It's always sad to see people getting fired. It would be interesting to know the real amount of the people fired and the size of the studio. If they really fired around 90 people and the studio was barely above 100 people, seems that the game didn't progress as needed, got canned due to not achieving the proper quality and the studio very likely will be shut down. Specially if the Final Strike story was true and if Final Strike was supporting this game.
If they were like almost 150 and fired around a dozen people, maybe could be that as part of yearly appraisal reviews some people got fired because of not being productive enough, not achieved enough quality, having caused an important issue, etc. That would be part of the normal behavior of a company, where some people leave or get fired every year while other one get hired. So there's the probability of the studio continuing alive and the game not being canned. There's also the possibility that the Final Strike story wasn't true or weren't working in this project.
Maybe there's a middleground: maybe the game looked too bad but not bad enough to cancel the game and to shut down the studio, so asked to reboot the project meaning that they start it almost from scratch again with major changes and a good chunk of the studio -but not all- gets laid off because did an bad job and take responsability for it, plus maybe they weren't going to have anything to do during several months or even some year.
These gass games getting chopped real quick. Firewalk game must be really ,really good. They got purchased after.
Cancelling games is something normal that happened since the '70s, but back then nobody noticed it. In fact nowadays many games GaaS and non GaaS get cancelled around the world and most people because are from teams people don't care about or because people doesn't notice it specially when the game is an unannounced title from a big studio with money that doesn't need to shut down when their game (in many cases one of multiple games being developed in the studio) gets canned.
Based on what though? There was some hope they'd produce something good based on some ex COD team members but that's about it, they have no development history otherwise
Well, it isn't only ex-CoD staff, they had many people from several top shooters released in the last decade or so. They have/had a very talented and experienced team.
Got to say this isn’t a good look. Idk how the development was going but the optics look bad imo. A first party game made by former cod devs couldn’t work out? Wonder if their project was too similar to bungies stuff? Or firewalls game was further in development and essentially covered the same genre (sci fi) so one had to be cut?
What with the acquisitions budget being slashed and studio closures you’d think Sony was the one that just put out redfall.
Big publishers have an editorial team who set a roadmap of releases and when greenlighting games they take care that their games don't overlap too much and differentiate them enought to make sure that there's a market for each game.
I mean, they realize games are too similar when greenlighting them, not in the middle of the development. Sony won't have realized now that this game is too similar to maybe some Bungie one or the Firewalk one etc., if that would be the case they would have noticed it when greenlighting / signing them.
And well, at this point the game was well into development, it isn't that they shown them the first prototype now. If the game has been canned now, it has been because it didn't achieve pretty likely multiple milestones with the required quality or in time.
I mean, most games have delays to pass some failed milestone. Some even continue and miss a couple milestones but get completed. If they decide to cancel a game it's because the game clearly doesn't have the required quality and it's clear that can't be fixed with some extra time, resources or a reasonable amount of changes.
If the issues are structural and they see that the quality is too low and won't end being good enough, it gets axed and as soon as possible to send the minimal possible amount of work to the garbage bin.
If a game has to be cancelled, better to cancel the work of 150 people after a couple years than to cancel the work of 2500 people after four years.
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