Hitman studio suffered so many setbacks before its new James Bond game that "some companies would offer $1 to take over"

gamesradar.com:

The failure of Hitman: Absolution meant that when Square Enix chose to divest Project 007 studio IO Interactive, some offers were as low as a single dollar.

In an interview with Edge magazine, Hakan Abrak, CEO and co-owner, speaks about the difficulties that IO had faced in the years before it began work on Hitman (2016) and eventually went independent: "[Hitman] Absolution was a tough, tough production. The game took seven years. It was completely over budget."

At the end of those seven years, Abrak says that "whatever was hot back then had changed. It was DOA. Having worked so hard, and made people work so hard" - Hakan describes "two years of brutal crunch" to get the game over the line - "and then that dissatisfaction, feeling that it was our fault…" Absolution was a failure - commercially, critically, and with the fans.

The work was thrown away, and Abrak and his team started work on the game that would eventually kickstart Hitman's World of Assassination in 2016. That game, pitched as a more elegant version of Agent 47 than the one seen in Absolution, was originally turned down, but when a management shuffle put Abrak back in charge of the series, work could continue.

That period saw the creation of Hitman 2016's structure, as Abrak told engineers, "We need to build this game like an MMO," and Square Enix pushed for an episodic approach in line with Life is Strange, which was released in 2015. Abrak would eventually liken the game to a "Trojan horse" - the idea was to sell smaller pieces of a  game, episode by episode, with the polish of a major game, but not necessarily the size of one. "Would that be a good way of breaking the barrier of the niche and making a bigger [selling] game?"

The answer to that question