Rockstar’s parent company, Take Two Interactive, just cancelled a game that $53 million had already been dumped into. They revealed this information in an earnings call earlier today. This isn’t the first time we have seen a big project like this cancelled, but $53 million is a lot of money any way you slice it.
The game was in development from studio Hangar 13 who developed Mafia 3. The project had the working title ‘Volt’ and was a third person action game that featured super heroes. So it probably was not the Bully 2 or Mafia 4 that people were speculating.
When you are dealing with massive AAA titles, $53 million is not nearly as much as the full budget would’ve been with some titles costing over $400 million. It sounds like this project had experienced a number of problems and adding the pandemic on top of that it had left it a bloated mess. This probably caused Take Two to just view it as a sunk cost, not worth continuing to invest in.
The Video Game Report 