Perfect Dark was first released for the Nintendo 64 with a prequel later released for the Xbox 360 as Perfect Dark Zero. Rare started to work on a sequel to the first Perfect Dark which went through some different iterations before dropping with Chris Seavor, the game designer for Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
After laying off numerous employees, Tim Sweeney, the company’s founder and CEO, sent an email about the situation. The 52-year-old businessman clarified why the layoffs happened and even shed some light on the future of Fortnite.
Good on them doing this at least.
“we’re offering a severance package that includes six months base pay and in the US/Canada/Brazil six months of Epic-paid healthcare. We’re offering to accelerate people’s stock option vesting schedule through the end of 2024 and are giving two additional years from today to exercise the options. In the US we’re also offering to vest any unearned profit sharing from their 401k. And we’ll provide benefits including career transition services and visa support where we can.”
Epic makes way too much money to have to lay people off of the spent that money smartly. Tim wasted money on exclusives for their store when it could have gone to paychecks for people.
Epic put all their eggs in one basket with fortnite, they should have continued with the development of unreal tournament and got that game going as an arena shooter that's free to play with a huge cosmetic cash shop.
But your CEO knows what their doing.... laying off people so the board doesn't see exactly how much you stuck. The usual playbook.
Remedy’s Sam Lake describes the work involved
Unfortunately, I believe it was Rare’s tardiness and unorganized development practices that lead to Perfect Dark: Core failing to take-off. As evidenced by Rare Replay video docs, Rare worked on numerous projects from 2005 to 2010 that failed to make it to full development. If Perfect Dark: Core had been released in 2009 the game may have had a chance to increase both Microsoft’s and player interest in its franchise.
Perfect Dark Zero, despite their being many negative perceptions of the title was a fairly successful and popular FPS on Xbox live until Halo 3 and COD 4 came out in 2007. The Perfect Dark franchise got shelved by MS due to Rare’s procrastination and the franchisee not being as successful as Gears of a War and Halo. Also the FPS market on consoles got very competitive during the 2010s.
I don't think it will happen, but I think Microsoft working with Human Head Studios on Perfect Dark would be the way to go. We've seen what they did with Prey and were doing with Prey 2 before Bethesda cancelled the game, so I think they could be a smart choice to bring back the world of Perfect Dark.
Playing perfect dark on 360 was fun to me, at that time I didn’t have internet so playing against all those bots made me feel like I did lol 😝
The prequel sucked to me I didn't really like it if Microsoft announced Perfect Dark 2 and Conker 2 at e3 I'd be happy I'm actually getting tired of Halo, Gears, and Forza good games but c'mon get new ips.
Perfect Dark was my 2nd favorite N64 game. Too bad they never made the sequel. That laptop gun was amazing.