Purely playing devils advocate here:Originally Posted by Psychotic
Not in the past 5 years or so, but they cancelled a couple of titles in the early 2010s. Plus they are also the same company that:
- Were disappointed with the Tomb Raider reboot selling "only" 3.4 million copies in its first month on sale.
- Scrapped the second season of DLC for FFXV despite the game being profitable from its first day on sale (and being the 4th highest selling title behind VII, XIV, and X), relegated said DLCs to a book that hasn't even been released in the West yet.
- Don't exactly have a track record of direct "sequels" selling as well as the original title.
- Go quick buck chasing in the mobile space.
- Shown with FFXIII and Fabula Nova Crystallis, by extension FFXV, the original FFXIV release, and KH3 that they sometimes have too grand a vision and stuff gets bogged down in development hell, or has to be re-scoped so much that the quality ends up getting sacrificed.
If VIIRP2 doesn't sell as well as they'd hope, I don't see it outside the realm of possibility that could drop the rest of the project entirely, put it on ice for 5-10 years, scope change it, or made it a low priority in favour of allocating resources elsewhere. They could even just decide that the quality bar they'd need to hit is too high, and postpone indefinitely to avoid a massive backlash on a product so much of their reputation rides on. Or heck they get a change of direction at the higher levels internally who think another goose is more golden and worth chasing - and that a gargantuan resource project like VIIR isn't worth the investment anymore, especially when much of their key talent is tied up in it.
I mean I've worked in the industry for 12 years and know that nothing is certain even when something seems like a guaranteed gold mine and I've seen sound decisions get overturned by dubious executive calls. People come. People go. Shareholders exert pressure. Bad decisions get made. Good decisions don't pan out etc. Some new tech makes pursuing a different path seem more lucrative than something else. Quite a lot of the SQEX board of directors are coming up to the retirement age in Japan too, and having witnessed first-hand the stark change in direction that can happen at a company when it's core directors retire... nothing is beyond the realm of possibility.
So yeah, while I think the likelihood of VIIRP2 being cancelled at this point is almost non-existent (hence why I said it was my cynical estimate), it's not impossible. Heck, despite all those words I think a general cancellation of the whole project is very unlikely - but nothing should be taken for granted.
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I think the biggest question mark in terms of time between releases will be the PS5 and whether or not they decide to go for a World Map. Part of me expects we'll see an "Enhanced" version of P1 on the PS5 - maybe as a standalone release before P2, maybe bundled with P2, as I'm fairly sure Sony are going to have some eggs in this basket with a view to use VIIR as a system seller for PS5.
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