TimeGate Staff Estimate 50% Of Aliens: Colonial Marines Is Their Work

Yesterday, amidst the flurry of bad reviews a post was discovered that seemed to indicate that Aliens: Colonial Marines was not developed by Gearbox and was outsourced to TimeGate Studios.

Since then it has been reported that Sega America’s Senior Producer, Matthew J. Powers, has denied these claims and said “Absolutely not, the game has been developed by Gearbox Software. Other studios [like Timegate] helped Gearbox on the production of single and multi player.”

Previously, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford has said they were responsible for 80% of the game and he reiterated up this claim on Monday suggesting TimeGate had contributed 20%-25% of the game, while another team called Nerve worked on maps for the game’s multi player.

However, a post on TimeGate’s own site by their Forum Moderator suggests there might be a bit more Gate and rather less Gears in the final product.

“Messaged a few people in TG and found out that TG basically had a hand in everything. They are responsible for the weapons, the characters, some of the story, a fair amount of the aliens, and I don’t mean conceptualization, they did the actual work of making said weapons and so on.”

“Technically they did work on the MP component, just not in the way I initially thought.”

“This said, the game underwent a lot of changes so TG doesn’t actually know how much of their content is left. Some had the estimate that 50% of what you see in the campaign is their work, others wanted to see for themselves and would get back to me after playing the game themselves.”

Now the interesting thing is that Gearbox have seemingly backed up this claim, “If you take pre-production out of it, their [TimeGate’s] effort’s probably equivalent to ours.”

That seems to indicate that that Gearbox designed the game but only programmed half of it.

The post on the TimeGate forums concludes, “One has to remember that you can’t really “blame” TG for this. They were outsourced to do parts of ACM, and it does not represent current TG design philosophy. ACM is still mostly a Gearbox production and it was they who made the final call on all content.”

There are also rumblings and whispers that despite the game being in production for five years, Aliens: Colonial Marines was not a priority for Gearbox.

This tweet was posted by a writer for PC Gamer:

Some might also question why on February 11th, the day before the game is released, Randy Pitchford starts an interview with IGN not with hyping Aliens but by flogging more Borderlands 2 DLC.