kaisersoze, on Feb 11 2010, 05:15 AM, said:
There was a 5 million dollar amount being thrown around that 3dr apparently asked Take 2 for to complete DNF. When Take 2 balked,
George let the team go.
Now, is it possible that 3dr had let's say 2 million dollars laying around and was able to pick up an outside developer to finish the game?
I presume the 5 million amount was the money needed to pay 3dr employees so they could get to the end of development. By cutting the staff,
could it have possibly "brought" the completion amount down for a third party like Gearbox or Humanhead to finish it?
Despite the fact that George and Scott have said nothing on the subject of the possible external development of DNF, there is, in my opinion, considerable evidence that the game is being worked on by an outside party. Just a couple of months after the team was released, Scott began making interesting posts on Facebook which included unreleased screenshots of the game. On one of these posts he wrote that Duke was "back in the game" which seemed to be referring to DNF, especially since it was accompanied by a screenshot that was obviously from DNF. The interesting thing is that around the same time, 3D Realms sold the Prey IP, which probably made them several million dollars. My thinking at this point is that the timing there couldn't have been entirely coincidental, and the likely scenario is that 3D Realms used the money from Prey to pay an advance to an external developer, who is now completing the game.