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Midway - New Unreal Publisher, Inching Toward Profit?
Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting the press release revealing Midway has announced a multi-product agreement with Epic to publish three new Unreal franchise games. The deal is "including Unreal Championship 2 [originally to be published by Microsoft], an Xbox exclusive title scheduled to ship in 2005, and two future installments of Unreal Tournament [previous versions published by Atari] on PC and upcoming next generation consoles." In related news, Midway announced financial results for Q2 2004, with some slightly positive news (the company "expects to have shipped over one million units of NBA Ballers through 2004 Q3"), but disappointment in a "loss [of] $9.0 million", and news that Midway "has moved one of its major releases, Area 51, from 2004 into 2005."
Let's just hope that Midway allows Epic to develop the games on their own, without screwing with them. The main problem developers seem to run into is "meddling" publishers, but I don't think Midway is bad for this, and Epic is big enough that they can probably resist any "executive decisions" pretty well. This is probably better than Atari in the long run, anyway, judging from the... interesting decisions Atari made regarding The Temple of Elemental Evil. (That game had several "objectionable" portions taken out... like the children.) The rise of the "publisher" phenomenon in video games is worrisome, though; the effect was hardly positive on the literary front (where everything is now expected to fit into a neat little genre).
Well, different publishers have different personalities. Some like to meddle in the games they publish; "This content is unsuitable," "We demand that this game get a T rating," and so forth. Others don't. Some promote games extremely well, others don't. Still others are notable for their technical choices. Atari, for instance, likes copy protection, even when it affects legitimate buyers negatively (see Unreal Tournament 2004).