Home Gaming Split/Second 2 Canned – "Risky" new project under development

Split/Second 2 Canned – "Risky" new project under development

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I never did get around to playing Split/Second last year so I don’t have much of a personal attachment to the franchise, but what I can tell you is that I had a lot of friends who did play it, and it would be an understatement to say that they swore by it as their favorite racer of 2010.

Well some bad news has rolled in, because the sequel has officially been canned. Even worse, a ton of jobs are rumoured to be lost tomorrow according to sources even though a new “risky” title is apparently in the works.

Eurogamer initially reported that jobs were in jeopardy, with an anonymous source at Disney Interactive Studios saying:

“it’s rumoured at Black Rock that there will be voluntary redundancies tomorrow – roughly 40, with the aim of reducing the studio to a single game team.”

It has since been discovered that there was a misunderstanding and apparently only 40 jobs are safe, which means that there are around 100 members of the team who will lose their job.

Sad news for the studio, as well the franchise and it’s apparently not because they have been slacking, but rather left twiddling their thumbs:

“We had a concept week (everyone in the studio working on small teams) to try to come up with new ideas, but nothing really stuck. We had a freemium week sometime later with similar goals too.”

“The inactive portion of the studio has been expecting redundancies for months, so this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It’s sad that it’s come to this of course, but for many people they’ll be quite happy to take the money and go, as they’ve been sitting around doing nothing for months.”

The source had the following to add:

“After SS wrapped, we started work on SS2 pre-prod which was cancelled last December due to DIS’s new management and their changing priorities (the push towards freemium etc) – SS2 didn’t really fit in with that (despite some efforts to shoehorn it in).”

“We had a concept week (everyone in the studio working on small teams) to try to come up with new ideas, but nothing really stuck. We had a freemium week sometime later with similar goals too.”

“The inactive portion of the studio has been expecting redundancies for months, so this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It’s sad that it’s come to this of course, but for many people they’ll be quite happy to take the money and go, as they’ve been sitting around doing nothing for months.”

He did also mention that there is a new project underway with Eurogamer reporting that:

Our source did reveal that a “good proportion” of the studio was actively employed on a “promising” title. He explained that the project was “new and risky, so I imagine [Disney] don’t want to risk putting two teams on it.”

Sorry to fans who were hoping that they would get a sequel to a well reviewed game (82% on Metacritic) and sorry to any of the development team who are going to be given the boot… it truly sucks to know that something promising is being trashed because it doesn’t line up with the view of the bosses.

I guess for those of us that haven’t played the first game, it would probably be a good idea to go and pick a copy up since it’s apparently so awesome, and now so much cheaper too.

Source: Eurogamer

Last Updated: May 5, 2011

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