It’s starting to become a bit of a rough Christmas for game developers as it appears that another one has been forced to shut up shop. Factor 5, based in San Rafael, California and creator of Lair, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and Turrican has become the latest victim of the credit crunch, according insiders.

While it’s not quite as close to home as the troubles facing Free Radical Design, there’s an beginnings of a trend emerging here. Both companies had enjoyed decent success in previous generations – Rogue Squadron II was one of the GameCube’s best titles – and then both signed up to make exclusives for the PlayStation 3.

In Free Radical’s case it was dreadful first person shooter, Haze. In Factor 5’s case it was oft-criticised Dragon piloter, Lair. As one of the most hotly anticipated PS3 launch titles, it was an unfortunate victim to the PS3’s half-baked Sixaxis control mechanism. Notice how you don’t find that being used in many games anymore?

So we have two companies with quite superb game portfolio’s under their belts, and each one appears to have been brought down by a single poorly rated title, made for the same console. We really hope this is just an unlucky coincidence. Either way, it’s not great news for the PS3. Console’s live and die by their exclusive titles; so to see a pair of studios go under after theirs failed to cut it commercially, is hardly going to be a great incentive for other devs to sign over exclusivity rights to the platform.

If you think we already see far too many multiformat ports, then we’re afraid to say that it’s probably only going to get worse from here.

Factor 5 (via CVG)

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  • John

    It’s not really that surprising, if your gonna make a game with high development cost and tie it up to an exclusive deal for the console with the smallest user base, you’ve crippled your returns before you’ve even started.
    Even if Lair or Haze had been successful they’d have struggled to make a profit, especially lair which arrived earlier in the PS3′s life cycle.
    I can only imagine that the developers believed the PS3 would be as big a success as the PS2 but with such a high price tag and so little extra to offer gamers over what the 360 does, it seems a strange decision to make.

  • Gordon

    Um, actually it might be more accurate to say that Lair was a victim of the media’s obsession with blasting PS3 and Sony to pieces. Lair by all accounts from people who actually spent time playing it was a good game. Many reviewers had a hard time with the flight controls using the sixaxis motion controls instead of the more traditional flight stick approach. And boy were they not backward in coming forward with their complaints about it. Rather than review the actual game the majority 9of reviews in the West concentrated on bitching about the motion controls.

    As it happens the sixaxis motion control is implemented in far more games than you might think. One recent example is the use of it to control the head and body movement of your sackboy in Little Big Planet.

    Regarding lair, perhaps if the reviewers had approached the thing from the point of view that they were riding on a dragon and the controls were designed to give you the feeling of being at the reigns of the dragon you’re riding, they might have had a different experience and/or opinion. Instead of asking for the precision of an F-16 simulator, perhaps they could have noted that a dragon is not an F-16? Ah, but then they would have had to drop their preconceived notion about PS3, Sony and Lair, and put their bias, spin and anti-Sony hate away.

    Gee, the author of this little piece might have done some research, but it’s far easier to bash Sony, no one ever got fired for doing that, did they?

  • kk

    cant say ill miss factor 5 lair was dreadful factor 5′s last good game was super turican 2 that was in the snes days

  • Sproutey

    Totally agree. Both companies are struggling due to nothing more than poor product spread over the weakest console by sales volume.
    Hardly surprising really. Hopefully the programmers will spread themselves among the other developers out there and contribute to more worthwhile projects.

  • na

    Actually lair was a pretty decent game its a shame they are strugling. Hopefully the closure at factor 5 wonlt relult in loss of talent from the gaming scene and i hope the developers manage to get work elsewhere.

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