The Xbox 360 console has relied on a lot of games in order to appeal to customers. One such franchise is Project Gotham Racing, which took the genre to a whole new level and was the most played racing series on the Xbox Live online service.

But now Bizarre Creations, the studio behind the franchise, isn't working with Microsoft anymore, as Project Gotham Racing 4 was the last one in the series, leaving the large Redmond-based corporation in favor of another big company, Activision.

The studio's creative director Martyn Chudley has now talked with Edge about the split between his company and Microsoft, revealing a very interesting aspect regarding the development of PGR 4, namely that Microsoft wanted the game to ship earlier, which the team couldn't do without releasing a buggy game. It was that attitude that made the studio reassess its partnership with the software giant.

“I'm not going to slag Microsoft off in an evil way, but obviously we worked on PGR4 for them, and I think that PGR4 was the strongest Gotham game we did – the most fully rounded. But towards the end of that project they wanted us to bring it in early, to chop six weeks off development. But the way we work is really right up to the wire, so basically the game is nowhere near finished at six weeks to go, so we had to dig our heels in and say that our contract said that we're to bring the game in on this day, and that's what we were going to do because we cannot compromise the work that the lads have been doing, and the quality of the game,” Chudley said.

He then continued, “They didn't realise how bad a situation it would have been – we needed that extra six weeks, and it got us concerned with the future with Microsoft. We were getting disillusioned with Microsoft and they were getting corporate and [arrogant] as well because of the shift in power between them and Sony.”

So it seems that Microsoft isn't the best publisher to work with, as other studios have suffered the same fate or, even worse, were closed down because they couldn't provide profitable series in a short amount of time, like Ensemble. Hopefully the Redmond-company will change its strategies in the long run.