>>15510424
>Microsoft did the right thing by not giving them extra money.
<Microsoft was demanding Darkside to deliver the moon and only gave them the budget to build a a steamboat
Why don't you actually read the links people provide you with:
>No more than a week after they’d signed the contract, according to several ex-Darkside employees, Microsoft’s team came back to the studio with a new request: they wanted a single-player campaign. “They decided that fans were gonna want a single-player game,” said a person who worked on the project. “But they weren’t going to change the budget or the timeframe.”
>…
>As the months went on, things got shakier. Microsoft’s demands for the game increased, and the pressure got worse and worse as Redmond kept asking for new things, Darkside sources say. Microsoft wanted a longer single-player campaign; they wanted various features added and changed; they wanted Darkside to help contribute card art to the accompanying mobile game Microsoft had planned. “This kind of focus change happened on a nearly monthly basis,” said a person who worked on the game.
>“They asked for things pretty quickly,” said a second person close to the studio. “We kept telling them, ‘We cannot make this game for the budget you want.’”
>…
>The original plan was for Darkside to finish the vertical slice by December, but after some struggles, they convinced Microsoft to extend the deadline to January. One particularly strange moment for Darkside happened around then, when Microsoft’s Ken Lobb said on a podcast that Phantom Dust would be “about a 30-hour JRPG.” The developers were baffled. That was never part of their plan. “Nobody knew he was gonna say that,” said one Darkside staffer. “We were told by people at Microsoft that Ken just does things like that.”
>By the end of January, they had a vertical slice. Darkside sources say they loved the way it turned out, as did Microsoft. The art, characters, and levels were all approved. “Everybody was very happy with it,” said one person who worked on the game. “The execs had fun playing it, I was surprised to hear. They were actually having fun with it in their office, in meetings.”
>…
>Even as Darkside’s developers celebrated the successful prototype, leadership couldn’t ignore the looming money problem. By February, it had become a huge concern—they just didn’t have the resources to deliver what they knew Microsoft expected. There were no signs that Microsoft would be willing to give them more money, even after all the work Darkside had put into the game already.
>“[Microsoft] loved us; they said we were one of the best devs they’d ever worked with,” said one person who worked on the game. “They wanted to go forward with us—the issue was the budget.”
>So in mid-February, Darkside’s top leadership flew out to the corporation’s Redmond campuses for a meeting that they hoped would get them more money. Darkside made the pitch: to properly reboot Phantom Dust with both multiplayer arena battles and a sizable single-player campaign, they’d need more resources. It just wasn’t doable at $5 million.
>Microsoft said no.
>“When it came down to it, the game they wanted could not be done,” said a person familiar with the studio. “We could not make them the game they wanted for the budget they had.”
>On Tuesday, February 17, Darkside got the phone call: it was over. Microsoft would no longer be moving forward with them on Phantom Dust. Darkside’s owners immediately told the staff that the project was cancelled and that they’d have to lay everyone off—they’d put everything into this game, and without it, they had no other options.