Tomb Raider Delays Worry Eidos

Thanks to several readers for pointing to a Yahoo/Reuters report discussing the continued delays to Lara Croft: The Angel Of Darkness, the latest in Eidos Interactive's Tomb Raider series. As the article mentions, "Already delayed twice, 'Lara Croft: The Angel of Darkness' is slotted for a release on June 20th. But that's looking less likely.. the game has to be in stores by June 30th in order for the company to recognize sales [estimated to be 1.5 to 2.5 million units] for its current financial year." With rumors of a delay into July for another long-awaited title, Republic: The Revolution, Eidos definitely has cause for financial concern. But of course, gamers will probably forgive and forget if both of these titles turn out well, even after so many delays.

Comments

Re:Eidos financal power

[Anonymous Coward]

Loss of reputation? Come on... you buy a game, not a game from a company

you do? i certainly do pay attention to the company im buying from. most companies, all except blizzard actually, i wont buy a game until its been out 3 months, or i have played it and know its done.

Not true at all, Simon.

[Inoshiro]

"But of course, gamers will probably forgive and forget if both of these titles turn out well, even after so many delays."

It'd be nice if that was true, but it's not. The moment you miss a target on an 18 month game development cycle, and don't address the issue, you've set yourself up for failure. Look at Daikatana. They slipped, and ended up having to get a new gaming engine (Quake 2). The results? They had to redo all the maps, QA testing, entity models, etc, just as if they'd started from scratch. The only difference was that they still had wasted all that money on the previous version.

Duke Nukem Forever is in the same situation. Because they were unwilling to release the versions based on the Unreal engine and the Quake engines, they've effectively flushed all the money they spent on those development branches down the toilet.

When you look at it this way, you realize that unless people will pay a couple hundred dollars a copy (or whatever it takes to make up for late shipping), you will be losing money in the long run compared to shipping on time. No game is that good.