Published , by TJ Denzer
Published , by TJ Denzer
The matter of Scalebound has been discussed several times over at this point with both members of PlatinumGames and Microsoft, all the way up to studio heads themselves saying it was just an unfortunate situation and there were no hard feelings. However, PlatinumGames director Hideki Kamiya recently spoke to what went wrong in further detail, personally apologizing to players and explain that the developing team wasn’t “experienced enough” at the time.
Kamiya recently spoke extensively to the decisions around Scalebound and its cancellation in a video on the Cutscenes YouTube channel. It was here that Kamiya spoke extensively to what went wrong and apologized personally.
“Scalebound was a project we had teamed up on with Microsoft,” Kamiya explains. “They expected good things from us, and we needed to live up to those expectations with the project… We were working in an environment we weren’t used to. We were developing on the Unreal engine, we also lacked the necessary know-how to build a game based on online features. The hurdles we had to overcome were very big. We weren’t experienced enough and couldn’t get over that wall, leading to what happened in the end.”
It was back in April 2020 that Xbox lead Phil Spencer fully confirmed that Scalebound was a dead project and both PlatinumGames and Microsoft had moved past it. It’s not getting revived anytime soon. Even so, Spencer also assured that there are no hard feelings on either side and Xbox still talks to the folks at PlatinumGames and supports the studio in its efforts.
“I have a ton of respect for [PlatinumGames], [Hideki Kamiya], and the team,” Spencer said. “There’s no animosity between the teams. We tried to go do something, and it didn’t work.”
PlatinumGames studio head Atsushi Inaba echoed the sentiment in a previous interview at Video Games Chronicle.
“Both sides failed,” Inaba said. “[the game] didn’t do all of the things that we needed to do as a developer. Watching fans getting angry at Microsoft over the cancellation wasn’t easy for us to watch because the reality is, when any game in development can’t get released, it’s because both sides failed.”
Even so, Kamiya’s full dive into the reasons Scalebound failed is an interesting one. Regardless of who is at fault, it sounds like both groups are on good terms and have moved onto bigger things with the lessons learned.