There’s no proof, but here’s the deductive reasoning:
Point One: Platinum makes games very, very quickly.
No Platinum title has ever had a development cycle of more than 30 months at the absolute most. Most have development times of far less. NiER was announced in 2015 and is about to come out. That’s a dev time of like, two years at most, counting work that was likely done before we ever saw it. Transformers Devastation was a year. Bayonetta 2 was around 2 years. MGR was like ONE year.
Platinum taking four years to make a game is wildly out of character for them, and no publisher has EVER had this issue before with Platinum, even when they were working on upwards of SIX TITLES at once.
Kamiya tweets ‘what the fuck are these microsoft fucks shitting with me?’
Game vanished for two solid years
Comes back as a massive multiplayer game with 4 player co-op.
Impossible not to put the pieces together here. Microsoft kept changing what they wanted and eventually pulled their same bullshit they always do.
Point Two: Microsoft does this shit all the time
Microsoft doesn’t like to cancel games outright. This requires them to pay a fee for breach of contract. Instead, they do something that is depressingly common in the industry: they shift goalposts and change roadmarkers, then cancel a game when their unreasonable demands cannot be met.
Platinum is the third studio this happened to (that we know about.)
The first was Obsidian who got dicked over so bad they had to go to Kickstarter to save themselves.
And while we don’t have a clear story on it, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what fucked over Lionhead and Fable Legends, as well.
Point Three: This is happening to every fucking Microsoft Game
Every single game Microsoft has funded themselves lately has either been canceled, vanished, or come out rushed and broken.
Crackdown is MIA and is reportedly having troubles, been totally missing for three years.
Cuphead keeps being delayed and went from a boss rush game to a game with platforming levels (feature creep?)
ReCore was rushed out the door and sucks.
Fable Legends was canceled.
Sunset Overdrive was rushed out the door and sucks.
Project Spark came out, sucked, and then had it’s plug pulled.
Do we know 100% that Scalebound wasn’t on Platinum? No.
But considering Platinum has a history of making good games on a short time frame and Microsoft has a history of fucking developers they contract with up the ass, I don’t see ANY reason to give Microsoft even the slightest benefit of doubt.
