Hitman Creator IO Interactive Being Dropped And Sold By Square Enix

Square Enix has announced that it will be cut­ting ties with Hit­man Cre­ator IO Inter­ac­tive and will no longer finan­cial­ly sup­port them. 

Finan­cial loss­es and a need to focus on key fran­chis­es are cit­ed as the rea­son for drop­ping IO Inter­ac­tive. Here is Square Enix’s full statement.

“To max­i­mize play­er sat­is­fac­tion as well as mar­ket poten­tial going for­ward, we are focus­ing our resources and ener­gies on key fran­chis­es and stu­dios. As a result, the Com­pa­ny has regret­tably decid­ed to with­draw from the busi­ness of IO INTERACTIVE A/S, a wholly-owned sub­sidiary and a Dan­ish cor­po­ra­tion, as of March 31, 2017.

This deci­sion has result­ed in book­ing of the extra­or­di­nary loss amount­ing to 4,898 mil­lion yen, includ­ing dis­po­si­tion of the con­tent pro­duc­tion account relat­ed to the busi­ness and impair­ment loss of intan­gi­ble assets, in the finan­cial results for the fis­cal year end­ed March 31, 2017.

As a result of this the Com­pa­ny start­ed dis­cus­sions with poten­tial new investors and is cur­rent­ly in nego­ti­a­tions to secure this invest­ment. Whilst there can be no guar­an­tees that the nego­ti­a­tions will be con­clud­ed suc­cess­ful­ly, they are being explored since this is in the best inter­ests of our share­hold­ers, the stu­dio and the indus­try as a whole.”

There has been no offi­cial state­ment made on how this will affect the cur­rent Hit­man game or future titles. This could mean that the promised sec­ond and third sea­son of con­tent for the cur­rent Hit­man game will not be made or if the right investors and deals can be made con­tent could con­tin­ue as normal. 

The fate of Io Inter­ac­tive is still unknown how­ev­er their chance of being sold are good. Their lat­est Hit­man game was crit­i­cized by many how­ev­er most of the major crit­i­cisms were of the busi­ness mod­el and the way con­tent was being release. Actu­al game­play and con­tent was well received by many.  As of now it would seem that the stu­dio will be sold and con­tin­ue mak­ing games under a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny how­ev­er the sit­u­a­tion is still precarious.