Activision business model allowing us to continue to be Bizarre, studio rep says

Yesterday, the Gaming Elitist wrote a piece about Activions buyout of popular UK-based studio Bizarre Creations (Project Gotham Racing). Since then, GamesIndustry.biz has got hold of Sarah Chudley, commercial director at Bizarre, who shared her point of view of the deal. In short, it seems Bizarre have thought about the now-accepted offer for a while before they decided it was the best course of action:

“All we want to concentrate on is making great games, rather than the pressures of running a pretty large development studio, searching out deals, spending months and months on legal and due diligence procedures that are the norm for signing up a game nowadays.

“We want to be doing what we love, in the way that we enjoy, without having to think about being big business people. It was a long and hard path coming to this decision, but we were driven by our desire to continue being able to deliver great games, and to enjoy doing it,” Sarah says to GamesIndustry.biz.

Also, the deciding factor for choosing Activision (from what I’ve heard, unofficially, a couple of other offers from other publishers were rejected rather quick) seems to be their rather relaxed company policy that still allows their developers a good amount of freedom in their work:

“They have a hands-off approach to game development, meaning we’re left to do what we’re good at, and can ask for support from their strong development network should we need it. One of the most important reasons from our point of view is that Activision has an independent studio model, meaning that we can continue to be Bizarre,” she continues.

In other news, this interview also gives us some new information regarding the studios popular Project Gotham Racing series. It seems that Bizarre will leave the PGR franchise rights to Microsoft, and instead focus on working on two new IPs to be released in 2009. While no more information about these new projects were discussed (PROTIP: they’re racing games…), we’re no doubt going to hear more about them as they’re getting closer to completion.

Xbox 360-exclusive Project Gotham Racing 4 (to be released next month) will likely be the last PGR game developed by Bizarre, and it will be interesting to see in which direction they will go in the future.