If you’ve been paying attention to the gaming industry at the moment, then you’ll know that there have been a lot of cuts from major names over the past few months, and we’ve discovered a lot of games that were in the pipeline that have since gone onto the ‘shelved pile’ or scrapped forever.
We’ve seen it with the game that was primed to be SSX’s spiritual sequel, and now vehicular carnage game Twisted Metal has also seemingly fallen foul of the latest layoffs.
Sony and Microsoft have had to make some major cutbacks and seemingly haven’t taken a leaf out of the late Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata’s book and taken pay cuts further up the chain in order to keep employees and game studios open.
Firesprite games reportedly had a new Twisted Metal title hidden away, and according to Bloomberg’s very own Jason Schreier on Twitter, it was going to be a live-service game that received regular updates to keep things fresh for players.
That kind of project would require a constant workforce, and it seems that Sony doesn’t think they have the budget for that right now… or at all.
The End Of An Era
It seems strange that Sony have shelved a new Twisted Metal game considering the fact that they’ve just commissioned a second series of the Twisted Metal TV show.
Surely hype for a new game is at its peak?
I imagine that Firesprite regrets the fact that they agreed to Sony taking over the company in 2021, though who could have foreseen the problems that the industry is facing now?
Well, to this writer at least, it seems that Sony and Xbox have been taking on much more than they can cope with in order to outdo each other, and sadly the devs and studios are the ones that are taking the brunt of both company’s poor decisions. Twisted Metal isn’t the first series to have a cancelled project since these issues began, and it certainly won’t be the last until things level out again.
Perhaps if more directors and CEOs thought more like Satoru Iwata, then maybe we the gaming industry would be a much safer place for budding devs and studio owners… today’s ‘food for thought’.
