PlayStation project cancelations
President of PlayStation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida shared how they decided to continue or cancel games in an interview with Game File (paywalled):
We kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game. 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
Sometimes the game is in deep production. 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.
I produced, so I was really harsh on producers. That’s what I used to do.
I think that’s one area that many startups nor big companies do enough: honest mid-dev assessments that honestly ask if they should cancel or more strongly steer projects back into scope. In my experience, startups are encouraged to give perfect and rosy projections – even to the point of firing anyone that questions obvious or serious issues. This leads to all kinds of deception and fraud.
Bigger companies, conversely, tend to plan once, and then doggedly stick with it no matter how bad the estimates were or how off-track the project becomes. Rarely do they do an honest re-plan with project cancelation being seriously on the table.
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