Activision finalises Bizarre closure

Sad news taken from EG:

Activision has recommended that its Bizarre Creations subsidiary be closed, after no buyer came forward for the Liverpool-based studio behind Blur and James Bond 007: Blood Stone.
Back in November, Activision announced it was looking to offload the struggling developer, saying it was "exploring our options regarding the future of the studio, including a potential sale of the business."

Coddy Johnson, Activision Worldwide Studios' chief operating officer today told Develop, "I want to be clear, our first choice was to try and keep this group together and find a buyer for the studio."

Johnson insisted that it had, "explored a lot of leads – pretty much anyone you can imagine in the industry. But unfortunately, so far we've not been able to find any interested parties. So we've made as a last resort, a recommendation to the team for closure."

Apparently staff at Bizarre have indicated that they will accept the recommendation.

Bizarre started life in 1994, making its name with the Project Gotham Racing series for Microsoft Game Studios. Activision purchased the studio in September 2007 and set it to work on the poorly received James Bond 007: Blood Stone and excellent but under-performing racer Blur.

"Over the past three years since our purchase of Bizarre Creations, the fundamentals of the racing genre have changed significantly," explained an Activision spokesperson in November.

"Although we made a substantial investment in creating a new IP, Blur, it did not find a commercial audience."

GAY! and M$ are gayer for not picking them up and getting to work on PGR5!

I wonder if we could pick them up for a couple of quid....

£2.50!

bobby kotick is a duche bag

I wonder how much of this is Activision can't sell because they are asking too much - in the end Bizarre will be folded and the brains there will end up either setting up on their own (and with their track record they should be able to gain funding from somewhere) or they will be snapped up by other developers.

Activision may yet live to regret this because Kotick wants big money IP's that turnout a new game every 12 months with DLC thrown in to bleed gamers dry. Sooner or later the COD series will take a fall and Activision could find themselves with little originality left within their midst to keep themselves relevant and profitable....

Too true mate, I know codies ran an open day for Bizarre employees so there's no doubt a few went there but I'd like to see a new dev set up out of this. Seems EA keep winning out of this having picked up many of Activisions lost talents and teaming with the Ex IW crew to form Respawn so they may do something similar here...