Scalebound trailers disappear from YouTube following cancellation

All trailers for Scalebound, the recently canceled, PlatinumGames-developed Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive, have been made private on the official Xbox YouTube account. That leaves virtually no trace of the co-op action game through any of Microsoft Studios’ channels.

Revealed by director Hideki Kamiya on stage at Microsoft’s E3 2014 press conference, Scalebound began life as a single-player jaunt through a fantasy world of dragons and other monsters. Its debut trailer is still viewable below, courtesy of Polygon, showing PlatinumGames’ original vision for the title.

Yet attempts to view Microsoft’s officially uploaded trailer show that the publisher is really scrubbing every remaining reminder of Scalebound’s existence from its pages. Subsequent videos — from Gamescom 2015 and E3 2016, two of the game’s few public appearances — are also private. We’ve contacted Microsoft to confirm that it intended to lock the videos from public view and will update accordingly.

It’s a sad ending to a game whose production had long seemed shrouded in mystery. After the game’s appearance at E3 2014, we neither saw nor heard from Scalebound until Gamescom 2015, more than a year later. The trailer that premiered at that event showed off gameplay, and it teased four-player online multiplayer at the very end. Watch that one below to compare to its very first E3 trailer.

The next — and final — time we saw Scalebound in playable form was E3 2016. That was the first time we saw the game’s cooperative play in action, and some found it a marked change from its single-player roots. Earlier that year, the game had been delayed from holiday 2016 to a 2017 release, creating further doubts about its development.

Now, all that’s left of Scalebound is its Twitter account, which serves as an archive of what little news there was about the game over the past three years. Microsoft pulled the game from the Xbox website just before announcing the cancellation, and Scalebound’s own homepage only includes Microsoft’s statement revealing that the company had ended production on the game.

Still on PlatinumGames’ plate is Nier: Automata, an action game for PlayStation 4 and Windows PC; it’s out this spring. Later in the pipeline are Granblue Fantasy: Project Re:Link and Project Lost Order, both for mobile platforms, but there are no other Xbox One games known to be in the mix for the cult-favorite Japanese studio.