After much speculation, it was finally announced in 2020 that Microsoft's prestigious studio in Santa Monica, The Initiative, was working on a new Perfect Dark. Little by little, we got to see more of it, until it was surprisingly shut down earlier this summer.
The game was developed in collaboration with Crystal Dynamics, and now Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier reveals via Bluesky that this could have saved it. The studio asked Take-Two for more resources to finish the project and that the latter should release Perfect Dark themselves, and they were reportedly interested.
Unfortunately, however, the negotiations fell through and, according to The Game Business editor Christopher Dring, Perfect Dark needed "another $80/90m spending", so it was no small amount that was missing. Microsoft was reportedly also not interested in giving Take-Two the long-term rights they would have needed to dare to invest.
That makes it sound like the saga is completely over for Perfect Dark this time around, but as you may remember with Hi-Fi Rush, among others, both it and the studio Tango Gameworks made a comeback long after they were shut down when Krafton took over. It's not entirely impossible that something similar could happen to Perfect Dark, although we certainly wouldn't call it likely.
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