"It comes down to budget and it comes down to having a champion [at Microsoft]," Urquhart said on the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered. "I can see games that had champions and weren't canceled until $80 million were spent.... There's games that had a $10 million budget and had a champion and ended up the budget was $60 million and it shipped."
Urquhart went on to explain that when you're making a big-budget game, "there has to be someone at the publisher" who can defend the project and assure the higher-ups the game is going to be good. In the case of Stormlands, unfortunately, Obsidian didn't have someone like that to champion the game at Microsoft.
"There has to be someone with that attitude and the ability to defend the game," he added, using Baldur's Gate as an example of how important it was for them to have someone to champion the game at Interplay when poor European sales forecasts were going to negatively impact its success in American markets. "For a game to truly be big, it often has to be pushed and it has to have ads and PR," he explained.
Urquhart concluded by saying: "Why did Stormwinds get canceled? Stomwinds got canceled because we didn't have an advocate."
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