The video games industry has been guilty of some astounding examples of wastefulness in its history. But Midway/Warner Bros sandbox title This Is Vegas is today revealed as perhaps the most spectacular of all time.

CVG has been told by a cast iron source close to the project that it has been canned by Warner Bros after three years in development.

That's not a great surprise, considering the publisher stealthily closed the studio behind the game, Surreal Software, this year - dispersing staff between fellow Seattle developers Monolith and Snowblind.

That was back in June - a full year after Warner picked it up as part of the $33m deal for Midway's assets.

But the shocking amount of hard cash wasted on the project is a recession-busting bombshell - and apt for a game that takes its inspiration from gambling mecca Sin City.

"Apparently the entire This Is Vegas project has been totally canned," said our source.

"Midway spent in the region of $43 million up to the point when it was being sold to WB. Alan Patmore, who was [Surreal] studio boss, either left or was let go - but considering the resources and art created this is a lot of work down the drain.

"It was moving along to a point where the title was on the schedule for release late last year - but still needed another eight months to a year to finish with a studio burn rate of $250,000 per month."

Do the maths - and that comes out at a total expenditure between WB and Midway of over $50 million. Just think what you could buy with that: Most of Red Dead Redemption, for one.

"It's a ridiculous waste of money," added our source, "a silly budget when you think that games like Konami's Saw - which made profit - were built with around $3m and BlackLight Tango Down was made for $2.5m."

This Is Vegas was due for release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. No more, it seems.

CVG has contacted Warner for comment, but we're yet to hear back.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=261533

...

Bloody hell...

Biggest waste of money

Duke Nukem Forever aka Did Not Finish

$20m of their own money on it, let alone investment money over 13 years

I heard a rumour that a dev had picked up DNF. Surely it was a joke/lie?

That's taken so long to get out it'll probably run on Intel's integrated GPU's.

Nope, Gearbox (Borderlands) have it now IIRC

What is says to me is that for a mere $4 million or so they are willing to scrap $43 million of investment! That makes me think that the company is in trouble. That would be a great rate of return even if it only got its money back.

That's a pretty big if. The point surely is you should only spend the extra $4m if you think the game is going to generate $47m of revenue. If it isn't going to generate that much - and a lot of games don't, because that means it would need to sell roughly 2.5 million copies at full price - then the extra $4m is just throwing good money after bad.

Quite how it ended up costing that much on such a relatively short development cycle (as oppose to the decade long DNF for example) is a mystery to me. It can't have been in dev more than three or four years - $10m a year? What were they doing?

Yes but that is not a lot by many games standards. Some have taken a billion dollars. I am not expecting that.

Some women look as beautiful as Beyonce

A LOT (99.999%) don't

Actually, yes it is. The number of games that don't sell 2.5 million copies vastly outnumbers those that do. Especially when the game in question is 18 rated, which means certain shops in the US won't even sell it. And it's not an already established franchise - the best predictor for a game selling lots of copies is it being a sequel to game that has already sold lots of copies. Or is a first party NIntendo game on the Wii. Anything else, you're probably going to be lucky to sell over a million and 2.5 million would be 'a surprise'.

Anyone who plans to break even at that point is a lunatic. You're basically gambling with $50m and the odds are against you.

Jon

Yes but $40M was already spent in the cost of development so included in the cost of buying the company. It was the extra $4 million that they would have needed to finish the project that they have saved. So even if they spent the $4 million and they only got $20 Million back they are still ahead.

$250k/month studio burn is more than $4m over 8 months, and there is no guarantee of completion either, around 1 in 10 games actually make it to release and turn a profit, I think they realised how slim their chances were

Would you rather be out $1000 or $4000?

I appreciate the low chances of success but if you took that attitude why make a game in the first place? They spent $33 million buying the company so all the previous expenditure was accounted for, and even if they took a year it would add $3 million over a year. Though if they had seen what was accomplished to date, they may have realised it was a pile of [LIFTED], and so abandoned it at that point.

Because they may have thought the state of it was better than it was

You only realise how crap something is when you get into it, just look at DNF, many people had an optomistic view until it was revealed how deep the issues went