To recap:
- After Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Alex Ward (Criterion studio head) decided he wanted Criterion to focus on a new IP, and a lot of the older leads (10+ years there) were interested as well.
- To facilitate this, EA moved the bulk of the studio over to Ghost Games (basically a rebranding of part of the studio, the staff was all still in the UK) to keep working on Need For Speed, while 17 staff remaining under the Criterion brand prototyping new IP ideas.
- About a year later, Alex Ward left with a variety of other Criterion staff to make his own studio funded by their own life savings. He wasn't entirely clear on his reasons, but he implied feeling that the decision making and market/sellability concern of publishers was overbearing and preventing them from making the types of games they really wanted to do, along with forcing them to spend a lot of time on marketing efforts and the like instead of just game development.
- Criterion's new IP was later canceled, but the studio was moved onto Battlefront (both 1 and 2) along with a new secret project under new leadership. The studio is currently back up to around 80-90 people.
- Three Fields Entertainment released their first game, Dangerous Golf, last year. It didn't seem to sell especially well, only being in the 4000-8000 range when I looked at SteamSpy few weeks after launch, and reviewed with a Metacritic of 56. It is much higher now, but it was in the Unreal Engine Humble Bundle at the $1 tier, which sold 50% more units than the game has on SteamSpy, so I'm assuming most of it is from that.
- Their second game was a VR title that they say sold about within their expectations, but noted that it obviously could not sell very much given the VR market is so small.
- As it stands today, they've bet the entirety of the company on their next game, Danger Zone, which is a Burnout: Crash Mode successor. They say it's somewhat limited in scope as it's been made in 4-6 months as that's all they can afford.
- They feel signing publishers is tricky and takes too long in the current market, which is why they've gone this direction, though they're open to being published if someone decides to come along and do so.
- They note that Three Fields is currently 6 employees, though shortly after they were first announced, they were 10 employees, so it seems they may have done some headcount cutting already. It's also possible people just left, not sure.
- Alex Ward has later noted he didn't mean everything was riding on this game, but that doesn't seem to fit with the nature and extent of his original statements about strict budgeting concerns? Maybe he wants to make a further clarification on this?
Danger Zone is a critical title for Three Fields, which relies on game sales to keep the lights on. It's fair to say Dangerous Golf and Lethal VR failed to set tills on fire, so the studio's future is dependent on Danger Zone being a relative success.
"Everything" is riding on this, Ward said. "We got together and pooled our life savings. We've put everything we have into starting a business out of pure passion and determination to succeed. We have no backing. There's no publishers bankrolling us or anything like that. We'd love it if there were. They're free to come and do so! We're just a small group of people just making games and putting them out and trying to do the best we can. Hopefully the game can find an audience."
"Three-to-four month development period is tops for us, in terms of what we can afford to do," he said. "We're self-funded. We used our own money to start the company. We're totally dependent on sales from the games we put out.
Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...h-mode-spiritual-successor-called-danger-zoneOf course, Burnout fans will wonder whether Three Fields plans on making a fully-fledged racing game. With EA seemingly uninterested in returning to the Burnout series, the hope for a spiritual successor remains.
Alas, Three Fields is not currently working on a racing game, Ward confirmed. It's not something Three Fields is currently in a position to make.
"No we're not," he said. "We started that a year ago. We did a couple of weeks. Obviously a fully-fledged racing game requires a lot more artwork, and that costs money. Making a big game, making an open-world game, it costs money and it's money we don't have. We'd need backing on that.
"Support for funded projects is incredibly tough and challenging right now. We can't rely on writing ideas for games and thinking somebody's going to come along and give us lots of money to make it. In that time, we could have just put the thing out.
"This could have been a way bigger game if we'd had funding, and we could have easily done another six months on it. But it's us doing it off our own back. We can afford to do about three or four months and a game of this scope."