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THQ recently announced the cancellation of Frontlines: Fuel of War for PS3 and the end of its Stuntman and Juiced franchises. Last night, in a conference call to investors following its third quarter fiscal results, CEO Brian Farrell offered further details on the publisher’s decisions.
Concerning the cancellation of Frontlines for PS3, Farrell put the blame firmly on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, stating it “just didn’t perform as well in the open world as we would have expected”. As a result the PlayStation 3 version was running two or three months behind the Xbox 360 and PC versions.
It wasn’t technology problems which lead to the culling of the Stuntman and Juiced franchises though. Farrell said that Stuntman was put to bed because it was regarded as a franchise with “old generation gameplay” and said its highly scripted gameplay did not match gamers’ desires for open gameplay and greater player choice.
Juiced was simply a case of throwing too many SKUs at the dev than it could handle.
“We were way too ambitious with that studio,” Farrell said, “giving them six different platforms to support, everything from new PlayStation 3 development all the way down to DS. I think that was a bad decision, and we don’t have any studios working on more than three SKUs simultaneously now.”
