It appears they shopped it around (probably because it has *some* name recognition) and nobody wanted it, another indication that it got cancelled for a good reason
I don't think we need to give large corporations the benefit of the doubt on the decisions they make.
It has become impossible to have a normal discussion about the industry in these threads, so I’m leaving now because that is boring to me. Don’t bother quoting me.
I don't know what this means, what qualifies as a normal discussion, why you're upset, or what you were hoping to talk or not talk about. The only takeaway I have from this is that you said you suspect Microsoft had a good reason to cancel a game, I said I suspect they don't, and that's bothering you enough that you're leaving the thread.
Anyway, I hope you come back as you're a good person who adds something to the thread, brings something to the table.
FWIW I think there's a bit of truth behind both things Interest prob isn't there in a way they want it to be and also I can't really trust what they're basing decisions off of (Love you Moose just respecting your request to not be quoted and clear up my "also true")
I’m responding despite what I said because your post is nice. What bothers me is that in most discussions like this, whenever someone makes a (good) point, someone (in this case you, but this is not personal) counters with “don’t defend corporations” or various varieties of the same sentiments. That’s fine I guess, but large corporations run this industry, and these kind of arguments thus make talking about the business side of it futile, and I like talking about the business side.
Talking about the business side is fine, but statements like "they must have had a good reason" stick in my craw, especially in the current climate where we have studios with good, relatively successful games still getting shut down and games with good buzz getting canned without a care... and hey, which company has been doing a lot of both lately? It's just depressing.
See I just happen to think that the sunk cost fallacy alone was probably a “good” enough reason in most cases. These games all took way too long and probably already cost more money than they would have made, even before marketing budgets etc. Spider Man 2 broke Sony records and didn’t make money. See Obsidian for example (to stay in the Microsoft example) actually ships games in a reasonable timeframe, hence why their games come out. Of course Perfect Dark could have somehow defied the odds, but it’s easy to see how risky it is.
I think a better discussion would be if they should ever have green-lit a AAA Perfect Dark given how risky and broken AAA development is these days
I think Perfect Dark is the kind of license that probably should not be AAA. AA at most, both because the license itself is mostly nostalgic at this point and as a game, I can't see it adding anything to the FPS table. I could see New Blood doing a good job with it.
Perfect Dark got cancelled because they’ve been working on it for over 5 years and all they had to show was a “fake” vertical slice. Current Microsoft can’t even sell people on the best Doom game, they can’t afford these ridiculous dev cycles. wishing those bozos in management the worst.