Scalebound officially cancelled.

[Obscura]

https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/10/can ... inumgames/

Bad day for Platinum. I was kind of interested in Scalebound, despite lolkamiya; at any rate, this getting cancelled is bad news for action game fans everywhere. Nier: Automata better shatter sales records everywhere, or Platinum is toast.

[iconoclast]

This was no action game, it was a full blown RPG, and it probably had a much bigger scope than anything Platinum's released. I'd imagine that blame lies on both Microsoft for mismanaging the project and on Platinum for being in over their heads, but regardless, it sucks that it's been canceled. It never looked that great in previews, but I was always going to buy it at release because Kamiya has never made anything but excellent games. Too bad.

[Obscura]

Yeah, I'm aware the game was an RPG; the reason I say it's bad for action game fans is that Platinum has a very unique "voice" in the 3D 3rd-person action genre (hell, does any other AAA company make DMC-inspired brawlers at all anymore?), and I think that with this failure, they're in real danger of dying. Games that get killed this late into development tend to take their studio with them.

[iconoclast]

I think Team Ninja will work on Ninja Gaiden 4 after they release Nioh, but the genre is pretty close to dead outside of the occasional Platinum game. Escalating budgets & low sales is a bad combination.

I don't see Platinum dying out just yet. They're still working on the Granblue Fantasy console game, which will probably be a decent success given how popular it is on mobile. If anything, I think they'll just downsize to one or two teams before shutting down completely. They must have been spread thin between Scalebound, Nier, Star Fox, Granblue, and all of their Activision shovelware.

[Obscura]

What's Granblue? I haven't even heard of that one, and apparently no one writing about the Scalebound cancellation has either.

I don't know if Platinum can survive spread less thin. My understanding is that the small projects such as the Activision budgetware and SF0 were taken out of necessity -- they needed any cash they could get after Bayo 2 and TW101 both failed to sell well.

[iconoclast]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQytfm-bI0Y

Granblue is a huge mobile game in Japan. They announced a console RPG last year, and Platinum is at least co-developing it. I think Kenji Saito (the MGR director) is involved.

Pretty much all of Platinum's games sell badly, but I think they're getting paid the same no matter. The real problem is that they're eventually going to run out of publishers willing to take a risk on their ideas since none of them have paid off. Maybe they'll be stuck working on other companies properties, like MGR, Nier, etc.

[Obscura]

It's not really accurate to say that none of Platinum's games have sold well, even among their original IPs. Bayo sold 2.14 million (which isn't far off from the Batman: Arkham games!), Vanquish sold 1.03 million, and MGR sold 1.42 million not even counting the PC version. Anarchy Reigns and TW101 were both unmitigated disasters, though, failing to sell even half a million, and Bayo 2 only did a little better.

[kid aphex]

I really feel that were Bayo2 on the PS4 it would've re-ignited the genre... at least a little bit.

[gbaplayer]

There goes my plan on buying an XBOX One when Scalebound releases...that was the only game worth owning the console.

[iconoclast]

Bayonetta 2 definitely would have sold more if it were on PS4/XB1, but it would probably still have bombed. The original game was only a moderate success, and I don't see a straight sequel doing any better. Sega was probably right to cancel the game, honestly. Platinum is lucky that Nintendo was trying to win over an audience they lost, but that audience is both small and not interested in Nintendo, so...

[Obscura]

Two million copies moved is a lot more than "moderate success". It sold almost twice as much as Demon's Souls, and I don't see anyone calling that game anything close to a failure.

[iconoclast]

Where are you getting 2 million from? The only official numbers I know of have it at 310k~ in Japan. It didn't even make the top 20 in the month it came out in the US, and the only hearsay I've seen about it's lifetime sales puts it at 400k~. European sales won't add much to the total. There's no way it's anywhere near 2 million. Maybe around 1 if they're lucky.

Besides, success is determined by budget. Like how Capcom considers Resident Evil 6 a failure, despite it being their 2nd best selling game of all time at 6+ million.

[Sumez]

I really feel that were Bayo2 on the PS4 it would've re-ignited the genre... at least a little bit.

Question is, it it really a genre that needs re-ignition? Platinum is probably the only studio to ever really get it right.

[Obscura]

I'm getting 2 million from vgchartz. Wiki has it as having sold 1.35 million by March, 2010 (which was just two months after the western release) (pre-post edit: I see that your NeoGAF post mentions that, but I don't personally see any good reason to put much stock in a random GAF-er).

And I'm betting that Bayo had a smaller budget than Resi 6. Just a hunch.

Question is, it it really a genre that needs re-ignition? Platinum is probably the only studio to ever really get it right.

WATCH YOUR WORDS, HERETIC.

DMC 3 and 4, and God Hand, are all better than Bayo.

[iconoclast]

vgchartz literally just makes up all of their numbers, that site has no credibility at all. The 1.3m on wiki are the copies Sega sold to retailers, not copies sold to consumers, so that isn't much use either. I'm not aware of any US numbers, but just look at the January 2010 NPD: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2721 ... ercent.php

Bayonetta's nowhere to be seen, and the 10th best selling game on there sold 171k. I read that Bayonetta wasn't even in the top 20, but let's just take the best case scenario and say it sold 150k on 360 and 100k on PS3. Video game sales are extremely front loaded for the most part (especially for something like Bayo), so there's no way it went on sell tons more. Honestly it seems like a stretch to even call it a moderate success. Maybe only relative to Platinum's other games, which bombed even harder (excluding MGR, which obviously had a huge brand to boost it).

[Sumez]

WATCH YOUR WORDS, HERETIC.

DMC 3 and 4, and God Hand, are all better than Bayo.

Though not a huge fan, I'm not all against DMC (and I think I enjoyed 4 more than most people seem to). To be fair, though, the series was created by Hideki Kamiya

[TransatlanticFoe]

Microsoft probably didn't want another ReCore - delayed then ships half finished, downgraded to a budget title to boot. It's a shame as the concept was great and because, well, Platinum. Hopefully it resurfaces at some point.

The voice acting was House of the Dead awful on the last trailers which probably shows just how slow progress was - they had to present something and grabbed a guy off the street!