The real reason is that if they released numbers regularly every time they would have to deal with articles online decrying how far behind Xbox One is falling behind PS4. It is a good PR move on their part. People can only speculate now. Does not mean I like it though.

I hope Sony reveals their MAUs, amounts of kills in UC4 MP, the average minutes consumer spend on PSN etc to troll the living shit out of them.

Ok, you people need to stop making excuses for bad news.

Are you really sitting here, in not so many words, saying it's ok for someone to dictate whether something is good for your or not rather than YOU deciding for yourself with your own opinions?

Do you guys know part of the reason Sony took away a vast majority of support from Nintendo when the PS1 arrived? It was because Nintendo had the SAME mentality Spencer is trying to excuse for right now. Nintendo had the "seal of quality", you know, that gold star on the cartridges that said in a nutshell Nintendo approved of a game.

Nintendo would basically decided if customers would like the game rather than let people see for themselves, basically saying to developers "it's our way or no way". So when the PS1 came out and developers didn't have to go through that heavy mandate, they jumped to the PS brand. And to this day Nintendo's 3rd party relations haven't recovered since.

Now sure, some games will be crap. But some games will also be gems. But it should be the customers' choice as to what is what, not some corporate suit.

"so, x game for y system was going to suck anyway" is a predictable defense mechanism.

It's a silly one then.

Subjectivity is one reason why I don't buy the "Scalebound was going to be crap anyways" argument. The other reason is that the claim greatly assumes that in a parallel world where Microsoft did let Platinum finish making Scalebound, the game would be negatively received no matter what. While the gameplay footage from Gamescom 2015 and E3 2016 weren't great, by any means, who's to say that the game couldn't be improved by release?

I remember shinobi602 saying that Microsoft is likely moving towards a Games As A Service (GAAS) business model. Scalebound is primarily a singleplayer game that has co-op features. Maybe Kamiya wanted to size down on some of the features such as co-op, so he could focus on making the game run more smoothly and Microsoft said no. I'm not saying this was what exactly happened behind the scenes, but so far, there hasn't been much empirical evidence that significantly favors one theory over another.

Did they release numbers when the 360 was doing good? I can't remember

Hopefully we will at least get a heads up when it reaches the 30 million mark... but doubtfull at this point.

Oh yes.

And how do any of us know it was a "broken" product?

And if it was (which I doubt), they had no problem showing it for 3 E3 conferences. So I doubt it being broken was the issue. All we know is one side is saying "we're making a choice for the customer by canceling this game and it's a tough choice, we apologize". And the other side saying "we're sorry, look at our other products"

If this was broken, it would have been cut long ago. If not, Microsoft were the ones doing a disservice to their customers by advertising it at every conference knowning it was broken.