Dying Light Team Reportedly Cancels Two Games

Wasnt one of them from a 2nd party publishing deal with xbox or am i mistaking with another. Seems like xbox is cutting alot of those publishing deals with the restructure

I just don't understand that when games get cancelled, all that money and resources are just lost and wasted. Some of the most colossal, long-running franchises were created from other scrapped games. Retool these cancelled games into something that will work! That's how we got Assassin's Creed (scrapped Prince of Persia game) and Devil May Cry (scrapped Resident Evil game) for example. These corporations just don't get it anymore.

The year of cancelations and laid offs

@Balie3000

I haven't taken the time to try and get a translation of the original source written in Polish, but the $36 million Techland claims they're "losing" almost certainly includes the money they've already spent on development of a game that in their opinion just isn't financially viable. Meaning, to create a game out of whatever's already been done they'd have to spend even more money, all for something that still isn't necessarily going to sell. That kind of a management decision can end up tanking the entire company. In most cases, it's much better to simply abandon what isn't working rather than spend more money trying to salvage a mess. The sunk cost fallacy is real.

In today's gaming world, cancellations almost always mean layoffs as studios "get lean" while they're trying to decide what to do next. It sucks for employees, but from the developer's perspective they don't need as many people if they're just in the initial/early conceptual and design phase of development. They'll potentially get bigger if/when they're further along in development. AI's going to continue to disrupt the size of this cycle, of course.

Gaming isn't the only industry that behaves like this. For example, a slowdown in sales of cars often leads to a slowdown in factory production. Dealerships don't need more inventory they can't sell, and an automaker doesn't need 10,000 cars sitting on a lot waiting to be shipped to dealerships so they cut production. That=factory layoffs.

@NavalHistorian Sell the assets on to others who might want them, then? An asset market would be an excellent idea. Work doesn't get trashed and at least some cost can be recovered. The only problem is AI and idiots that try to pass off such stuff as their own.