Gearbox outsourced Colonial Marines to other studio

Whispers from "inside sources" are pushing the blame for broken game Aliens: Colonial Marines from Boarderlands developer Gearbox and onto Section 8 developer TimeGate.

According to an article on Kotaku, reliable but anonymous sources have claimed that much of the title's development was outsourced to TimeGate in order to free up GearBox to focus efforts on Boarderlands 2.

Originally announced in 2006, the title was handed over for development by publisher Sega, however, financial troubles shook the company and it felt pressured back proven success story Boarderlands 2 over the untested Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The decision was made to outsource much of the development to TimeGate in 2010, with both studios reportedly happy about the direction that the game was going.

It soon became clear that muddled oversight, with both Gearbox and Sega watching over TimeGate's work, had led to a lack of direction.

"There was also the 'too many chefs' syndrome when it came to gameplay, where too many people gave feedback on both ends and it ultimately led to further delays... In one case, working on a particular task took me a month to finalise, as there was inconsistent and delayed feedback," explained an inside source.

Furthermore, sources claimed that major design and story decisions had not been made well into 2011.

"For a couple months, we were just kind of guessing," a source told the site. "It's really weird to work on a game when you don't have a basic idea of how things will work."

James Lee

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James Lee is a freelance writer and analyst with extensive experience in the technology, media and games sectors. For the past few years he has provided content for internationally published industry reports, SEO companies and a variety of news-focused websites. Prior to this, James was responsible for covering news and producing in-depth features for GamesIndustry.biz while occasionally contributing to its sister-site. Eurogamer.net. In addition to this he has contributed to other notable sites such as CVG.co.uk, Edge-Online and DigitalSpy.