Former Darkside Games employees blame Microsoft’s unrealistic expectations for the studio’s closure
Small video game studios are often at the mercy of their gigantic publishing partners, and it can be painful for fans to watch developers get chewed up by the corporate machines of companies like Electronic Arts Inc and Activision Publishing Inc.
Former employees of a small-time studio called Darkside Games say they got to experience that process first-hand when it teamed up with Microsoft Corp to produce a Xbox One reboot of Phantom Dust.
Phantom Dust was a commercial failure when it released on the original Xbox, but it later became I minor cult hit. Darkside Games signed on to reboot the series as a multiplayer-only game for Xbox One, but after a series of directional changes mandated by Microsoft, the studio found it was unable to complete the game with the $5 million budget it was given.
“They decided that fans were gonna want a single-player game,” a source told Kotaku. “But they weren’t going to change the budget or the timeframe.”
The studio was forced to hire additional employees to cope with the new single-player element it was told to include, but its resources remained the same.
The team was also surprised to see a pre-rendered trailer of their game during E3. The trailer was not made by anyone at Darkside, and it used none of their assets or designs.
“We didn’t even know if they were going to show it,” a source said. “Basically what they showed had nothing to do with the game whatsoever. We had no idea that was even happening… It was like, ‘Holy crap, now fans are expecting characters to look like that, and that’s not what we’re making.’”
As the scope for the game continued to grow, Darkside found itself unable to live up to Microsoft’s lofty expectations. The studio created a short vertical slice of the game to demonstrate what it had to offer and convince Microsoft to put more money into the project, but instead Microsoft decided to cancel the game entirely, forcing Darkside to lay off its entire staff.
“When it came down to it, the game they wanted could not be done,” a source familiar with Darkside told Kotaku. “We could not make them the game they wanted for the budget they had.”
photo credit: insidethemagic via photopin cc
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