The original Crackdown was developed by Realtime Worlds. At the moment, they're busy with APB, so another developer, Ruffian, will be working on the sequel. Does that surprise you? It surprises Realtime.
CEO David Jones has told GI.biz that he's both surprised and "miffed" at...something.
The bottom line is that what we thought would happen is that a sequel would be done by a studio somewhere... maybe one of the internal studios, or others that they've worked with, and that would be the way it went forward.
I think it was unfortunate that it had to be with a start-up in Dundee... it is challenging to get enough developers in one region as it is, so that was the only little big of negativity to the story.
It's just one of those awkward moments. In terms of the franchise, as always - as with anything we've created - we're always keen to see it do great things. This is like a bump in the road... was there really no way it could have been done by one of the studios Microsoft shut down...?
I was a bit miffed at Microsoft that it happened that way, but you live and learn.
Is he...jealous? Disappointed? Maybe neither. Maybe both!
David Jones "miffed" at Microsoft's Ruffian decision [GI.biz]