Capcom employee and community liaison Greg "GregaMan" Moore recently
came forward in a thread on the Capcom Unity forums to deliver his take on the cancellation of
Mega Man Legends 3 -- but moreover, raise certain questions about the amount of transparency between developers and fans.
"It's not at all uncommon for games to be canceled mid-production, even (or especially) for major publishers," Moore explained. It's a scenario recognizable to many of our readers. "The difference in [
Mega Man Legends 3]'s case is that it was announced publicly from its earliest planning stages, while most games that meet this fate are nixed long before ever being revealed outside office walls."
Moore describes the proposed game as having been "an experiment in transparency," given its early announcement and the goal to have an alpha version available through the Nintendo 3DS's eShop.
"Consider that the game was destined for a platform that didn't even exist yet in the wild," Moore continues. "And consider its place within the greater
Mega Man brand... [
Mega Man Legends] has always been a passion project, not a cash cow."
Since
Mega Man Legends 3's cancellation in 2011, crowdfunding for games and, with it, an all new breed of transparency has taken root. So when projects such as
Double Fine's Broken Age run aground with budget problems, or a game is cancelled or delayed, players are privy to practically every moment -- rather than only hearing of the game perhaps months before it ships.
"Hopefully [
Mega Man Legends 3] has shown you why companies are rarely ever this transparent," Moore says to Capcom Unity's forumers. "As soon as you let the public in on something, you may as well have made a promise. And god forbid it be a premature one."
Moore also put a question to fans in turn: "Knowing how this project turned out, would you rather have not known about its existence to begin with?"
