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Star Trek - Elite Force II Goes Gold, Team Laid Off
Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has confirmed that developer Ritual was forced to lay off most of the team that created the PC FPS Star Trek: Elite Force II, only two days after the game went gold. Apparently, a couple of other projects fell through. Ritual's other in-development games, Counter-Strike for Xbox and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero for PC are unaffected." Fansite Ritualistic has plenty of extra information on Elite Force II, which is looking promising despite this unexpected news.
Unfortunately, if you're a developer and are receiving milestone payments from your publisher at regular intervals, then your last milestone payment will probably be at the gold master of the game.
At that point, you'd have to wait a few months to even _possibly_ get royalty payments from that title, through. So if Ritual didn't have a lot of money in the bank to pay developers until a new project came through.. issue. I think the same type of thing happened with the Myth III development team (scroll down) a coupla years ago, who were, oddly enough, ex-Ritual people, although the inside scoop on that may be a little different, and blatant speculation abounds, etc.