After three years in development, Surreal Software’s This is Vegas has finally succumbed to cancellation. A source has told CVG that the project has been canned by Warner Bros, who acquired the game from Midway in June when it purchased the company’s assets for a cool $33 million. Surreal Software had already been disbanded by Warner Bros, with members of its staff going to other local Seattle studios like Monolith and Snowblind.
"Apparently the entire This Is Vegas project has been totally canned," the source said. "Midway spent in the region of $43 million up to the point when it was being sold to WB. Alan Patmore, who was [Surreal] studio boss, either left or was let go - but considering the resources and art created this is a lot of work down the drain.”
"It was moving along to a point where the title was on the schedule for release late last year - but still needed another eight months to a year to finish with a studio burn rate of $250,000 per month,” continued the source. "It's a ridiculous waste of money, a silly budget when you think that games like Konami's Saw - which made profit - were built with around $3m and BlackLight Tango Down was made for $2.5m."
Duke Nukem Forever still stands ahead when it comes to money wasted on the killed project, but this is still a pretty galling example of wasted development.
1 Comments
August 25, 2010
It's not too surprising, considering that WB has slashed and burned much of what the former Midway Studios was doing. They probably cut it because the return on investment for This is Vegas probably wouldn't have very good ROI, when you add in the remaining dev cost and marketing.