Almost three years after it was officially announced at E3 2014, Microsoft Studios has issued a statement to Gamasutra and other outlets that it will shut down production of Platinum Games' buddy dragon game Scalebound.

Devs may appreciate knowing that, according to sources trusted by Eurogamer, development on the project stalled out last year as the relationship between Platinum and Microsoft went south. Microsoft owns the rights to Scalebound, and now it appears the company is canning the project entirely.

The fact that Scalebound wasn't owned by Platinum is especially notable in light of the fact that studio cofounder Atsushi Inaba stated publicly last year that Platinum "doesn't have a future" unless it focused on developing its own original projects. 

Scalebound started out as just such a project -- director Hideki Kamiya told Gamasutra in 2015 that he'd brought the idea for the game with him from Capcom to Platinum in 2006, but that the project was sidelined multiple times before finally coming together with Microsoft as a publisher -- and with a dragon as the player's companion, rather than the dinosaur Kamiya said he'd originally envisioned.

"To me, because of my love for dragons, so much of my goal [for Scalebound] is to 'be' with the dragon. To have the dragon be with the player as their companion, and as their partner," Kamiya told Gamasutra. "That brings out the true beauty, I think, of what it's really like to be with a dragon."