Or maybe more imporantly, who didn’t do it. It goes like this… Rumor goes around that CD Projekt cancelled the console version of The Witcher, laid off the entire team. Times are rough, these things happen. Except then we get word that things aren’t quite what they seem:
"Basically, after a few months of not being paid, we stopped," said Masclef speaking to GamesIndustry.biz. "We’ve not been paid for a few months and we had a very nasty broken payment. We had no choice but to put the product on hold. We’ve not been able to find a solution."
Masclef claims Widescreen was also kept in the dark and not informed of new milestone dates for the project, along with added features, which publisher Atari was expecting following discussions with CD Projekt.
"We were not involved in discussions with Atari and CD Projekt. The financial situation seems to have grown more and more difficult," he said.
Hmmmm… They also claim to have not been told about milestones (mini-deadlines):
Masclef claims Widescreen was also kept in the dark and not informed of new milestone dates for the project, along with added features, which publisher Atari was expecting following discussions with CD Projekt.
"We were not involved in discussions with Atari and CD Projekt. The financial situation seems to have grown more and more difficult," he said.
Man, those damn CD Projekt guys (and Atari for that matter)…except well, they have their own take on the situation (check out comment #8):
It is sad that we cannot talk with WSG in normal business way, but communicate through media. It is absolutely not our style of making business, and we answer here as we feel forced to do this to clarify the unclear information:
1. All payments were done on time according to milestone plan.
2. Truth is that payments were later than originally planned but this was solely due to delays in production. The delays were growing in the project due to WSG continued to miss the deadlines.
3. Delays and risks of further development by WSG were unacceptable by CD Projekt (this happened even though CDProjekt RED was constantly increasing main team involvement to help in the production). The most important fact is that development process didn’t make planned release date possible and moreover propositions of the new release date were changing few times. Besides the schedule, technical incapability created a risk of missing planned quality which is absolutely unacceptable. And this brought an end in our cooperation with WSG.
4. Currently the works are on hold. We are evaluating all possible options to continue the production.
So we have a he said, she said situation. Which really sucks. I couldn’t really give a crap whose fault it is…but I was sure looking forward to trying out The Witcher on my 360. Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
I couldn’t claim to know who was in the right, nor do I really care. Sucks to see a game that was so potentially close to release get shelved, probably forever (Almost any game put on hold is gone for good).
What Would Matt Do: Play the PC version…maybe I’ll hook up my 360 controller and pretend. Probably not though. /me pours one out for the fallen games…
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