BlogJam of the Week: Beware of Greeks Cancelling Games

JoystickwithaQ takes the monkey this week with the sad tale of a little, Greek developer that could (not).

The tale goes thus: Greek game developer Track7 has decided to cancel development of their upcoming adventure title Theseis for the PS3, citing the high cost of developing for Sony’s console.

The source for this story was apparently a spare posting on a minor site, and to be fair, JoystickwithaQ’s editors openly questioned the validity of the claim well before Track7 officially responded, by saying things like “Take this for what it’s worth.” and ” If this does turn out to indeed be true.”

Track7’s official response would seem to have put the kibosh on the tale.

track7games would like to clarify that we never cancelled something that did not exist in the first place. We plan to develop “Theseis” for PC and Xbox360 in the near future. As for the PS3, we simply made a strategic decision to not move ahead because we deemed it not probable at this time.

So apparently they didn’t cancel development of a PS3 version of the title because developing for the PS3 is too expensive, they just decided to not even start development of a PS3 version of the title because developing for the PS3 is too expensive. Right. Totally different. Well played.

Perhaps the word “cancel” loses something in translation to Greek, but a decision to not release a title on a major console is a decision to not release a title on a major console regardless of when its made. This is still a sign of how difficult PS3 software development will be and is still (even more) bad news for Sony.

For the responsible handling of the initial story and dead-on analysis, JoystickwithaQ earns a BlogJam score of Q. Shine on, you crazy blog, shine on.

As for Theseis, the game loooked pretty cool at Track7’s low-rent Kentia booth at E3, although the Greek-speaking developers weren’t able to effectively demo the game. From what I saw (and understood) it’s a kind of Tomb Raider-ish, leaning heavily on the architecture and history of the developers’ native land. Whatever platform it eventually releases on, I’m looking forward to it.