On October 10th, 2020, the Xbox gaming studio The Initiative announced their project Perfect Dark. Now, five years later, the project has been officially cancelled due to Xbox company layoffs and an inability to secure the project’s necessary funding.
The beginning of the end for Perfect Dark was in July 2025, as Bloomberg reports that Microsoft laid off thousands of employees across their gaming divisions. The cuts negatively impacted various departments, including dissolving The Initiative and cancelling Perfect Dark. In a staff email, Xbox Games Studio Head Matt Booty claimed that shutting down The Initiative and its projects “reflect a broader effort to adjust priorities and focus resources to set up our teams for greater success within a changing industry landscape.”
Despite The Initiative being shut-down by Microsoft, individuals at the studio and Perfect Dark’s other developer Crystal Dynamics remained determined to keep the project alive. Today, a report from Bloomberg claims that Crystal Dynamics was in talks with video game publisher Take-Two Software in order to receive the necessary funding to continue development of Perfect Dark. The proposed plan was for Take-Two to buy the rights to Perfect Dark, which were owned by Microsoft’s Xbox division. After this purchase, Take-Two would take on the burden of funding and publishing the game.
However, the report claims that Crystal Dynamics and Take-Two couldn’t agree on who would secure ownership of the Perfect Dark IP. The Perfect Dark series has been owned and operated by Microsoft since the series’ debut title, Perfect Dark, released for the Nintendo 64 on May 11th, 2000. Due to these logistical issues, the deal between the two parties fell through. Without the funding from Take-Two, Crystal Dynamics was forced to abandon the Perfect Dark project.
Crystal Dynamics recently laid off a portion of their employees due to “evolving business conditions” as stated by the company in a recent post on their LinkedIn. However, Crystal Dynamics remains in business and is continuing to work on future installations of the Tomb Raider series which remains “unaffected by this decision.”