Sony owns the IP for Heavnely Sword, so they can just give it to the Santa Monica Studio or Ready At Dawn, or whoever they choose.

I know that HS didn't get great sales because it was labelled as a button masher, too short of a game, and not enough variety of enemies, but it was still lots of fun, and the story / acting was great.  It definitely had a Hollywood-movie feel to it.  I am still waiting for a sequel.

That's actually a shame. For all the flak they got, I enjoyed their games. Heavenly Sword was short but incredibly enjoyable; Enslaved was pretty great and I was definitely interested in playing DMC.

I hope this isn't true, although I can completely understand why they'd make this decision - the AAA market had been pretty harsh to them.

Going to mobile, however, doesn't seem like the smartest choice. Their heavy focus on motion capture among other things won't translate to that market at all. They'll basically have to change everything about themselves to become mobile, at which point, are they really Ninja Theory anymore?

In response to the OP, I think they are right, as the current model is broken.

For gaming, people only have so much money to spend. A few years ago, you would buy a few games, which would support more developers / publishers. Now, people buy fewer games and purchase DLC / season passes for those games. All of the spending is concentrated on these few games, so instead of 10% of games breaking even, it has become 1% (don't quote me on these numbers, I am speculating). If publishers see that something is not a hit, they just shut it down (Prototype is a good example of this).

On the bright side, there are a lot of good indie games cropping up to fill the void. Guacamelee, Braid, Limbo, etc., are awesome games. I think Ninja Theory can do mobile gaming while still releasing games on Live or PSN. I think it is smarter to hit more platforms than less.

I thought it would be good for Sony to buy them out as well. However we simply don't know if thats desirable for the studio or for Sony themselves.

Its a shame we'll continue to get games like FF13-3 when developers like this can't survive within the AAA model.

This just in:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-21-ninja-theory-confirms-itll-keep-making-console-games

They're NOT out of the console business.

The indie scene is a lot harder to get into that most people think. How many really popular indie games can you think of? You can probably think of a very good chunk, but think about the thousands of other indie games that you never even heard of. Just by looking at the Steam greenlight page you can see just how many of this indie games are out there.

Recently, the only indie games I can think of that could potentially become really popular are games that have a prestige studio or developers behind their projects or, because of luck, became really popular on Kickstarter. 

If you want to put your game on Steam for example, you first need to get the votes of users and if you get popular enough Valve will add the game to the Steam library, if you don't, well though luck, you have to manage yourself.

Ninja Theory fixes the problem of having a prestige name behind, which is a big issue. However you still need to pass several thresholds on Steam, Live, PSN, Eshop, etc. Getting games published in any of those is a real pain, and even if you have a popular name behind you, it doesn't mean the game will get published (well on Live probably you will, there's a lot of thrash games in there). Sure you can publish your game yourself on your own website, but you probably won't get the popularity you want or need (the Minecrafts of the world are very few and far between).

In the mobile market, the competition is severe, just by looking at the app store you can see thousands of games listed, you don't however have to go through all the pains of publishing the game; don't quote me on this but I think that for you to put an application on the app store, you just a to pay like a $10 fee or something like that, and you're done. And of course even if the competition is bigger than consoles, you have a waaaaay bigger market (we are of course talking of the hundreds of millions who have a smartphone device); so the chances of making your money back are usually bigger. That's the main reason why companies are leaning towards mobile devices rather than what we usually see as indie games, there is more money to be made in this area.

I cannot speak for publishing on the Wii or the XBox, but I did look at self-publishing, and it is easier than you think.

For the Vita and Sony phone platforms, you can do this for free after filling out some forms:

https://psm.playstation.net/portal/en/index.html#register

For PSN, you would have to create a corporation (so you will have to pay a government registration fee), and then register with Sony:

http://us.playstation.com/develop/

You may have to buy a devkit, but if you already have a working title (on Steam, for example), you may get one for free from Sony.

Apple gives you access to their developer program for $99/year, but I think they have given out access for free before.

YES!!!

*I'm just quoting so this post gets more attention*

You should make a thread.

Here is the original article, when read in its original context what Tameem is saying is actually justified:

http://www.edge-online.com/news/ninja-theorys-antoniades-xbox-one-is-completely-the-wrong-direction-mobile-is-the-future/

Yeah you're probably right. But as we've seen now this whoel discission was for not; they're still making console games :p