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Why Majesco Fell
CNN Money's Game Over column today takes a look at some of the reasons Majesco has bowed out of the majors of game publishing. From the article: "Majesco was hardly blameless for its failings. 'Advent Rising' didn't come close to living up to expectations - earning middling reviews at best ... 'Psychonauts,' though, was a critical darling - earning a spot on many critics' holiday buying guides. Despite this, the game never found an audience. Sales were awful, coming in at under 100,000. As for the movie licenses? 'Aeon Flux,' based on last year's Charlize Theron film flopped. 'Taxi Driver' was cancelled as part of last week's decision. 'Ghost Rider,' (based on an upcoming Nicholas Cage film) was sold. And, inexplicably, Majesco has decided to move forward with the release of a game based on 'Jaws' itself - perhaps as a last hurrah, perhaps because it couldn't find a buyer and the game was essentially complete. (I saw an early build of 'Jaws'. It is not - in any way - a game that would have reversed Majesco's slump.)" We discussed their decision last week.
I believe that the reason Psychonauts didn't do well is because Majesco didn't bother to advertise before it came out. Afterwards, yeah, but did you see any before? Of course not...it was all spent hyping Bloodrayne 2.
Have you ever wondered how they managed to fund so many titles? It was those 'tv episode on a gb cart' things that the article alluded to. When they first came out, and for a couple years, parents were spending huge amounts of money on the worthless things so that they wouldn't have to buy DVD players for their car, etc. Any time they needed to distract a kid, hand them the gameboy with an episode of Spongebob and they are good for 20 minutes. A good business idea, but surely not creative...
From the experience of friends who dealt with Majesco, some of the people they would send out to meet with developers were... less than competant and/or less than friendly. Even for titles and developers who were considered 'rising stars', they seemed to treat them like they were incompetant, screaming at developers over the phone and in person because the build didn't have feature X, which was removed a few months before as per Majesco's request. I've heard it described as working with a spoiled child; they know what they want now, but have no idea what they wanted a week ago, or what will actually be good for them.
Add to all of that overpaid, prepaid, incompetant hollywood writers (who can't write a linear fiction script, let alone an interactive fiction script), people who are not creative believing themselves to be, and a president who wouldn't know a good idea if it bit him on the ass, and Majesco was bound to fail.