Quote Originally Posted by Freya View Post
I think they stretched the DLC thing too far. You can only expect people to still be interested for so long. XV is at about 2 years now. I'm sure SE realized this and probably were having less and less sales for it.

We were talking about this in discord today. We're not sure if it was Tabata resigning first that caused them to cancel or they canceled and that was what pushed Tabata to resign.
From what I've gathered, it looks like the studio pushing for the XV team to be Luminous and start working on new projects is likely the culprit for the DLC being cancelled, though I'm sure the lukewarm reaction to it didn't do it any favors. As for Tabata resigning, there could be a lot of reasons. He may have genuinely decided to leave cause he felt he couldn't make the games he wanted or there could have been more internal drama going on. We might get a better picture if more XV developers start resigning as well in the case for internal drama, but I don't see any signs of drama.

I think Tabata just wants more creative control over his future projects and considering half his time working on XV was him trying to "fix" SE's broken development thinking, he may feel he has a better chance of building a strong studio from scratch than trying to fight for change within a relic dominated by senior employees who don't understand the issues.

I mean when you realize that XV's announcement as a IP coincides with KHIII's announcement and we're already two years in development time difference between both titles despite both games being announced as being developed years before their official reveal, it shows that SE probably didn't take to heart his suggestions on how to fix the company's development time problem. Both KHIII and VIIR had their initial development scratched and restarted which doesn't seem like something you would want to do for two high profile games in light of having to bring in a new team to finish developing a ten year old IP they sat on so the procrastinating director can move onto said projects. I feel like SE didn't really learn anything useful from versusXIII/XV's development struggles, likely because the company is sticking to an outdated corporate structure.