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[Calverz]

It's honestly sad. Codemasters have been consistently good for as long as I can remember.

EA - Barely makes traditional games anymore. Handful of successful GaaS and yearly sports slop.

Ubisoft - On death's door. Never found a successful GaaS outside r6 which is old and busted now. Probably will not survive the next few years.

Warner - On death's door. No successful GaaS. Lost in the sauce. Probably will not survive the next few years.

All 3 of these big western publishers completely lost the plot at some point after 360 gen.

They absolutely have. It's very sad to see. This last 3 months I have primarily been playing older consoles on crt's and some through retrotink etc and honestly they are so much fun. Iv enjoyed playing a lot of driving games including Colin MacRae series.

 

[GamesDontSuck]

Any time I hear the name Codemasters I instantly think of

What an amazing game. Basically it's if you made a game of The Great Escape. Which ironically would have its own ps2 game a year or two after. Which wasn't as good.

 

[RickMasters]

I just started playing g-police last night! It was too late to play much but so far, so good. I'm a huge psygnosis fan and wanted to play this since it was in magazines.

I just had a thought…… a G-police sequel/reboot would make a great PSVR game. And maybe some sort of dedicated flight stick type peripheral.


Aahhh! I swear sometimes we have better ideas than these companies as to what they should be doing with IP they are just sitting on.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

I won't pretend to know exactly what should've been done with their engines but they had a few routes they could've gone down.

If they stuck with Ego (which they've used since the PS3 gen) then they should've upgraded it enough last-gen to handle longer track lengths they might be using in the future. When engine upgrades are done it's common to over-shoot the final requirements eg. we can now handle so many lights, or ray-tracing, or up to 100km² maps, even if realistically they might only utilize a fraction of those features. You can't be fighting against limitations of your own tech and you have to be prepared for the next-gen, because people will be expecting more.

The thing is that Codemasters developers were active on the forums over the years and explained all these limitations back in the late 2010s, so it isn't like they didn't have time to get a solution together within Ego. They also had an ideal candidate to experiment with a new engine - the Dirt Rally spin-off, yet they just used Ego for that again.

And if the switch to Unreal Engine at the time they did was unavoidable, why on Earth did they opt for UE4 and not UE5!? They ended up with the exact same stutter issues, but at least they could've utilized the more advanced features of UE5 to allow the team to visually punch above their weight. First impressions matter and if most people are thinking to themselves "this looks worse than the PS4 game", it's just over. And it wasn't even that it was a cross-gen game! WRC only released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles...

EDIT:

Here is what Milestone, who have been been making MotoGP games since the PS2 days, are managing to do now on UE5, having made numerous engine switches over the years including to UE4 during the PS4 days:



Their other series, Ride, switched to UE4 for Ride 3. This is Ride 5 on PS5 now, still running on UE4, with 7+ years of experience with the engine under their belt:

So, I'll hazard some guesses here.

Upgrading Ego probably wasn't feasible at this point. The cost to do so and the time it would take they probably weren't equipped to deal with. They moved to Unreal 4 for WRC 24 but still didn't put this game out on PS4 and X1... My guess is they couldn't get it to perform, highlighting their struggles. The project being Unreal 4 predated Ue5.

Milestone moved to unreal engine 5, but they only had one game to develop as opposed to two and they had moved to UE4 earlier so would have had more experience.

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

This is so fucking sad. They were the best.

 

[Barakov]

Opportunity for Sony to get this at a good price.

Gran Turismo Horizon isn't the worst idea.

 

[NeonDelta]

Such a shame.

Will. E good to let someone else have a go at the F1 license though.

On a side note. When did the word shuttered become a thing in relation to closing down/shutting down a company/studio, not sure I'd seen it used before a year ago.

 

[Nocty]

there are too many studios, too many great games, too many indie studios making even grater games. There is not enough time in the day to play everything nowadays, so only the absolute best is successful. Mediocre games just don't cut it in this environment.

 

[Perrott]

Gran Turismo Horizon isn't the worst idea.

No need to tap into a hole that's already been filled by the recent PS5 release of Forza Horizon 5. Same reason why they shouldn't focus on pursuing any Halo or Gears killers moving forward. It's over.

Just focus on your strenghts as a publisher, which broadly speaking seem to be linear and open-world cinematic action/adventure games.

 

[PeteBull]

Before they just made F1 games, they made this classic. (Alongside others in the series).

This feels very similar to what happened to Psygnosis/Studio Liverpool ... Pushed from making a variety of games to focusing on F1 games and then being dissolved.

That game looked crazy good for a NES game and back in the days it was superhard to my kid self:

 

[xrnzaaas]

No need to tap into a hole that's already been filled by the recent PS5 release of Forza Horizon 5. Same reason why they shouldn't focus on pursuing any Halo or Gears killers moving forward. It's over.

Just focus on your strenghts as a publisher, which broadly speaking seem to be linear and open-world cinematic action/adventure games.

Yup that window has pretty much closed. They had that chance even before they got rid of Evolution Studios and didn't attempt anything over the years, even though they probably noticed how much Forza Horizon has risen in popularity.

Now PS players have Horizon 5 and chances are that Horizon 6 will release on all platforms the same day. Ubisoft is probably also uncertain about Motorfest's future and maintaining its popularity, because one of their selling points was giving PS players a similar experience to Horizon.

 

[Fabieter]

Sales culture is hitting hard.