Former Playstation president Shuhei Yoshida now runs his own consulting firm and makes it clear why games get canceled.

“In the worst case, we kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game,” in an interview with Game File. “If the revenue seems lower than the money we need to spend to finish, we cancel the project. We cancelled lots of projects after the prototype level and no one knows in public. And that’s fine. That’s just a process, right?”

“Sometimes the game is in deep production,” Yoshida says. “The largest I canceled were two games, after we spent $25 million. At that time, that was lots of money. Now, not as much. I felt really bad about how we couldn’t see this.”