14 DAY TRIAL // You have probably never heard of a game from Midway called Career Criminal - it's normal, since it was a secret project. Unfortunately, neither will you hear about this title again, since the developing company has announced that the project was canned and no less than 80 people were fired from the Austin studio. However, Matt Booty, interim CEO of Midway, has announced that the studio will not be closed and the people there will continue working on new games.
However, things are not that great for Midway, even though the company will most likely hit the jackpot with the latest game in the Mortal Kombat franchise. But, until that happens, we know it had to delay two of its most exciting projects (Wheelman and This Is Vegas) to 2009 and that's not going to look good in the financial papers of the company, since it means that it just lost the Christmas sales.
Back to Career Criminal, it appears that it was another GTA-like title, described as a "large, ambitious, open-world project." However, it was not that ambitious, since Midway considered it was not "converging towards a reasonable chance of success." Now we can't say that we're sorry about the cancellation of the game since it's the first time we hear about it, so all we can do is move on and hope that the recently fired employees will find new jobs soon.
"The Austin studio is important to us in a growing and competitive game development location. Although we are canceling a major title, the other projects in development at the studio will continue, and we will continue to invest in new teams and new people going forward. Our Central Outsourcing Group - which has become an outstanding resource for all of our development teams across the company - will also remain active in the Austin studio," said Matt Booty to website Kotaku.