During a recent interview, Steve Ellis—creator of the multiplayer component of GoldenEye for the N64, and programmer for the Timesplitters series—said that “pretty much every FPS loses money.”

The quote came from an interview with UK publication Edge, where Ellis painted a dire picture of the first-person shooter market.

“Nobody really buys any FPSes unless they’re called Call Of Duty,” Ellis told Edge. “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.”

Seems like a very bold statement from Ellis, and it’s a little hard to believe. Look at all of the FPS releases out there—would developers and publishers continue to make them if 99% of them lost money?

There could be just cause for Ellis’ downer attitude toward the genre, however—the problem Free Radical Software had in trying to find a publisher interested in picking up Timesplitters 4.

“I spent the whole of 2008 going round talking to publishers trying to sign up Timesplitters 4,” Ellis said when talked to Edge. “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.”

For Edge’s full conversation with Free Radical Software’s Steve Ellis, hit the link below.

Source: Edge Online