In the wake of the recent earthquake disaster in Japan, Irem will cancel this Spring's upcoming Disaster Report 4, the first next-gen entry in the disaster survival series. It's set in the wake of an earthquake, and tasks players with escaping the city as it collapses.
Although the company didn't give a reason for the cancellation of the awaited title -- it had been slated for a March 10 release but was pushed ahead to Spring back in February -- it's implied that the company found it inappropriate given the ongoing devastation in.
The magnitude 8.9 quake that struck over the past weekend is among the worst in the nation's history, with much of the region at risk of further damage from aftershocks, tidal waves and nuclear fallout from a destabilized plant in Fukushima prefecture.
The Disaster Report franchise has seen two prior outings on PlayStation 2 and one on PSP, and is viewed as something of a cult favorite.
[UPDATE:Wired reports that Sega has delayed the Japanese release of its latest Yakuza game, planned for Thursday, and that Sony has delayed Thursday's planned release of Motorstorm: Apocalypse in Japan.]
Agreed. But they could have decided to cancel it last week.
I was very interested in the game and haven't touched the previous outings. Most likely not a day one purchase unless something was done to change my feelings for it.
Part of me wonders if they weren't toying around with the idea of canceling it anyway, and saw this as better PR leverage or even the final straw. It is hard to imagine canceling something this close to release instead of pushing it back. Still, it seems like movies get more free passes when it comes to avoiding controversy.
Irem is an economic light weight, they are barely getting by as is. How can they possibly justify outright cancelling an expensive PS3 project at such an advance stage?
One can only hope that the engine codebase and art assets will be of some use in future projects.
Don't lots of companies have completely finished games just sitting around gathering dust? I figure it has something to do with marketing being very inflexible. Like, if the market researchers figure out a specific day is the best day to maximize profits, and then they spend all their marketing money to maximize day one sales for that day (I've never heard of this game so I can't say if they spent enough on marketing to even care about this), but then they can't release on that day, they then don't bother to have their researchers find a different day 6 months or a year later and they don't want to reinvest in a new marketing push, so they kill it instead of losing even more money by quietly releasing it and having a bunch of unsold boxes sitting around.
This perception is just from anecdotal experience so it may be completely off base, though.
Before the "next-gen" there were the "bleeding edge" games.. up until Tim Langdell started suing everybody at least :P We'll just see Next-gen remain the current standard while the previous gen games will be remembered by the console era they were built for :P
I was very interested in the game and haven't touched the previous outings. Most likely not a day one purchase unless something was done to change my feelings for it.
So close to release too...
Geez. When Sept 11 happened, the release of Scorsese's Gangs of New York was pushed back about six months. But it wasn't outright cancelled.
One can only hope that the engine codebase and art assets will be of some use in future projects.
This perception is just from anecdotal experience so it may be completely off base, though.
I wonder, if the PS4 games will be called next-next-gen.