It and Gears of War: Judgment sold around one million copies each
People Can Fly wanted tomake a sequeltoBulletstorm, one of the most pleasantly surprising first-person shooters in years, but the prospect was deemed too risky. (I’m still not over this, if you couldn’t tell.) Instead, the studio went on to doGears of War: Judgmentwith Epic which, as it turns out, also failed to catch on in a meaningful way, despite the overall success of the coreGearsseries. According toEdge, the former game sold just under a million copies across its three-platform release, while the latter sold just over that milestone.
“I think that any time you’ve done your best and read the critical excitement but it doesn’t translate into financial success, you feel that maybe there’s something you could have done differently,” lead level designer Wojciech Madry said ofBulletstorm.
“But that was the most successful new IP that year! The problem is, like with the movie industry, the most money is made by [sequels]. In the end we did everything we could to make a great game, a game that we would want to play, and there’s nothing we were ashamed of or wanted to change. We did everything we could.”
A shame for both titles, really.Judgmentended the series on something of a low note, while I feel likeBulletstormwas only just getting started by the time I reached its conclusion. I wanted to see more of that world and less of the other.
How Epic’s buyout freed People Can Fly to bring straight-up shooters into the 21st century[Edge]
