http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20170511_01en.pdf
I am utterly heartbroken. I’ve been excitedly anticipating season 2 of Hitman all year, and to think that it probably won’t happen…
Feel free to use this thread for mourning and speculation.
I’m so fucking upset about this.
This kind of really sucks. As controversial of an opinion it seems to be, I liked Absolution quite a bit and was planning on jumping into the new one when they dropped season 2, which I guess might not happen now maybe? Regardless, I could tell from the interviews they gave and when they sat down and played the game with the Giant Bomb crew, the devs were super passionate about this series. I hope some miracle happens and they are allowed to make more of it.
Edit: I forgot that it’s 2017 and miracles are dead, Square is keeping the IP.
This absolutely sucks. From Danny O’Dwyer’s twitter it looks like Square keep the IP so I’d say season 2 is dead in the water. What a god damn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation
If you’re upset at Square-Enix at least with Nier you can beat up the Square-Enix CEO.
No way. God, that makes this so much worse.
That’s definitely the worst part of this. It’d be one thing to cut IO loose and let them continue Hitman with another publisher. It’d still suck, but at least they would still have a shot at keeping things going. Dropping IO and keeping the Hitman property? Awful. Just awful.
“4,898 million yen” sounds like a lot of money in a fiscal year?
I mean, I know I bought Hitman when it was on sale, but…
I cannot imagine how it must feel to have worked so hard, and displayed such vision and wit, to have the game your studio created wrenched away from you. Especially when it seems likely that the things hurting that game were dictated by SE- episodic release, always online shit.
Optically I would say that the episodic release format worked in the game’s favor. I don’t think it’s a very good game if you sit down and play through everything naturally as you would in a traditional $60 game. The marketing tail on it was probably also a boon; it was in the public eye for a long time.
The only potential downside I can see is maybe it didn’t work out financially; maybe they needed everybody to buy every episode, and maybe everybody didn’t.
Okay, Square-Enix, now drop IO interactive again but this time disguised as the Sheikh.
This is a real kick in the teeth though, I was angling to upgrade my PC largely so I could finally play Hitman. Hopefully IO or those people in whatever form bounce back from this though. they put together quite the resume last year.
You didn’t think it worked as a complete package? I only started playing it when every episode had been released and it’d been a long time since I’ve had that much fun with a game.
Nope. Game seemed built for players to spend large amounts of time on one area and then put the game down for a bit.
“Get an episode, master it, wait for the next episode” was a great structure. And, again, kept the game in headlines for most of the year.
What a fucking awful situation. I know that I’m incredibly bummed that we likely won’t see season 2 of Hitman, I can’t imagine what the team feels like. Losing what is probably the most beloved product you’ve made because of business bullshit must be devastating.
I was just wondering when season 2 news would becoming cause I couldn’t wait to jump in when it was live and not everything was known for the most part when I started I new paris like the back of my hand from the GB crew but Places like the Hotel and Japan where where I had the most fun doing things the GB crew never did this is a Major Bummer and I hope IO bonces back
So, now Square Enix US / EU is all about Marvel games? Makes me wonder about the few strong IP “remaining”. I’m thinking of Tomb Raider, Just Cause or even Life Is Strange…
I truly hope IOI will quickly find another partner. I know the reboot was hard to come to fruition and the new business model based on episodic content did not please everyone but I feel they had something very good on their hands. Plus it still made decent sales AFAIK (630K on Steam according to SteamSpy, near 2 millions with consoles?).
I truly don’t get it.
IO got screwed here.
Square Enix has been no stranger to calling out there western devs when they don’t make enough $$ and so IO got lambasted by the community for Absolution which was considered too mainstream and now they make a critical success they get kicked out.
Brad on the Bombcast mentioned a couple of weeks back that news on S2 was worryingly quiet. Guess this was the reason 
I didn’t play it all that much but have several friends who are going to be super bummed about this. And as an outsider, I could appreciate that IO seemed to support S1 in a major way. This would appear to be their reward, which is a real shame.
Squeenix tried to blame Tomb Raider for a bad 2013 and then as more data came out it became clear that the game was very successful, it just didn’t hit the unrealistic benchmarks that Square had laid out. I wonder if the numbers play out similarly here, as it dominated so much positive critical conversation last year that it MUST have done pretty well.
Exactly Square has been way too aggressive in selling out their western developers due to unrealistic expectations
