In the current economic climate, things are tough. Really tough. Mickey Rourke tough. That’s why, based on the hunch that things will get better before they get worse, I’m turning this article into a semi-regular feature titled “Desperate Measures,” since these are desperate times. I would have called the column “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures,” but since I’ve only got 530 pixels or so to play with in the column width it seemed a bit long. Oh, I’m digressing…

Anyway, Crystal Dynamics, the American team behind the past few Tomb Raider efforts, have been ordered by publisher Eidos to shed a few staff lately, with the current recession among other things to blame. What else though? Join me after the jump for the answers!

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You’ve managed to read something about the economy without falling asleep, and are a supreme intellectual amongst the rest of us. Here’s the story so far with Eidos, and Crystal Dynamics in particular.

The team behind the Gex and Legacy of Kain franchises, were given the chance to redeem the Tomb Raider series a few years ago following lackluster PS2 effort The Angel of Darkness after the original developers, UK-based Core Design, effectively murdered their own creation.

The re-invented franchise (literally at one point with almost-exact remake of the original game, Anniversary) has gone down well with critics so far. The thing is, two successes in a row can build an ungodly amount of hype, and by ‘ungodly’ I mean ’simply impossible to live up to’.

Tomb Raider: Underworld felt the wrath of this hype, and a spate of mixed reviews reflected this view. What made the situation worse was Eidos’ insistence that reviews were made to follow its direction – much like Kane & Lynch in 2007 – and all reviews that gave the game a score of less than 8 out of 10 were to be held off until the game hit the shelves. I highly doubt that helped sales at all.

Overall, I feel that Underworld’s poor sales performance can be put down to Eidos’ self-generated negative publicity, the mixed reviews and the fact that it was simply another Tomb Raider game. Underworld played very similarly to Legend and Anniversary and so was a little on the boring side…perhaps that’s why this morning’s news isn’t really coming to me as a shock.

Well, half of it isn’t anyway. Because Underworld sold 500,000 copies fewer than Eidos had forecast (that’s about £20million or $29.7million) Crystal Dynamics have slashed their numbers by 30, under order from their publisher, so that the team can focus entirely on Tomb Raider games in the future, rather than have the team split up to work on different projects.

Along with the downsizing, Eidos have admitted to The Times in the UK that Lara Croft will be on the receiving end of yet another makeover sometime in the near future. Why, though? Page two has the details on the other desperate measures being taken by a publisher in trouble

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