The mysterious Project Dagger from People Can Fly will not be created. We never found out whether there was going to be production, but it must have been at a fairly advanced stage of development. Its cancellation means that Polish companies will write off PLN 68.3 million from last year's financial results.
Problems with the title started much earlier,
in 2022 . It was then that the then publisher - Take-Two - sent the company a letter regarding the termination of the game financing agreement.
“We believe very much in Project Dagger and want to continue working and self-publish. The game is still in pre-production, and the team is currently focusing on refining the combat and gameplay systems and on migrating from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5," said Sebastian Wojciechowski, president at the time.
Nothing of that. Yesterday it was announced that the title was finally canceled, which means a write-off of almost PLN 70 million. As explained, the sum symbolizes "one hundred percent of the expenditure on this project." The data are estimates and may change after the auditor's examination.
" The discontinuation of work is the result of re-analysis of the development plans for projects implemented by PCF and changes to these plans due to the unsatisfactory results of the evaluation of the scope and commercial potential of the project after redefining the direction of the game's development," we read in the announcement.
As you can guess, investors are not satisfied and since yesterday the company's share price has dropped by over 12 percent. Even if deleting projects is nothing new in the world of games, the fact that in this case the amount involved was as much as PLN 70 million was probably a surprise.
People Can Fly will publish its complete 2023 report on April 25, which will give a more accurate idea of how "severe" this write-down is.
