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Following the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 and Mega Man’s exclusion from Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, there’s been a lot of chatter and questions as to whether Capcom are laying the Mega Man brand to rest. During a video Q&A, Capcom’s Christian Svensson provided the following reply to the question: “Is Mega Man dead?”
“Oh, absolutely not. The frustrating thing for me is I have nothing I can hold up and say, ‘Oh, here’s this other Mega Man thing’. Absolutely, we have other things… Mega Man is a very important brand to Capcom. We get questions [like] ‘Are you guys trying to kill the brand?’
“No, absolutely not. It will continue to be a very important brand for us. I wish I had something I could hold and display for you that that’s the case, but I don’t right now. But super, super important to us; I do want to express that.”
It’s understandable that a lot of people that were looking forward to Mega Man Legends 3 — us included — are disappointed that the project was cancelled. That said, something to consider is that there could have been a multitude of reasons for its cancellation, especially in light of the fact that even the planned Prototype Version that was meant to gauge interest in the game never made it out the door.
Perhaps the game itself ran into development issues. Perhaps Capcom’s senior management played the Prototype Version and thought it wasn’t very good (it was even delayed once), and decided it was time to stop throwing money at a game that was going nowhere. Perhaps the team moved on to another Mega Man project instead. There could be any number of reasons that can’t be publicly discussed.
Regarding the cancellation, Svensson says:
“The decision was not made lightly. Certainly, we knew there would be a lot of upset people and in spite of that, we still had to make that decision. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about you at all. I unfortunately can’t get into the details of it, but it was not a decision that was made lightly and I can tell you that no one is happy about that decision, but it was a decision that had to be made.”
A lot of time and money goes into making games — even those with controlled budgets like Mega Man Legends 3. Prototypes of games are shelved all the time for various reasons, often related to quality or viability. The major difference in this case is that the prototype was highly-publicized and developed with the input of fans.
