Prey 2 not canned after all, says Bethesda's Pete Hines

Prey 2 has not been axed, according to Bethesda's European marketing boss, Pete Hines, citing translation errors as the source of erroneous reports.

"To clarify, I didn't say Prey 2 was canx. Gave an interview in English, translated to Dutch, translated back to English," Hines tweeted.

The interview in question comes from IGN NL, and was translated back into English by auto-translate and BeefJack.

“I can be very clear about this. At one point, we looked at Prey 2 and decided that in its current state, with all the money, time, and resources we put into it, it didn’t meet our expectations. So we decided to pull the plug from our end,” the translation said.

"It was a tough business decision, but at that point it was the right one. It’s never a good thing to have to make those choices. It’s a shame, but it comes with the territory."

It's not clear what Hines was referring to in the original comment before it was mangled; we've reached out to Bethesda for comment.

Elsewhere in the interview, Hines apparently confirmed that Bethesda owns the Prey 2 license, which means if the project were to be cancelled, Human Head won't be able to shop the game around with other publishers - although it may be able to slap a new IP onto the existing build, alá former True Crimes game Sleeping Dogs.

Prey 2 vanished from Bethesda's marketing materials earlier this month, but the publisher denied a cancellation at the time. After an initial marketing splurge, the publisher went very quiet on the anticipated sequel, leading to rumours of its shelving as early as April.

The official word was that the game had been delayed into 2013, but industry whispers suggested ongoing problems between Human Head and Bethesda had shut the project down.

Human Head is known to be working on a sequel to Rune.

Thanks, games.on.net.