How A Small Game Studio Almost Made It Big

 One week in early February, three top employees from the independent game studio Darkside Games flew to Redmond, Washington for a secret meeting with Microsoft.

 Over the course of the meeting, which lasted two days, Darkside’s leadership tried to convince the mega-corporation to give them a few more million dollars, according to two people familiar with the situation. For the past few months they’d been working on an Xbox One reboot of the cult classic Phantom Dust, and it’d become clear to Darkside’s producers that their $5 million budget wasn’t going to swing it. To make the game Microsoft expected, they’d need more money: a total of $7 or $8 million, at the very least.

 Microsoft wouldn’t budge. As they flew back to Florida, Darkside’s leads were pessimistic about the negotiations working out, and sure enough, the next week, on February 17, they got a phone call: it was all over. Microsoft was moving on.

“There was just no leeway,” said one person familiar with the meeting. Microsoft had already dumped roughly $2 million into the project, but at that point the publisher decided to pull out rather than pour more money in.

“They said, ‘OK, let’s cut our losses.’”

Shortly afterward, Darkside laid off all of its staff. The owners would later go on to contract a few artists and programmers for small projects, but today the studio is a shell of itself. Almost all of their employees have either relocated or taken jobs at nearby game companies like Magic Leap and High Voltage. When the Phantom Dust deal fell apart, Darkside did too.

Source: http://kotaku.com/how-a-small-game-studio-almost-made-it-big-1696997142

$2 million is very small compared to other games. Microsoft should have taken the chance. It looked interesting.

Based on what was shown in that 3 minute video a few weeks ago, Microsoft was wise not to waste any more money.

It was a very risky game, which is probably why it had such a low budget. I'm guessing it was probably more than just funding that caused Microsoft to can it though, they probably weren't hitting their milestones and the early work wasn't enough to justify extending the contract.

This, This and This!

This.

Given their budget, I'm shocked they had that much done.  The CG trailer probably had more resources put into it than the game.

It was a smart move. MS is wise to make sure a game is on budget and on schedule. Sony would be wise to do stuff like this too. They wasted millions on projects that took far too long to happen and in some cases never happened. If MS was running the show I'm betting that TLG would have been canceled long ago.

This, I honestly don't get why MS should have poured more money in, something like this was never going to take off in a big way and even then it wouldn't make the money back of 8 million.

Why is it that recent negative M news is being posted by someone not from the MS crowd?, it just seems like throwing wood to the fire if you ask me.

2M isn't enough
8M is probably too much for its sales expectations
5M was a good balance, shame the studio couldn't make do with it.