Alan Wake PC Cancellation Wasn't Its Developer's Decision

The axing of the Alan Wake PC project wasn't a decision made by its developer, Remedy Entertainment.

The boss of Finnish development studio Remedy, Markus Maki, held a very interesting panel at last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, entitled ‘Alan Wake: The Writer Who Made Us Rewrite Our Engine.’

In it, he discussed all of the factors that caused the Alan Wake project to have a lengthy six-year development cycle and eventually appear on just a single platform from the three it was scheduled to visit.

Many years ago, Remedy was still reaping the success of its Max Payne series and wanted to follow up with Alan Wake, a gritty psychological thriller starring a writer that needed to battle not only his own demons but also real ones in a mountain town in the USA.

The game was scheduled to appear for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, originally, but, after the company struck a publishing deal with Microsoft, the version for Sony's console was cut while the Xbox 360 one became the primary platform.

This, according to Maki, caused a lot of development problems for the team at Remedy, who didn't have a lot of experience with the platform.

Time was also spent building the engine for Alan Wake from the ground up, as well as on rendering the open world.

Still, Remedy triumphed, and, according to Maki, Alan Wake was among the few games that didn't need any type of update or patch after its release.

Speaking about the canceled PC version, Maki said that he couldn't really discuss it, but that the decision wasn't made in Finland.

As you can guess, this is a veiled accusation that Microsoft actually scrapped the PC version, so that Alan Wake would remain an Xbox 360 exclusive.

Despite committing time and time again to PC gaming, Microsoft, if it were actually behind the decision, proves once more that the Xbox 360 is still the most important thing for the company.