1/6/2024 0 Comments Phantom dust pc controlsWhen Phantom Dust came along, Darkside employees say they were ecstatic - finally, they could prove that they were capable of making their own game, too. Darkside, like many other small studios, was firmly rooted in the unglamorous world of outsourcing, helping make other companies’ games rather than creating their own. Though you may never have heard of Darkside Games, you’ve probably heard of the games they have helped develop - the Florida-based studio has contributed to Gears of War: Judgment, Spec Ops: The Line, Sunset Overdrive, and various Borderlands games, handling all sorts of art, DLC, and other features. When the Phantom Dust deal fell apart, Darkside did too. Almost all of their employees have either relocated or taken jobs at nearby game companies like Magic Leap and High Voltage. The owners would later go on to contract a few artists and programmers for small projects, but today the studio is a shell of itself. Shortly afterward, Darkside laid off all of its staff. Microsoft had already dumped roughly $US2 million into the project, but at that point the publisher decided to pull out rather than pour more money in. “There was just no leeway,” said one person familiar with the meeting. As they flew back to Florida, Darkside’s leads were pessimistic about the negotiations working out, and sure enough, the next week, on February 17, they got a phone call: it was all over. To make the game Microsoft expected, they’d need more money: a total of $US7 or $US8 million, at the very least. For the past few months they’d been working on an Xbox One reboot of the cult classic Phantom Dust, and it’d become clear to Darkside’s producers that their $US5 million budget wasn’t going to swing it. Over the course of the meeting, which lasted two days, Darkside’s leadership tried to convince the mega-corporation to give them a few more million dollars, according to two people familiar with the situation. ![]() One week in early February, three top employees from the independent game studio Darkside Games flew to Redmond, Washington for a secret meeting with Microsoft.
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