Bizarre got caught in Activision switching its business strategy. All acti are doing is looking for the developer to give them that next COD or Guitar Hero or Tony Hawk. Thats why they've bought Bungie and Bizarre. Its just not worth it for them to manage run of the mill small studios. Looking back at Bizarre's catalog - yes as gamers PGR4 was a good game but I dont think it sold that many copies, similarly The Club was a fail and Blur. Nothing in Bizarre's catalog since PGR3 screams that they will make the next COD or Guitar Hero certainly if Bizarre had already decided to start Blur 2, Acti probably figured they would just cut them.
Being a gamer I'm outraged that a talented developer like Bizarre is gone now, but it doesn't surprise me given how poor Bizarre's recent games performance have turned out...
The thing is I've always said, Blur was technically a really good racing game, but no one ever thought about the marketability of the game at all. the weapon system mechanically was great and worked great, but it looked like ass and when u put that up against something like Split/Second which people 'get' straight away, its going to lose out. That said I don't think Modnation did that well either!
What I will miss most about Bizarre is that we probably won't ever get to see another game like PGR2, with 10 REAL cities all around the globe with places we've never seen again in Video Games Sydney, Hong Kong, Washington, Barca, Florence, Stockholm, Yokohama, Edinburgh, Moscow radio stations from each country, huge amount of tracks, first really playable online driving game for me - and all the little touches - it was a masterpiece. Then I think they lost their way a little with PGR3 cutting corners to make it in time for launch - bringing back pretty much the same cities in PGR1 and personally all the exoticness was lost from PGR2 with cities like London, Tokyo and New York in an effort to sell the most copies i imagine. PGR4 for me while technically a great game was also a disappointment - the new cities were great but they added on the old cities again to increase the amount of content which really made it feel like i was playing one part new game and one part old, plus bikes really should have been an extra unlockable at the end of the game not part of the game.
But RIP Bizarre - you had talent, and all you should have done was make another PGR2 game, you got close in PGR4 but some cheap design decisions kept it from being another masterpiece