its too bad too hear about how Midway is in such dire strait. They have always been a B grade company in my opinion. sometimes they have released AAA titles though. I love games like Mortal Kombat and Gauntlet legends, which have to be their best hits.

Hopefully, some current midway executive will read this and get some good ideas on how to change the company, or at least if the company fails whoever buys the rights and licenses or tries to revive the company.

I'd hope not to be the only person to make a post like this.

WHAT DID MIDWAY DO WRONG, AND WHAT WOULD I DO IF I RAN THE COMPANY

Midway has been loosing money for a while and in my opinion it was because they were overproducing and under-earning. If your a company and starts to lose money to the extant that your near bankruptcy than you were most likely under the impression that you were a bigger and stronger company than you were.

Producing games is expensive. It gets more expensive when you produce games multiplatform. Paying for the rights to be a licensee of the big 3 gets into a million right off the bat. then you have programmers who have to specialize in making games for each console. They are obviously the most well paid, and also the most integral people when making games because everyone else simply cannot do their job without them.

If I were midway, i'd start acting like a square during the Super Nintendo and Playstation eras. I'd focus on one platform. This will do a couple of things. Get to know the audience. If they focus on one console they will get to focus on the same group of people, they can more accurately judge what is popular. When they go to release later games they can look back with what did well and what did not. Quality may also go up. Without resources spread so thin among the platforms those resources can be harnessed to produce bigger better more quality games. The fanbase will thank you in sales and it will improve your pocketbook and REPUTATION in the longrun.
Exclusivity creates a sort of bond with the fan. They know that you care about them and them only than they will care back that much more. Acclaim who is now out of business did better in the 32 bit/64 bit era when they focused on n64 releasing Turok games. as soon as they went multiplatform their quality went down. Capcom has been exclusive at times like with the resident evil series on gamecube, but gamecube didn't have a big enough userbase. Plus they double dipped. They would claim exclusivity, but then release the game months later on ps2. Also, had Street Fighter and Megaman been exclusive to gamecube than it would have changed the whole scheme of things. If Resident Evil wasn't on gamecube also, Nintendo might not be in the position it is now with how well the wii is doing.

If I were Midway right now, i would be trying my hardest to make a quick buck. I would take advantage of online distribution channels. I would seriously lower the price of all Midway online games to the point where everyone would be willing to buy them. They in the last month have already lowered the price of ultimate mk3(for being a hit) to 5 bucks, one would hope that microsoft would get Midway their money ASAP. I don't think too many online midway games are out on Wii or ps3 right now, but they need to get them out immediately. If they can do this they can buy enough time to stay afloat to produce a bigger seller.

Pull a Megaman 9 with mortal kombat. I like the old mortal kombat. the games were produced by photographing people and then photoshopping and animating them. It only took a few months to make a game. There was a tackiness early 90s quality to it that brings some nastalgia. If i were midway id make Ultimate Mortal Kombat 4 with classic graphics and new character available online.

With the suces of Castle Crashers, a newer online version of gauntlet might be woth it too

Well-said, although it may be too late for those options. Will they instead go the way of Atari and get into publishing? Atari seems to be doing very well with that business model.

I'd have to disagree with you on all points, Patrick.

First of all, pointing out the advice.... that a publisher that has ALWAYS been a multi-platform publisher (in the beginning, even the original Mortal Kombat was released on SNES and Sega Genesis) to focus on a single console makes little sense. The Mortal Kombat audience is not platform-specific.

The best way to show you care about your fan is to produce a quality, fun title. In the opinion of a good friend of mine (who has been a diehard MK fan since the beginning) their most recent title - MK vs DC Comics - was garbage, a cheap cash-in; this may be part of the root of their most recent financial troubles.

Lowering the quality of their visuals wouldn't necessarily help, either. Mega man always had a more "retro" look because mega man started out as maybe 14 pixels; Mortal Kombat started life as, essentially, photographs. Users have come to appreciate the improved visuals, in the characters and the detailed game worlds (in both "adventure" and classic fight modes), so I think it might come as an unwelcome surprise to change their artistic direction so drastically.

Looking back on my comment about MK vs DC, actually... that may be an example of your advice in action.

I don't think Midway has the resources to get into publishing either, at the moment. Considering they have 50 days to come up with $240 million dollars, with $10 million on-hand they really only have a few options:

1) sell out to someone with some sort of repayment plan
2) start development on a new title and somehow work out the royalties so their debt gets paid off, with the great possibility of the guarantor becoming far better off than Midway (as long as Midway's debt is paid)
3) turn CD-Rs into solid gold via alchemy.

One more thing:

Your comment about how early games only took a few months to make... games nowadays are expected to do far more now than they were then. Even relatively simple games take OVER 6 months to produce, usually 10-12 months, and that's for something like a puzzle game. AAA titles are typically in the range of 24 months if not more.

Coming from a game development student (and junior developer), I recommend you take a step back and re-evaluate your stance. I'm not trying to attack you personally (although it may seem like it) but I think you might need a fresher perspective.

It's hard to say what they can do. Dropping the prices on all Midway games i think would help;last second advertisements; downloadable content. But to somehow pull 200 million in less then 2 months is near impossible especially with out ecomomy. They made some terrible moves to get where they are. In the end i personally think they made too many "safe" moves with their game-play because nothing stood out..nothing was special.

And not to single you out Patrick, but to restrict yourself to one console is ridiculous. It's either you make a good game or you don't, plain and simple. The only way to do it right is with a game that stands out and they didn't set themselves up to have that power (think Gears of war, that game took over 5 years)Your time constraint on a "quick" game is like an Iphone game or internet game. I worked with contractors that said Midways management was terrible. They just never did they're homework.

I really think they never grew with the times. The suffering was a good game with lots of possiblities but the sequel was weaker then the first! All i gotta say is " you shoulda kept pac-man in your pipeline"

One of my key points was that Midway is not the powerful multiplatform publisher/developer that they used to. Also, they didn't even start out developing for platforms as their history is in the arcades. If they are broke they have to scale back what they do and worry about their bottom line. Single platform has worked for several companies like Rare,Square, Konami(has been mainly playstation focused), Tecmo(although the went downhill once Itagaki left), capcom(barely released anything on n64 to great success), Namco avoided Nintendo like a plague for years. If they have talent on multiple teams than that talent will not get to work together. Talented people working together is always better. Look at how Sega went down in Quality.

Just because games take long periods of time nowadays doesn't mean they can't make a great game in a short period of time. Their staff is obviously bigger than in the old days of maybe 10-16 people, and technology is even better than before. Its possible to make an old style game much faster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSwaMnXvbKs

check that out, don't tell me mk can't be done like that. I think seriously that Midway screwed up by changing the style of gameplay for mortal kombat games. The graphics have gotten better, but i'd take the Eurocom developed mk4 over Armageddon, or mk vs dc any day. That's not to say they should ditch the 3d engine altogether. Maybe they could rebrand it. After all I'm pretty sure most gamers will acknowledge that the new mortal kombat games have been nothing more than tekken/soul calibur clones.