Probably one of the most talked-about game series that’s been pushed for a reboot by fans is TimeSplitters. The ill-fated fourth instalment of the game was in development back in 2008 by Free Radical, but fell apart when the company went bankrupt. The company has since been incorporated into Crytek, and is now known as Crytek UK.

Pretty much consistently for the last four years, fans have been calling for the game to get a reboot, and one of the means by which fans hope this can be done is through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. However, former Free Radical founder Steve Ellis said in an interview with Not Enough Shaders that this isn’t feasible.

Dismissing any chances that his current game studio Crash Lab (which contains several former Free Radical staff) will reboot the series due to the obvious fact that Crytek owns the IP, Ellis also said pointed out the problems in Kickstarting the series.

personally I don’t think that it is currently possible. I think that the novelty of Kickstarter and the surrounding press coverable were a large part of the reason that Double Fine were able to raise as much as they did. I don’t expect games to be routinely funded that way, and I don’t expect that figure to be significantly exceeded any time soon. However, FPS’s are much more expensive to develop than point & click adventure games… A modern FPS would require several times as much funding, and I don’t think that that is currently achievable using Kickstarter.

This seems like a fair statement, given that most of the Kickstarter games are certainly not big-budget blockbusters. To put it into perspective, the most funding ever received for a Kickstarter game is $3.3m for Double Fine Adventure. A game like Battlefield 3, on the other hand, costs around $30m to develop.

Recently, a Facebook group was set up to campaign for the release of a new TimeSplitters game, with over 35,000 people currently being signed up. Crytek have acknowledged this recent push, but also stated that there is not currently ‘enough interest’ to warrant making a new game. Looks like we’ll just have to keep on pushing…