“We are disappointed in our first quarter financial performance,” THQ's Brian Farrell admitted in fiscal resultsreleased to investors this week. The company posted a loss of $US38.4M, with Farrell laying much of the blame for the poor result on high-profile disappointment Red Faction: Armageddon. Appropriately enough for a game named after the End of All Things, the title turns out to be almost certainly the last in the series, with Farrell announcing that the company has no plans “to continue with that franchise in any meaningful way.”
The series debuted in 2001 with a burst of fanfare and grand claims for its “revolutionary” Geo-Mod engine, which promised infinitely destructible environments and delivered solid walls in which you could make a few holes if you shot them just right. The poster-child for an era in which titles became franchises solely on the inertia of their own branding, the middlingly-received title earned a few middlingly-received sequels (including the underappreciated Guerrilla, which we actually kind of loved) before finally forcing Farrell to admit that a “passionate niche following” wasn't enough to save the series, which “did not resonate with a sufficiently broad console gaming audience.”
Red Faction: Armageddon's release coincided with those of XBLA/PSN spin-off Red Faction: Battlegrounds and the SyFy original movie, Red Faction: Origins. Both were middlingly-received.
Above: More of this please
Are you sad to hear of Red Faction's demise? Will you be firing up Guerrilla to revisit the one time the series made good on its promises in any meaningful way?
Jul 27, 2011
Source: Gamasutra
