I think there were a lot of factors to the demise of UT3.
(in no particular order)
* The success of UT
* The success of UT2004
* The fact that UT3 was a hybrid of sorts of the two above mentioned successful games.
* UT3 was expensive, and demanded expensive hardware, and in a genre where framerate is so critical, UT2004 performs extremely fast and looks very good on new budget CPU/GPU. Paying more and getting less framerate performance is hard to swallow when considering the game is so similar to it's predecessors. (Game Innovation/Gameplay is better for sales than graphics)
* Many like to wait for the price to drop before buying. By the time the price had dropped, very few were playing, making would-be late adopters less likely to adopt the game.
* The crash of Nali City (THE online place to browse for information/reviews on maps and DL them)
* The recent popularity of modern warfare FPS games.
* The masses thinking games like Halo 1/2/3 and other over-hyped games are better than UT1/2/3 (or, 99/04/07)
* Console systems like the Xbox 360 and PS3 finally running at resolutions above SDTV. (Even though Halo 3 itself couldn't even muster the HD spec of 720p, and renders the game at 1152x640 and then upsamples)
* Console Systems getting online multiplayer down well to the point where people actually get internet without having a PC/Mac.
* The negative rep Vista is getting (and PC gaming along with it)
* The economy

i remember before UT3, in the source modding scene there were a lot of people who were like "ayup, when that game comes out, I'm modding for it and dropping hl2 forever."
I wonder what ever happened to those guys.

They found out that contrary to expectations, UT3 was actually less moddable than UT2004. Another reason why UT3 failed.

Duplicate post.

I like GOG.com a lot. Gaining satisfaction at the bankruptcy of another company isn't very cool though. The loss of jobs, etc, especially in a struggling economy. Not very nice. I run a business myself, however I never feel joy or 'satisfaction' when a competition goes down, it means someone is struggling: the owner, the employees (and their families), the investors, and the customers.
Feel bad yet? :)

He never said that he did. He said he gained satisfaction that the 100% sure fire hit Midway would rather invest in than The Witcher, turned out to be a huge flop, while The Witcher was a hit. Midway did not go bankrupt because of Gauntlet. They went bankrupt because of a lot of "Gauntlets", so to speak. It just goes to show that the people who run Midway are not in touch with their target demographic. Don't blame that on GOG, who are in touch with their target demographic.

Expressing satisifaction at another companies failure on any scale is just bad PR.
I am not blaming GOG.com at all; I have great respect for this company. I merely have an issue with the 'personal satisifaction' comment.

Oh common, you can't tell me that you wouldn't smile after reading that the company that said "you're not good enough" has gone belly up, while you're still around. That's human. And if anything, I prefer dealing with humans instead of commercial entities where everything has to be sent to the PR department for approval first.

I'm going to have to mail this entire post to my father. We both love Gauntlet, and do agree that it has gone so downhill as of late. (The last good one I remember was the port to the PSX for Gauntlet Legends). Big Budgets do NOT mean big turn arounds, and even then The Witcher is STILL one of my favorite games.

No need to justify your previous post. We're all human and that means we laugh at the misfortune of the ones who hurt us. Even EA's PR department probably laughs at such occasions, they're just not honest enough to admit it.

I would imagine Midway probably laughed at themselves a bit too. Maybe not anyone who had a serious stake in the matter, but the developers who sort of just float around from company to company, probably don't care.

The only notable games that I liked from Midway were Psi-Ops and The Suffering.
The rest isn't really worth my time.

They've spent the past 5 years basically rehashing Mortal Kombat and Gauntlet over and over and over again. No big shock they're pretty much done.