– Former Mad Catz exec (and Tritton founder) Chris von Huben, speaking to Eurogamer.
After a rough 2016 that included multi-million dollar losses and significant layoffs, video game peripheral maker Mad Catz (founded in 1989!) finally filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
So what happened?
At the time it seemed like Mad Catz slipped into a spiral after its deal to publish Harmonix’s 2015 game Rock Band 4 didn’t pay off as expected.
Now, a number of former Mad Catz employees (some of whom requested anonymity) have told Eurogamer that while that’s part of it, the problem actually began much earlier, when the company best known for gamepads and fightsticks took a shot at launching its own game development business (ThunderHawk Studios) and, after that, investing in an Android micro-console: the M.O.J.O.
“MOJO was a complete flop,” former Mad Catz exec (and Tritton founder) Chris von Huben told Eurogamer.
“The management team’s position at that point was that console was dead. The video game market and consoles were going away. They banked on that. Lo and behold, it didn’t die, and the MOJO did. It was a spiral effect. While the company was doing all this stuff, it was starving the segments of the market that were key to the success of Mad Catz, such as the controller market, Tritton and Saitek.”
He and other sources go on to speak with surprising frankness about the various decisions that brought Mad Catz to its knees in the full feature, which is well worth reading over on Eurogamer.