5) Cancelling Scalebound And Fable: Legends Was Disappointing
Two large triple-A titles have been dangled in front of the public’s eyes like big, juicy carrots, only to be whipped away and cancelled deep into their development cycles: Platinum Games’ Scalebound and Lionhead Studio’s Fable: Legends. Sure, game cancellations happen quite a lot within the industry and there’s a fair few titles that end up forever buried in video game purgatory (Silent Hills’ cancellation broke my heart). That said, it’s much rarer for this to happen with console exclusives.
For me, Platinum Games’ Scalebound was a particularly disappointing cancellation as the Xbox One has a pretty thin level of support from Eastern-based developers. There’s simply not that many Japanese developers working on Xbox One games and Scalebound helped buck this trend.
Microsoft, if you’re going to erase promising games from your release schedule, you’d better be prepared to replace them with something special in the future.