Bulletstorm 2 canned, original hurt by poor port and piracy on PC

It's a tough industry for a new series.

It's a tough industry for a new series. As someone who very much enjoyed Bulletstorm's gorgeous, bombastic shoot-outs, I quietly hoped that People Can Fly had done enough to earn a sequel. Sadly, it's not to be. Epic Games president Mike Capps has told Gamespotthat while Bulletstorm was "very critically successful," it was merely "good, but not amazing" in the sales department. "I think EA was hoping we'd do better," he says.

Capps mentioned that some initial design work was done on Bulletstorm 2, but it's since been spiked in favour of other projects. He also admits that Bulletstorm underperformed on PC, and gives a couple of reasons. You can probably guess the main one. It begins with "P," is an anagram of CRAPYI, and rhymes with "biracy."

"It didn't do very well on PC" he said, "and I think a lot of that was due to piracy. It wasn't the best PC port ever, sure, but also piracy was a pretty big problem."

Aside from the field of view (easily fixed with some .ini tweaks), Games for Windows Live was the biggest bane of my time with Bulletstorm, a service that only seemed happy to sign me in once I'd sacrificed a small animal in its name. The rest, including the extraordinarily bloody co-op, provided some very satisfying shooting, and is still one of the only games that lets players kick enemies into cacti for points. You can try it out for yourself in the Bulletstorm demo on Steam.

It's not all bad news, though. Developers People Can Fly are still together, and are working on something new. "we found a project that we thought was a better fit for People Can Fly," said Capps. "We haven't announced that yet, but we will be announcing it pretty soon." Hopefully it'll be a 70s cops and robbers caper called Mulletstorm.