it was going to be a major title for Xbox Live. I figure the game isn't good enough for MS so they surrendered their publishing rights. I'm interested to see what the Xbox-exclusive title is, though.

It still boggles me how Midway could fall so far. Anyone have a link to a Midway timeline, possibly detailing bad management decisions?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion