Midway have been struggling rather a lot of late. Their games aren't well received, and their sales are suffering, too. This, according to a new Variety report, is in part down to the publisher's unnecessary tinkering with the Unreal Engine.

"The mistake we made was, instead of just taking the base Unreal 3 engine that Gears of War was made on and building games off of that, we let our tech and product development guys try to really modify the engine to add all these diff things," a former Midway staffer reveals.

"It was a ton of new technology which they just weren’t capable of doing. It put all the games way behind schedule."

Ex-CMO Steve Allison says that it was these delays to key titles that really made life tough for Midway, the firm missing key seasons through delayed releases, resulting in very tight finances.

"When that happens decision-making can become focused around not always what is best for each title, but how to fix cash flow issues. This is a spiral of doom in videogame publishing because you can’t ship compromised titles against the exceptional quality level of competition that is on the shelves."

By Luke Guttridge

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