Is that just conjecture or is there some evidence to that? It actually makes a lot of sense, but it's the first time I've heard of it.
It always struck me strange that Scalebound was a Kamiya concept as early as Bayonetta, and yet, Platinum sold the IP to MS outright.
I believe the dev team had to take time away from the game which was already behind because of the workload, but while they were taking time off, they were still working on other games. They had the money, and the deadline, but they were paying staff to work on other projects. They didn't technically take a pallet of cash and wheel it over to the guys working on Nier, but they were working on other titles despite during a month off from working on Scalebound, a game that had already been fully funded and was already behind schedule.
Thats a bold claim which I doubt you can prove argumentatively and evidentially, and certainly not to any legal certainty. Because if that was the case I'm pretty confident MS would have actioned it.
The fact is they killed the project. They didn't pull it from PG and hand it off to another team, nor did they pressure PG to deliver something. In fact what Phil did was to apologize about the disappointing outcome and express compliments about "his friend" Kamiya and PG generally.
Hardly the behavior of someone who's just been hoodwinked by a partner.
Accept the fact it was on MS.
It's a fair point that nobody has a clear picture of what went down. Consider this, has Phil ever been aggressive in any of his appearances? I mean Sony will destroy them in sales and he'll tweet a congrats to them for kicking him in the balls. He's about as laid-back of a CEO as I've ever seen. Platinum makes a lot of games and Xbox needs those games, so you cut your losses on the game that's hemorrhaging money with no clear delivery date, and move on with the publisher as you still want the games they are making. Imagine if they had cut ties with Platinum and Kamiya dcided fuck you guys, anything we ever make again is PS4 exclusive.
I don't work in the gaming industry, but in my line of work we don't burn bridges like that either. We had a contract with a local mine to sandblast and paint a belt gallery. We paid thousands of dollars renting equipment, hauling supplies, allocation staff, etc. The day we were set up and ready to start the work, the company that owns the mine pulled the plug on the project with no notice and we were out over $10K. We quietly packed up and went back to the shop and moved on, with no mention of the money and time spent. We wanted to work with them because they have more to offer than the $10K we lost. Microsoft isn't going to publicly shame a company known for making good games and risk losing access to that developer in the future, you cut your losses and move on.