Interesting, but they seemed to specialize in an increasingly niche genere, combined with a horrible case of developer arrogance. Even within that genere they seemed to be ignoring what the actual players wanted, and just did whatever they thought was cool at the time, figuring it would sell and justify itself. I think the question aimed at Blur: "who was this game directed at", pretty much summarized their problem, and this didn't seem to be the first game with that problem.
It's sad to see a company that has been around for more than a decade go out of business, but at the same time, that's the nature of business. Even in a multi-billion dollar industry it's competitive, and there is a point at which even among prima-donnas it's possible to just become too big of a prima donna by not performing well enough in concert with that attitude.
I don't think bail outs for game developers are a good idea in cases like this, when they are basically paying the price for bad products in a competitive industry. Perhaps if the industry was dying as a whole due to foreign competition, and you were dealing with a company going down for reasons beyond it's direct control it would be differant, but that isn't what we're looking at.
Heart wrecnching as a video game fan, and even more so for their fanbase, but really I can't see how this one is unjustified, nor can I blame activision for them not getting the job done. "Blur" was pretty much their last chance, and they really did seem to go veering off down a crazy path that seemed to be detached from anything the people in the racing fan base wanted. Even a quality product has to be appealing, and an expensive one has to be appealing to a lot of people.
