Earlier today, Activision Publishing announced a streamlining of its Vivendi Games operations, saying it would be bringing into the fold five of that company's franchises: Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Ice Age, Prototype, and one unannounced game.An Activision representative later confirmed for GameSpot that those would be the only Vivendi Games franchises coming out of the publisher. That leaves a number of high-profile projects in limbo, including Double Fine Productions' Brutal Legend, as well as Wet, Ghostbusters, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, World at Conflict: Soviet Assault, 50 Cent Blood on the Sand, Zombie Wranglers, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, as well as several Xbox Live Arcade titles.
"The only franchises that Activision Publishing will release are based on Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and one other game that has not yet been announced," the representative said. "We are reviewing our options regarding those titles that we will not be publishing."
Activision Blizzard has other publishing arms like Blizzard Entertainment and Activision Value that were not covered by the press release and could be among the options being reviewed. As of press time, representatives from those companies did not return requests for comment.
A scheduled Comic Con International panel on the Ghostbusters game was abruptly cancelled last week, with no explanation given to attendees. However, the game was on the show floor in playable form.
[UPDATE]: A Sierra Games representative told GameSpot he couldn't speak about all the titles on the list in need of a publisher, but stressed that Ghostbusters is "absolutely not canceled."
I mean it has to be that, they wouldn't cancel half done games that people were hyping about. Jack Black would not be pleased. Anyway, the developers of Ghostbuster, and some of those other "canceled" games said they were fine, so that either means they'd be published by another division of Activision or they'd be sold off.
The artists have JUST as hard a task and are also going to end up screwed. I worked on a Vivendi title a few years ago for 8 months til one day we got told to move onto a new game ... no explaination except that it was cancelled.
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