JoWooD regrets to be forced to cancel the development agreement with Perception, the Australian developer currently responsible for the Stargate-SG1: The AllianceTM license title. "The title in its current form, initially scheduled for an October 2005 release, does satisfy neither our quality requirements nor the fans expectations. We will not release anything that does not do justice to this well known license" says Albert Seidl, CEO JoWooD Productions Software AG. "In recent months we have invested a lot of time and resources in helping Perception finish the development, but we now simply have lost confidence in their ability to finish this project in time and sufficient quality."
This is terrible news! There’s no mention of this yet on the Perception hompage or the official game site, but according to a poster on the forums at Stargate Gaming a JoWood offical has said
I am the director of Brand management and just wanted to drop a few words before all hell breaks loose here tomorrow.
We are currently at a point where there will be potential legal issues that need to be clarified before we can say what happens to the project with any certainty. However we do fully intend to support it and hope to be able to finish the game in a timely fashion. However it may take some time before we have a clear view on things as there are differences of opinion regarding the legal situation between us and Perception. Unfortunately there is little concrete info we can give. We will maintain the forums and have no intention to close down the project as such. We will of course keep you posted on the devlopment.
As I understood it Perception had the rights to the voice actors, so I imagine that this will constitute a large part of the legal hassle.
This is such a pain, not just from a fans perspective, but also for Australian game development. This was going to probably be a fairly well-recieved game, and it will probably get picked up by an OS developer now (if ever).
Also on the official forums:
Here is what is going on in a nut Shell!
- Perception Holds the License to the Game and contracted JoWood Productions to Publish it.
- JoWood Invests 7.3 Million Euros and resources to the game.
- Supposedly JoWood has a demo of the game and they didn’t like what they seen and decided to kill the contract and now requesting all their money and now the Source Codes to the Game.
- Now is the legal part, JoWood vs Perception who has the rights to the said game and source codes.
That’s not an official statement though, so I just don’t know. It seems a wee bit odd that JoWood would wait until two months before release to do this if the quality was the real problem, surely this would have come up before they got far past the beta release. I mean the thing was shown at E3 and noone said anything. My cynical mind says that JoWood & Perception have had a falling out of some sort and JoWood are trying to pre-empt legal action by going on about quality problems. But then, I am cynical.
Post over at the Atomic forums says there’s rumours that Valve might be picking it up. Don’t you just love un-substantiated internet rumours? 