Perfect Dark Cancelled, The Initiative Shut Down

You'd think after 7 years they could at least shit out some 5-10 hour long Game Pass exclusive before shutting down.
Or a remake of the original... surely a good idea for a first game and revive the ip a bit?
It feels like too many people just got jobs in creative industries just to pay bills and have no care for releasing a product. Bunker down like this 6/7 times and retire. Closing the whole studio is the only option.
 
I still think it's western, because I can name of a few successful examples (see if you can spot the trend):

  • Kojima Productions
  • Tango Gameworks
  • Grasshopper Manufacture (admittedly more AA)
  • RGG (was spun out of Sega A&M to make Yakuza games)
Western new studio specifically build to churn out AAA right after their inception I can only think of Respawn, and with TF 1&2 not really selling as expected, with probably insane expectations, TF3 might have killed them, while APEX then kinda happened. EA bought them before Apex, so I guess they bet on Apex working out, but would have closed them EA-style if not.
 
What I find odd is the narrative that A.I. replaced everyone's jobs at Xbox

AI isn't making this game now is it
I bet this is just self marketing. That's the message they want to send to shareholders, press and the rest of the world. ai isn't doing shit at Microsoft. The reason they needed these cuts is years of bad management and biting off more than they could chew in terms of aquisitions.
 
So this game was either years off from release or broken beyond repair.
I doubt they'd cancel something they'd at least try to wring some money out of, even if it was a last-ditch effort. See also Redfall.
 
Re: 7 years dev and only a vertical slice (or a fake gameplay demo as previously reported)

So how many times was the game scraped and rebuilt from the start? You don't go 7 years without having many failed versions.
 
Nothing can beat Concord for sure, this would have been another PD Zero at its best.

PD Zero wouldn't even be that bad if they fixed some of the controls and improved the enemy AI.
honestly, maybe they should make a remake of PD Zero on a lower budget... surely when there's a whole game as a direction to follow they can't fuck it up... right?
 
PD Zero wouldn't even be that bad if they fixed some of the controls and improved the enemy AI.
honestly, maybe they should make a remake of PD Zero on a lower budget... surely when there's a whole game as a direction to follow they can't fuck it up... right?

This trailer looked pretty ambitious but I guess the management felt too little too late, if this is all they had to show after 7 years of Dev.
 
This trailer looked pretty ambitious but I guess the management felt too little too late, if this is all they had to show after 7 years of Dev.

and I don't understand how that can even be. it really feels like that most western AAA devs can't properly develop gameplay and game design concepts anymore. and without a concept as a direction, you'll just be stuck in an endless loop of prototyping some bullshit noone will follow up on.

it can't be this hard to make a new PD title. I bet if you gave a group of 30 hardcore Perfect Dark fans with game dev experience a AA budget, you'd have a decent concept developed within 3-6 months. and a fully developed game in like 3 years.
 
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