This is the story of a struggling publisher who pin their hopes on a long standing franchise. When that franchise fails to hit the publisher's lofty limits and said publisher's share value drops 25% (although it rose 8% again this morning), people have to be held accountable ... usually the wrong ones, as is the case here.

Of course, I'm talking about the 30 lay-offs from Tomb Raider: Underworld developer Crystal Dynamics and usually when the wrong heads roll, you get disgruntled ex-employees sounding off, which is clearly the case here.

There are numerous threads over at the Tomb Raider Forums from disgruntled ex-employees, one of those is supposedly even ex-Tomb Raider Creative Director, Eric Lindstrom, with some frankly shocking controversies.

Ex-employee, SacrificialLamb commented that if you "ask anyone who is part of it and if they are honest they will tell you around 40% of the DLC was meant to be in the game itself, originally. But it was decided later on to take out those parts because they were expecting most sales on the 360 and the DLC the way it looked at the time was looking to be a bit 'thin'. So we were asked to cut some parts out to be used in the DLC."

They also states the bigwigs were the real reason for their demise and stated that "Eidos and the people with high paid jobs who 'couldn't care less about this silly game' (real quote from a small unofficial meeting about Tomb Raider by one of them) are the problem and everyone knows this"

Real or not real, you make the choice here. The fact that the threads are still going and the admins of Tomb Raider Forums are getting involved, speaks volumes from my standpoint.

You've got to feel for the Crystal Dynamics ex-employees here who surely are the victims. With what is surely one of the best Tomb Raider games the franchise has ever seen, the lofty and unreasonable expectations of Eidos are placing a shadow of doubt over the title. It even looks like the time constraints they put on the team negatively affected the game as a whole in the end meaning they had to chop cheats, the ability to replay cinematics and a whole load of other stuff from the final game.

The 1.5 million sales weren't enough to keep the Eidos bigwigs happy, but what do they expect releasing a title in the hottest release period we've ever seen? I wish some people would do their maths. From a personal standpoint, I can see titles like Tomb Raider: Underworld, Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia and Dead Space's sales increase well in to next year. The fact remains that people will always pick from the top of the tree before moving down, so your Gears of War and Call of Duty titles will nearly always come first.

[Via Kotaku]

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