Activision dropped some serious cash to acquire Bizarre Creations, the developer of Project Gotham Racing and Geometry Wars. The actual price wasn’t released, but I wouldn’t expect it to be cheap.

Bizarre Creations had a statement regarding the news on their own website:

Well, we’re no longer tied to just one platform for starters. Our future titles can be on whatever we please – we are a truly multiplatform studio now. Of course that doesn’t mean that we’ll be forced to make a port of every game to every console in existence… we simply have that option available to us.

Both of our two main game teams are about to start work on two new AAA titles for Activision. One will be a racing game, and the other a character game. Of course we’ll make some more detailed announcements in the future, but be prepared for something big and exciting!

Very cool. Could PGR5 end up on all consoles? Only time will tell.

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Payoffs have existed in all industries for a very very long time. You can’t argue they exist, but do they do any good for the end user?

The most recent gaming related payoff centered around Microsoft and Rockstar, with a $50 million purse headed to the developer for the exclusive rights to publish two episodic packs for Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360. Many can argue this is good for gamers, but I disagree. This is good for Microsoft, and that’s about it. Rockstar will still sell the same number of copies of GTA4 with these exclusive packs as opposed to the downloads being available for multiple platforms, it’s just now the majority of copies will be for the Xbox 360. And what about the price paid? All of Take Two’s games sold on Xbox platforms have not totaled $50 million in gross sales, so how can one justify that cost? Will these downloadable episodic content packs cost gamers an arm and a leg? If history repeats itself, they very well just may.

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