As reported by Eurogamer, Dean Hall's game Ion, which is a collaboration between his studio RocketWerkz and London-based company Improbable (the game would use their SpatialOS game engine), is now no more, following a long period of silence on the game's development.
"Ion was initially conceived as a project for co-development between Improbable and RocketWerkz," Improbable wrote in a statement. "A lot has changed since then. Dean Hall moved back to New Zealand from London, RocketWerkz has started work on a number of other games, and we have grown increasingly into a platform for games to be deployed on."
"We can definitely say that Improbable is not currently working on Ion. However, we have not previously commented on and cannot now comment on RocketWerkz' current or future plans."
"We are focussed on making SpatialOS available to developers, and supporting developers such as Bossa Studios and our SpatialOS Games Innovation Program partners as they make games on our platform. We currently have no plans to develop or release a game ourself."
Dean Hall himself also spoke about the game, confirming that "we're not actively working on Ion, no," in an interview. "I am not involved in that, no. Nor is RocketWerkz studio in New Zealand."
"When I look at Ion," he added, "Ion could only happen with a company like Improbable, with the scale of technology like that, and that's not a game we could do alone."
"You know me, I don't like not saying anything," he said, "but I have to be cautious because you can be very disrespectful, and I certainly don't want to be disrespectful to anybody. I'm definitely of the opinion that you don't deflect blame to someone else simply because it falls at you. There was a phrase I heard often in the military, 'It went wrong and you were there.' Look, games get paused, cancelled, pulled back all the time in the industry. The reason why people don't announce this stuff is because what's the value in it?"
In terms of why he decided to stop working on Ion, Hall did suggest it was because he'd prefer to work on games that RocketWerkz alone controlled, adding: "I'd far rather people were pissed off I didn't release something than I release something I wasn't happy with and try to take money from them. That's the most important thing."
Are you disappointed that Ion is now no more?