Sony stops work on Eight Days and The GetawaySony Computer Entertainment Europe has announced that it has stopped production on two PlayStation 3 titles that were in development at the Sony London Studio - Eight Days and The Getaway.
A statement from the Corporation read as follows: "It has been agreed that production of both Eight Days and The Getaway will cease immediately due to the redistribution of resources and budget.
"This decision was made following an internal review of all games and it was deemed that with the incredibly strong list of exclusive first party titles coming up both this year and in the near future, resource should be reallocated to enhance those projects closer to completion.
"Worldwide Studios has a reputation for innovative and entertaining games, with titles such as LittleBigPlanet, SingStar,Buzz, EyeToy and Eye of Judgement, and will continue to push the boundaries on all PlayStation platforms.
gamesindustry.bizUPDATE: It has now been confirmed that
these projects have been shelved permanently, and
work is not scheduled to restart at a later date.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Entrevista a Shuhei Yoshida
(Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios)Q: You have shelved the development of Eight Days and The Getaway: what was the thinking behind that?
SY: People were doing the right things on the projects, and there were things in the games that were working really well, but the projects were coming to the end of the pre-production stage, and that is the time when we evaluate every product. Because after that, we would assign more resources to them, and they would really become major investments. This is a regular appraisal process for every project. We do evaluate and cancel projects all the time, because we do start more projects than we finish, and if we finished the same number of projects that we started, that would mean we were not taking any risks at all, and that wouldn’t move our industry on any further.
There are many new ideas that sound very interesting, but we don’t know whether they would really work, or how much it would take to accomplish our vision – that’s why we use the early pre-production stage to try new ideas and measure how much it would take to develop the product. With all that understanding, and with all the other projects that are going on – perhaps other projects are at the same stage and demanding lots of resources from many fronts, because we support many platforms in PS3, PSP, PS2 and PSN – there are more things we want to do than we can, given the number of people and resources. So, it was not like Eight Days was in jeopardy: it was making progress. But it was more about business situations and priorities.