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Def Jam Rapstar developer 4mm Games has run out of funds to work on new projects and must battle an $8 million lawsuit from EMI over alleged unpaid royalties.
“We have not got any new funding and obviously we need to resolve everything with Rapstar. And we’ve also got to eat,” 4mm Games founder Jamie King told Games Industry. “I get very annoyed at times, I would like there to be a way out of it but I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”
King doesn’t put the game’s lack of commercial success down to any one factor.
“We didn’t get accepted into the Kinect launch window,” King explained. “We met everyone and it took a long time to get a publisher of note. And that meant we couldn’t get product code. That meant we couldn’t test the servers so we had months of delays there.”
“And when we did a deal with Konami we needed multiple SKUs and we weren’t given as much time on the Wii as we warned them we needed and it showed.”
King added that more money and faith in the project was needed for his vision for the game to be realised.
“We had very high hopes for it, but it needed deeper pockets and a five to 10 year vision. Karaoke music games have a long tail but we didn’t have any control over it when it was published and we couldn’t do anything about support on the website.
“It broke my heart when it just got turned off. It didn’t get the love, there were no community managers, the videos were taking a long time to get rated. It’s business, I get it, we were very ambitious with the amount of funds that we had.”
We were big fans of Rapstar, and will never forget the epic rap battle at gamescom 2010.
