After languishing for three years in development limbo, Surreal Software’s This is Vegas was officially canceled. CVG reports the game had racked up $50 million in costs, and still required 8 months to a year of more development before completion.
Warner Brothers Entertainment, the publisher behind the game, had closed Surreal this June, splitting its remaining dev-time amongst its veteran designers, whom they moved to their other locally owned studios, Monolith and Snowblind Studios. The open-world Sin City adventure would have released sometime in the future on PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360.
That’s a crazy amount of cash to leave hanging.
I think this serves as a warning to the industry. Games are costing loads of money and by doing that the companies can’t sustain themselves. It is becoming harder and harder for publishers and devs to turn a profit when their dev costs are so high. Luckily some publishers are making games that don’t cost as much and are quality titles. I am not against high profile high budget games, but not all games have to have a huge budget. If that happens then the industry will become stagnant; which is why I like the indie market (cheaper produced games, but quality titles).