Microsoft is cancelling like a pro

[A Black Falcon]

It's really sad that Perfect Dark got cancelled.  Apparently both Everwilds and PD were, despite having been in development for like 7+ years each, still at least 3 years away from completion.  PD had playable 'vertical slices' but whether it actually had a game coming together or not is unclear.  The Bethesda MMO that was cancelled was similar -- a game that had been in development for years and people liked in testing, but that was still years away from finishing.  It is clear that Microsoft badly mismanaged their oversight of their studios over the past decade or so by giving teams too much freedom and no controls or focus, and these games and studios are some of the casualties of that approach.  Of course, I wish that despite the mismanagement and unfocused years of development teams wandering MS had committed the funds to complete these projects, with teams more clearly focused on their task, but sadly they went for the easy, standard corporate approach of 'cancel stuff and fire lots of people' instead of the better, more Nintendo-like approach of helping teams succeed and keeping them focused on their task.  Unfortunate.