Activision just gives up...

If memory serves, Activision's Bond license is (was?) still good until 2014, but all of Activision's Bond titles: Treyarch's Quantum of Solace, the late Bizarre Creations' Bloodstone, and Eurocom's 007 Legends, have vanished from Steam and from Activision's online store. (Eurocom's GoldenEye 007 Reloaded was never available on the PC in the first place, and therefore never available on those services.)

It should be noted that two of the three studios that developed Bond games for Activision pretty much collapsed after completing their projects. Eurocom laid of 150 of its 200 employees, and Bizarre Creations—faced with the twin financial disappointments of Bloodstone and the underrated kart racer Blur—folded altogether. (Treyarch, on the other hand, still has all that Call of Duty money.)

Discs are still on the shelves, at least for the time being (and probably for the foreseeable future, since nobody wants the damn things), but Activision has yet to respond as to why exactly this happened. So until such time as we know, let's pretend it was out of well-deserved shame for creating lousy products that sold poorly and were met mostly with critical and audience derision.

I get using the fact you have a well known commodity to coast by, but surely the more long term savvy thing is to use the fact you know the games will sell because of the 'OO7' in the title to bump up the budget and create something, y'know, good?

Gamers will wait for games. And with the exception of the CoD franchise, they frequently do. Just look at GTA, Mass Effect etc. With such a rich universe to draw from for gameplay ideas, really, there isn't much of a reason why Bond video games couldn't be anticipated as much as the big video game franchise releases.

It's easy to look at COD and say 'Ok, shoot 'em ups sell' but the reality is regardless of the quality of the games themselves, the CoD franchise got where it is by building up good will by being reliable and having good multiplayer/online set ups.

Particularly given Goldeneye N64's legacy is built on its multiplayer, it's really silly that Bond has gotten to where it is.

The Bond license has gone to big publishers—EA and Activision—each of which have a variety of studios, large and small, capable and... somewhat less capable under their umbrellas. Not every studio a publisher has is capable of creating what any one of us might want in a Bond game. And those top tier studios that do have the chops, well, they're working on either something new, or a sequel to a publisher-owned IP.

Consider that this problem extends to pretty much all games built on licensed properties, not just Bond. And is it really so surprising? If you're a publisher, and you've got a finite supply of developer talent at your disposal, are you going to focus it on strengthening an IP that you own, or one that you have to rent from EON Productions?

At this point, licensed games have a pretty defined role in the industry. They exist to soften any financial blows that publishers take while trying to build new IPs for themselves. Occasionally, one captures lighting in a bottle. The team behind GoldenEye 64 was still wet behind the ears—almost entirely untested when the game was made (these were not the same Rare employees who had made Donkey Kong Country, mind you). Publisher Nintendo probably didn't expect the sort of success the game turned out to be. (But then, who did?)

Until something fundamentally changes in regard to how licensed properties are handled between industries, I don't see this changing.

The last time a Bond game was really good was also the last time they really broke the mold, with EVERYTHING OR NOTHING bucking the Goldeneye-lite trend and instead creating an interactive Bond movie. Instead of expanding upon that, EA made a blatant cash grab with ROGUE AGENT, then put a new coat of pant on EoN and called it FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

I remember when it was announced that Activision would take over, I was relieved just to finally have a new guard after the EA years. Everything about the 50th anniversary had been going so well on all fronts, except for 007 Legends so I can't blame EON wanting to look elsewhere after Activision fucked that up, along with the other games.

What's sad is that the only successful title of theirs is a remake of GoldenEye. Not a tie-in to a new Daniel Craig film or an original title. That's pretty pathetic.

Tubes wrote:

The last time a Bond game was really good was also the last time they really broke the mold, with EVERYTHING OR NOTHING bucking the Goldeneye-lite trend and instead creating an interactive Bond movie. Instead of expanding upon that, EA made a blatant cash grab with ROGUE AGENT, then put a new coat of paint on EoN and called it FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

Everything or Nothing was developed by EA Redwood Shores, which is now known as Visceral Games (who are best known for the Dead Space series). As with Rare and GoldenEye, Visceral made Everything Or Nothing when they were still relatively new; it was only their second game (Agent Under Fire was their first), and the studio had only existed for five years when the game was released. Perhaps this is the best situation we can hope for licensed properties to end up in?

I don't know where the choice to try to create a game experience that better reflected the films (as opposed to treading water behind GoldenEye) originated. My first instinct is to say the publisher, since I can't really imagine an unproven developer convincing EA to throw what I can only assume were buckets of money at the likes of Dafoe and Brosnan. On the other hand, EA Redwood Shores (EARS) had been trying to vary the Bond gaming experience for some time (for example, the outsourced driving sections in Agent Under Fire, a game which actually started as the PS2 port of The World Is Not Enough before being granted its own identity and a considerable rewrite). Perhaps, after the lukewarm responses to their GoldenEye clones, EA was willing to take a chance on EARS' ideas?

Your assessment of From Russia With Love as a gussied up Everything or Nothing is a touch unfair from a technical standpoint. Technically, Everything or Nothing—like Agent Under Fire—was a Frankenstein's monster: different engines haphazardly slapped together, and twisted into a new shape. From Russia With Love was a whole new engine, one probably built using Everything or Nothing as an example of everything they wanted to be able to accomplish.

However, unless you happen to be Blizzard Entertainment or Valve, the amount of time you have to develop a game is finite. Especially when you consider the fact that, contractually, EA could no longer publish a Connery-based Bond game once another actor was cast as 007. The clock was ticking, and EARS used up all their time building their new engine. The idea of meaningfully expanding game play mechanics got lost in the shuffle. Tragic, especially since the stealth and shooting mechanics of Everything or Nothing were nothing to write home about to begin with; stuck in the late '90s with the prototypes of Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid and paling next to the flurry of innovation that accompanied the early 2000s.

Can't really say I ever expected anything good out of Activision. After all, this is a company that's released the same Call of Duty every year with a different name and each one makes $1 billion in sales after a week or two on shelves. I guess they figured the brand name was enough to forgo actual quality.

In my little dream world, let Valve do the next Bond, but only after they get on with Half-Life 3. It would almost be guaranteed to be good.

http://www.mi6-hq.com/news/index.php?itemid=10729&t=mi6&s=news

All but confirmed.