Scalebound cancelled [Platinum Games and Kamiya have commented]

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While it'd be awesome to see him come out on stage, rejuvenated, and on the fast track on a new game, like Kojima. I feel like there's no chance of that happening.

If he's really breaking down from all the stress from Scalebound then i'd imagine he'd might stay away from games for a while. Maybe even enter a year long sabbatical.
Perhaps it might be good for him to take a producer role on Bayonetta 3 and allow Hashimoto to direct again.
 
Look, once upon a time I thought MS was a breath of fresh air for gaming. I grew up a Nintendo fan, but they lost their way, and Sony filled the gap with the Playstation. PSX and PS2 were amazing machines, but the PS3 started a s a major joke and screwup. Enter MS with not only the Original Xbox as an alternative to the PS2, but the 360 which was INCREDIBLE in the early days


But then, MS corporate became more involved in the games division. After the first few years of 360, more and more rehash on the box, and less variety. PS3 came roaring back with a diverse lineup, and the initial release of the XB1 was a complete failure. Nothing had changed from the late years of the 360... and the PS4 simply obliterated it. Now, in year four the PS4 is REALLY hitting its stride, and the XB1 is treading water with a great weight strapped to it and dragging it down.

Japanese publishers don't even bother with the XB1 anymore, which is sad given how EASY it is to port between these machines. But they just don't. I feel sorry for those who bought an XB1 on the promise of a "better" lineup, because from what I can tell unless you like more Halo, Forza, or their "clones", you are SOL


Basically, at this point there is zero chance I would buy the Scorpio. Don't care how pretty the games are. Hopefully, Nintendo makes enough of a comeback that MS will be forced to go back to a more innovative approach, or quit gaming all together.



My guess is that the next big bomb will be Square pulling all future support for the box as well. They already have pulled everything that isn't the latest FF, or possibly KH. No chance at anything like DQ, or anything more niche.

Great point, I feel like the original Kinect for Xbox 360 started the downfall where Microsoft's stride slowed down completely rehashing their staple of games and at that same time PS3 ramped up with a great diverse lineup of games. That was truly the turning point and MS has never recovered.
 
Project Spark
Kinect 2.0
Xbox Fitness
and the failure that was Quantum Break/Tv stuff.

All the stuff that they banked on just fails hard or doesn't even see the light of day. Someone said in this thread Microsoft was quite fluid, I'd say that for this gen they are literally liquid shit.

Hahahaha
 
Games-wise, maybe. Overall I get the impression that they bank on offering the most powerful console ever.
Power don't mean shit when your only exclusives are tired and lacking. Also combine that with the lineup of exclusives from Sony and Microsoft is looking well.... soft.
 
Didn't look that great, however it would have been nice for Microsoft to show some Goodwill to their fans and see this one through. They have a pretty abysmal exclusive line up as it is. This brand has really taken a hit with Spencer in charge, not sure why he gets so much love on this board.
 
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how the contract was written. In these relationships, the publishers have all the power. Even if they are being unreasonable, typically developers have little recourse. They either agree to these milestones and hopefully get paid, or they don't, development stops, and the small dev doesn't have the money to keep the lights on. They can sue the publisher, but then their game probably never gets made, AND they are now labeled a problem to work with to all the other publishers. Not that it matters, because again, by the time the lawsuit is done, even if the dev wins, they have already had to shut down.

It's fucked up. It doesn't happen all the time, but it absolutely has happened, and will again.

The publisher doesn't have all the power. There are literally hundreds of thousands of indies out there. You mean to tell me that these indies are beholden to the big publishers? Once upon a time you could group all these kinds of people together. A union of sorts. Say alll of a sudden EA didn't get any indie submissions. I'm just talking out loud here.

So say all of a sudden a young upstart publishes all of their games. Has the full support of the "union".

Seriously all, places like GOG are trying to compete and they're giving you awesome bonuses to do so. So compete with them.
 
It was apparent halfway through the 360 gen that they were trading on being the multi platform machine with little else dev. MS are great at hardware launches so the Kinect launch glossed over this somewhat (outside of that, the E3's then were dire for unique titles). It's become particularly noticeable this time as the X1 didn't ignite after the launch flurry.

If you look at Sony and the PS3, they continued to pump out games, lots of which were "ok", but they kept up with support for the userbase. This seems like where MS are completely dropped off. I wouldn't be surprised if they are banking on Scorpio taking the third party power crown.
 
The publisher doesn't have all the power. There are literally hundreds of thousands of indies out there. You mean to tell me that these indies are beholden to the big publishers? Once upon a time you could group all these kinds of people together. A union of sorts. Say alll of a sudden EA didn't get any indie submissions. I'm just talking out loud here.

So say all of a sudden a young upstart publishes all of their games. Has the full support of the "union".

Seriously all, places like GOG are trying to compete and they're giving you awesome bonuses to do so. So compete with them.

When you sign contracts to develop games that cost upward of $50 million dollars of someone else's money...

That "someone else" has all that power.
 
Huh, is that really the first time you ever encountered that phrase? I always thought it's pretty common usage with relation to competitive markets and politics.
It is, but hey someone learns something for the first time every day.

It's like when people swarm a Rolling Stones sing on YouTube because it was in a CoD trailer.
 
It was apparent halfway through the 360 gen that they were trading on being the multi platform machine with little else dev. MS are great at hardware launches so the Kinect launch glossed over this somewhat (outside of that, the E3's then were dire for unique titles). It's become particularly noticeable this time as the X1 didn't ignite after the launch flurry.

If you look at Sony and the PS3, they continued to pump out games, lots of which were "ok", but they kept up with support for the userbase. This seems like where MS are completely dropped off. I wouldn't be surprised if they are banking on Scorpio taking the third party power crown.

Most Sony first party titles, based on the common consensus, are more than just okay.
 
The publisher doesn't have all the power. There are literally hundreds of thousands of indies out there. You mean to tell me that these indies are beholden to the big publishers? Once upon a time you could group all these kinds of people together. A union of sorts. Say alll of a sudden EA didn't get any indie submissions. I'm just talking out loud here.

So say all of a sudden a young upstart publishes all of their games. Has the full support of the "union".

Seriously all, places like GOG are trying to compete and they're giving you awesome bonuses to do so. So compete with them.
If an indie in interested in doing AA or AAA work and has already made an agreement with a publisher, then yes they have very little power.

I don't really know what the rest of your post has to do with this discussion.
 
The publisher doesn't have all the power. There are literally hundreds of thousands of indies out there. You mean to tell me that these indies are beholden to the big publishers? Once upon a time you could group all these kinds of people together. A union of sorts. Say alll of a sudden EA didn't get any indie submissions. I'm just talking out loud here.

So say all of a sudden a young upstart publishes all of their games. Has the full support of the "union".

Seriously all, places like GOG are trying to compete and they're giving you awesome bonuses to do so. So compete with them.

Indies publish their own games on a small scale basis. Some gets a big publisher to back it up during development, but a lot of them just self-publish them when done.
 
The publisher doesn't have all the power. There are literally hundreds of thousands of indies out there. You mean to tell me that these indies are beholden to the big publishers? Once upon a time you could group all these kinds of people together. A union of sorts. Say alll of a sudden EA didn't get any indie submissions. I'm just talking out loud here.

So say all of a sudden a young upstart publishes all of their games. Has the full support of the "union".

Seriously all, places like GOG are trying to compete and they're giving you awesome bonuses to do so. So compete with them.

Platinum is not a small indie. It's a 200 person studio that needs contracts from publishers to survive.

That's not a studio size that can survive on a few store bonuses and kickstarter money.


Obsidian, pretty much the only studio in a similar positoin i can recall, had to cut a ton of staff after their last bigger contract fell trough because it's really hard for a studio that size to find work. That's also the reason that independent studios that size are almost extint.
 
Games-wise, maybe. Overall I get the impression that they bank on offering the most powerful console ever.
When all those games can be played on a better PC?. They need more first party asap, I've been an Xbox fan from day one but the past few years since the launch of Kinect they seem to be going from one mess up to the next. I'm tired of gears forza halo I've spent thousands of hours on those now and although I liked the last gears and halo they are my least played games in the series by a complete mile, I've not even finished the latest halo when in the past I'd have beat it on every difficulty as well as in coop multiple times by now. They need new fresh ip, scalebound was one of the new titles I was looking forward to, ill but a Scorpio not because of software sea of thieves apart but because I buy consoles, the Xbox brand feels like it's at a cross roads, they either knuckle down and produce new ip or things might get worse.
 
Power don't mean shit when your only exclusives are tired and lacking. Also combine that with the lineup of exclusives from Sony and Microsoft is looking well.... soft.

It seems to me they just called it a day in this regard. They tried to come up with exciting new IPs in the last 3-4 years, I give them that. But so far no IP even came close to the success of Halo and Gears (not even Halo and Gears themselves), and they failed to make another one which gathered a solid fanbase like Forza.

And nothing in their currently announced line-up makes me think this is going to change anytime soon.

We are now entering Scorpio year without MS being able to deliver a proper killer app for that new system. Instead all will be about "Power!" and "4k!".
 
Why is thread nearing 6k replies?

The fucking OT would have ended with half of that. This isn't that big of a deal, guys. Game looked shit, move on.
People were looking forward to this, people are worried about the state of ms first party offerings. If a big first party title had been cancelled on any console it would generate a big thread.
 
I agree with a lot of opinions of it not looking good but i did have some hope. I didn't like the main protagonist but I'm more of a gameplay guy and PG makes engaging gameplay.
I thought it looked like something they could polish and refine but was not sure how much i would enjoy.
What kept my interest was the co-op! I thought that would have been awesome if they could manage to put everything together. I guess they couldn't at the end ad it sounds like PG kinda gave up on it with multiple high profile people leaving for months. That must have put them really behind.
I can really see why MS cancelled it. I'm tempted to blame those people who left for months. That must have hurt the project a lot. Sucks but if they couldn't handle it then its good to take a break for ones own health.
And of course there are multiple sides to a story and bugs me when people don't realize this and blame one party for a failure.
 
Ugh. The game looked a bit of a mess in footage but seemed to be quite far on.

Strange one to cancel. I wonder if they were afraid of another Recore disappointment in regards to sales and review scores.

Should have just kept going and release it MS. Not every game can be a Forza or Gears of War.
 
It's also a big deal for people who love Hideki Kamiya or care about the future of Platinum Games.

yep

Quite a few of us have been fans of the team's work for years. I've been following Kamiya's games since Devil May Cry 1 and it really fucking bums me out that his dream game just got cancelled. Even if the demos didn't look so great, I'd be more than willing to try the final work considering how special his games are to me. Bayonetta, Viewtiful Joe, and Okami are all incredibly important games to me and it's sad to know this got cancelled.

Plus, the fact that a good chunk of the studio is not working on a game now is a big deal. It's going to have some serious effect on them and I don't want to see that after Clover got shut down years ago.
 
Man, I really hope Platinum won't be hit with a lot of lay-offs because of this. Here's hoping they have several other projects going we don't know about yet. (I can see Nintendo paying again for a Switch exclusive)
 
Why is thread nearing 6k replies?

The fucking OT would have ended with half of that. This isn't that big of a deal, guys. Game looked shit, move on.
? Wonderful 101 got 144 pages despite being on a far deader console and the game being a bomba. Scalebound OT would easily outdo that.
 
Man, 130+ pages? MS really kicked the hornet's nest with this one.
Which is weird because I don't know anyone who was interested in it. I remember watching the E3 2015 Demo live stream and all of my friends thought it looked like shit. Hell I remember as recently as last week people here on neogaf were basically saying Scalebound wasn't a worthy AAA Exclusive worth mentioning compared to Sony's games when starting list wars.
 
Which is weird because I don't know anyone who was interested in it. I remember watching the E3 2015 Demo live stream and all of my friends thought it looked like shit. Hell I remember as recently as last week people here on neogaf were basically saying Scalebound wasn't a worthy AAA Exclusive worth mentioning compared to Sony's games when starting list wars.

Its not so much people liking the game as how it represents the state of the Xbox brand right now.
 
Which is weird because I don't know anyone who was interested in it. I remember watching the E3 2015 Demo live stream and all of my friends thought it looked like shit. Hell I remember as recently as last week people here on neogaf were basically saying Scalebound wasn't a worthy AAA Exclusive worth mentioning compared to Sony's games when starting list wars

Trade shows don't always tell the full story. Assuming this is consistent with history. This was 4 years of money for a fantasy epic that was looking to push forward the medium by one of the best and it's now lost because games as a service and ROI as determined by MS. This game was untouchable and a prestigious project.
 
Which is weird because I don't know anyone who was interested in it. I remember watching the E3 2015 Demo live stream and all of my friends thought it looked like shit. Hell I remember as recently as last week people here on neogaf were basically saying Scalebound wasn't a worthy AAA Exclusive worth mentioning compared to Sony's games when starting list wars.
Probably less about the game and more concern about Platinum.
 
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