L.A. Noire dev Team Bondi $1.4M in debt - Report

Documents filed with Australian government reveal Team Bondi heavily indebt

[dangert12]

Unlucky they tried something new and it failed badly

[cochise313]

LA noir sold over 3 million; the game didn't fail, it was just in production way too long.

[drsnobby]

We as gamers need to buy games,PERIOD! sales are the life blood of the industry.if we don't buy games then the indusrty will die.cochise,3 million was not enough to offset production cost,remember this was a multi-platform game,it should have sold double the amount.lets be clear about this,the survival of the gaming industry rest on us.love for developer=sales in return.show your lover gamers.:)

[dangert12]

Still It failed badly...

I don't see why so many people would disagree, It sold 3mil+

but now there In debt and worse of then before the game was In development

that hardly sounds like success to me

[denero1]

you can't blame just gamers and its kind of far fetched to believe it all depends on us gamers if we expect the gaming industry to survive im sure many things go into it as a developer you have to be able to manage yourself and the people under you with the money you have apparently team bondi didn't quite do this right and set themselves up 4 or 3 million is not bad at all

p.s.

also they have a pc port coming out is it at all possible they could use the money from that to pay off some of the debt?

[Seventh_Blood_Reborn]

"the survival of the gaming industry rest on us.love for developer=sales in return.show your lover gamers.:)"

Yeah, too bad, people buy almost only mainstream stuff/shooters or used games.
Look at the mindset of gamers, if you say that "if you buy used games you cause damage at the industry and push developers to close" -that is a fact- someone would disagree anyway.

L.A. Noire was a great experience under a good amount of aspects, I' m happy it sold well ( also if not enough for the developers ).

[lumley666]

Drsnobby: i buy many games but I didn't buy la noire. From what I saw at a friends house it was boring. Graphics and animation were some of best iv seen, developers need to learn. Spend less time on that and more on gameplay. If your going to spend forever on developing a single game and incur massive costs you have to make sure the basics are brilliant. La noire for me, meh

[Disccordia]

The game was a commercial success but the studio was so badly mid-managed for years. Brendan McNamara has done some good stuff for the industry but has a history and reputation for being a chump

[TopDudeMan]

Yeah, LA Noire did well. It's just it didn't do as well as they needed it to do. By the tune of $1.4million

[r1sh12]

Even though sales matter.
Rockstar could buy the company outright and have it relocated and make in an in house department.
That way they can get all the intellectual property rights and continue to build on it.

[denero1]

Yeah production was a likely problem but overall 4 mil >.> they should have made back enough to pay debts -_- but the business world is shady so who knows what happened to all that money

[Omar91]

The new facial animations they used must of cost them more then they had anticipated. That's why they are in debt by so much.

[denero1]

doesn't rockstar own the rights to la noire? is it possible there could be a sequel?

[JimboG]

Roar Roh.

[AKS]

Seems odd that they made such an awesome game yet the developer ended up in this state. It seems like everything behind the scenes was a mess, especially shady management, yet they ended up creating an excellent game.

[RagTagBnd445]

The game was good but the company was a bloody mess. They wasted a lot of money, because of terrible leadership, and had massive internal problems, this was bound to happen.

[xVeZx]

game was mehtastic most overhyped game of 2011...

[RavageX]

I'm gonna share a basic idea I've been thinking about...

I think we currently have some sort of game recession going on.

Games cost more than ever to make(assuming), and because of that MOST devs and such are afraid to try something different, add in this young generation of gamers who have no attention span and ta-da....you have a market full of fps shooters with no single player mode worth mentioning.

Why try something different when chances are it will be ignored for the "new" rehashed yearly fps shooter? Why go broke producing a game that introduces something new when other companies get rich by slapping a new coat of paint on last year's fps game?

Just doesn't make much sense does it?

I also think that's why mini games, crap phone games, and "apps" are getting so popular. Cheap and quickly produced...at least quicker than your full blown retail games.

Games that are different are robbed of their full potential by cutting out pieces of said game and selling it later or even AT RELEASE as DLC.

Take the game in the article for example, LA Noire. Yes it did do something different, but it wasn't great. The story started to falter near the end, and like most games today, bits and pieces were ripped out for you to pay for later.

A lot of the young generation of gamers simply saw that rockstar had something to do with it and immediately thought it would be like GTA, which I'm sure resulted in a number of sales.

Things don't seem to be getting any better either. My main issue with games these days...length.

I am expected to pay $60 for a game that will last me 6-8 hours? I think not. I don't care how pretty the game is, a game that offers little or no replay value is not worth $60, at least not to me.

How to fix this? I've no idea. In a way I kinda wish gaming never got so mainstream...in my younger days I often wished for it to get more popular, and now that it has it's changed the way things are, and not all for the better.