When True Crime: Hong Kong was cancelled, there was more than one publisher that wanted to release the game as Sleeping Dogs.
Sleeping Dogs executive producer Stephen Van Der Mescht said many publishers beside Square Enix and Activision were interested in the game. “There were a few other people who’d spoken to us. We know a lot of people, obviously – we’ve all worked with a bunch of different publishers, and there were a few people who came around and looked at the game and the team.”
United Front Games only owned the game’s engine, which made it difficult to find a publisher. “At one point, we looked into just taking the engine code and doing something else. We only owned the engine, we didn’t own any of the content, so to get a deal in place where the game was going to move forward, Activision had to be involved in the process. They had to license those assets.”
“So putting a new deal in place was incredibly complex. It wasn’t only a two-part deal between ourselves and a publisher, it was ourselves, a new publisher and Activision. The contracts had to go back and forth between all three parties to get the game back up and running. It was easily one of the most complex development negotiations I’ve ever been part of. They were great in the whole process, I’m personally very appreciative of the role they played in getting a deal signed.”
