The publisher dropped it over ‘poor quality’ back in January. However Winters says it was ”tracking towards a very good game.” It was a victim of circumstance.
”We think that the game was tracking to be a very good game,” Winters said.
”The question was really the size of the prize based on how good it could be. We are confident that thing would have been eighty plus. Eighty five maybe. They’re a really talented group at United Front.” At the time Acti dropped it over ‘quality issues’.
That was a tissue of lies? Winters says they had high hopes for it: ”We were really confident that they were tracking towards a very good game. The challenges in the market place right now, when you’re talking about open-world games that are going to compete with titles like Red Dead Redemption, expectations for the consumer are really high.”
”That would have been, and still might end up being, a very successful mid-tier opportunity for someone. But, as I said, we changed our business model to where we were going to change our business model to focus disproportionately on three big, huge monsters. Those three monsters are the Bungie, Call of Duty and Spyro titles.”
”So that left the True Crime title being a mid-tier opportunity which we felt was an opportunity cost against other things. But we have a lot of confidence in the quality of the studio and the quality of the title, just not in the scale of the opportunity.”
Once the project was announced as cancelled developer United Front proceeded with redundancies. True Crime: Hong Kong was very near the end of its development and was the first time that series creator Luxoflux wasn’t involved.
