Company
It's the first official response from Midway on the Ratbag closure, and perhaps it'll be the most we will ever get on the matter from them. Midway's CEO, David Zucker, had a chat with Gamespot at the recent Midway press event, which included a question on the sudden closure of Adelaide's Ratbag Studios...
David: We've acquired five studios in the past few years, four of them we are very happy with. We think they're on the verge of becoming AAA studios--Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and Newcastle. One of them, the Australian studio, is a good studio, but it would require a little more work to get up to the kind of quality we need to have for next-generation, so we made the tough decision to close the studio late last year. But as a result of our other acquisitions, we have four new studios that are a critical part of our team now.
They came, they saw, they bought themselves some naming rights, they left. My heart just goes out to all the people caught in the middle.
sounds like passing the buck to me. I guess it sounds less palatable to shareholders and the market to say, we made a mess of things.
What makes it funny is that they bought Ratbag for their "strong management skills" and when they closed the studio, it was mentioned that it was because of poor senior management.. so go figure..
Sounds like buyer's remorse...
screw midway never will i purchase theyre product again