yeah-yeah-beebiss-1 answered:
yup - to tl,dr it to the best of my recollection:
- sega contracted gearbox to make the game in like 2006, providing the budget in the form of recurring checks
- development was on and off as gearbox kept trying to get extensions to work on other things (borderlands, duke nukem forever)
- gearbox then just had a tiny skeleton crew work on functioning demos of aliens: colonial marines while actually putting the bulk of their manpower and budget to work on their own project (borderlands 2)
- using these demos as proof of the game’s progress, they continued to collect checks from sega as if they were actually making a full game
- sega in turn showed these demo builds at trade shows under the genuine impression that this was representative of the final product
- by late 2011 or so, gearbox had their “oh fuck how are we going to release a functional product” moment and decided to outsource a significant chunk of the game’s development (read: everything except the multiplayer) to a couple of smaller, inexperienced studios
- this is while they’re still telling sega that they’re fully invested in the project and getting paid accordingly
- in early 2012, sega finally has enough of the constant requests for delays and sets a Q1 2013 release window with no further extensions granted
- gearbox and the studios they contracted scramble to put together a vaguely functional product, and don’t really succeed - to put it mildly, the game is shit
- the game ships in february 2013, and everyone (consumers and sega alike) learns that the 2011-era demo builds that were being used to market the game are not in any way indicative of the final product
- consumers get pissed to the point where they file a class-action lawsuit - sega agreed in 2014 to settle and pay $1.25 million damages (mostly to people who bought the game on launch day), but gearbox refused to admit any culpability in the situation and their CEO, noted manchild randy pitchford, just whined about it being a frivolous lawsuit that hurts gamers (never mind the fact that the gamers were the ones filing the suit in the first place)
- it was this lawsuit, and the documents released during it, that revealed just how much everyone was duped and how even gearbox views their own CEO as a loose-cannon liability
- as a result of gearbox refusing sega’s offer to buy in to the settlement, they’re the ones who’ll face the music should anyone attempt to resurrect this shitshow
- (oh, did i mention that one of the studios gearbox outsourced development to went bankrupt months after the game’s release due to all the bad publicity)
but yeah, fuck gearbox - i feel like battleborn being dead on arrival was some sort of karmic retribution
