It’s not unusual to see console manufacturers step in to bail out third-party publishers to help them make games that wouldn’t otherwise be made. In the last year, we have seen Sony step in to fund Street Fighter V while Microsoft stepped in to continue Lara Croft’s adventure in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Rumours suggest that Nintendo is getting in on that act. A source for accurate games industry news leaked documents to the press that indicates that Nintendo is throwing its money on a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil.

This isn’t the first time that Nintendo has put money into a game that wouldn’t have otherwise been made. They partnered with Platinum Games to pay for the development of Bayonetta 2.

As for Beyond Good and Evil 2, this game has been confirmed to be in development since 2008. News on the game has been sporadic since with roughly annual updates from Ubisoft trying to assure gamers that the sequel to the 2003 cult-classic is still in development.

The latest rumour, which Destructoid credits to prominent industry news leaker Geno, is that Nintendo is funding the development of Beyond Good and Evil 2 and it will be a Nintendo NX exclusive in 2017. Geno first went to Dual Pixels with an internal Nintendo document about the NX and Destructoid independently confirmed with a second source that indicate that Nintendo is involved in the game’s development.

It’ll be interesting to see if Beyond Good and Evil 2 will be a timed exclusive or strictly exclusive to the NX. While other companies have sold sequels as console (Street Fighter V) or timed (Rise of the Tomb Raider) exclusives, Bayonetta 2 is still exclusive to the Wii U and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.

For their part, neither Ubisoft nor Nintendo have talked about the rumour. Destructoid says that Ubisoft asked that they remove the story from the website. Destructoid didn’t comply but that certainly would have been a great case of the Streisand Effect.

I would imagine that if/when this is officially unveiled, public opinion will play out much like the initial controversy over Bayonetta 2’s exclusivity. Anger over the game’s exclusivity on a new Nintendo console was quelled with news that Nintendo paid to make the game happen. I’m probably not the only one feeling a bit of deja vu right now.

Source: Destructoid, My Nintendo News

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