Another day, another quietly gloating story about cancelled PS3 games. According to GameWorld Network, Japanese developer From Software has canned two forthcoming titles, Dark RPG and Black Blade. "This is just the latest in a string of cancellations the PS3 has endured in the lead up to launch day," the reporter confides.
Endured? Hang on, let's just try and put this into some sort of perspective.
This is From Software - From Software - a company that's spent the last eight years wringing the very life out of its Armoured Core series of derivative mech battlers while occasionally, very occasionally, knocking out the odd cult delicacy like Kuon or King's Field. This isn't Square Enix.
The rest of that 'string of cancellations' is handily compiled here. It includes Killing Day, an Ubisoft tech demo shown off at last year's E3 and not heard of since. I'm sure the world will cope without another edgy first-person shooter that rips the creative heart out of every flashy action movie of the last five years. Then there's Theseis, some kind of supernatural conspiracy adventure based in Athens and developed by Track7, an untried, untested new studio that has clearly been playing Broken Sword or reading Da Vinci Code. Or both.
Next, Elveon, an RPG which, according to developer 10tacle Studios, is, 'based on the comprehensive fantasy saga that reaches back to the ascendance of elvish culture'. Just what the next-generation in videogame technology needs - another chunk of Tolkien-referencing fantasy tosh. (Don't worry it's still heading to PC and Xbox 360...)
Elsewhere, we recently discovered that Atari won't have any PS3 games til 2007. Lord help us, Ken Kuturagi must have dropped to his knees and wept like a child when he heard that. Atari's line-up for this year includes Arthur and the Minimoys, Totally Spies 2 Undercover and Stuntman 2. What an incalculable loss for the Sony dream.
This isn't a catalogue of disastrous extinctions, it is natural selection. PS3 is monstrously expensive and not particularly straightforward to develop for, so it turns out publishers are going to have to be extremely careful about what they fund. In the PS2 days, it was financially viable, indeed worthwhile, to follow a big genre title with several mediocre wannabes - the budgets were manageable and a large audience was there to lap up the effluent. But on PS3 we're talking millions and millions of dollars for even the most wretched of GTA or Final Fantasy rip-offs. And at least for the first few months, the market won't be big enough to support them, because there won't be enough machines in circulation.
Could it be that in the PS3 universe there will be no hackneyed RPG-by-numbers, no soulless 'me too' urban racers, no witless gangsta adventures completely lacking the wit or verve of GTA but filled with crude racial stereotypes and idiotic glorifications of violent street 'culture'? Well, perhaps that's too much to ask. But at least the numbers will be kept down. Publishers may be faced with a difficult choice - create truly excellent genre titles or break off into new areas. In the crushingly expensive next generation, will it be necessary to mutate in order to survive?
