Splatterhouse developer BottleRocket Entertainment was taken off the project by publisher Namco Bandai for “performance” reasons, according to the latter, but now the studio alleges that Namco was “inept” in its handling of the project.

BottleRocket has shot back, defending its performance record while accusing Namco of mismanagement.

"We too have to be careful of what we say since publishers have to worry about their ‘image’ and will sue small, independent studios who bark back at them too loudly," begins a BottleRocket statement issued to Gamasutra. It continues below:

Game development contracts are put in place to protect the publisher and their interests. Within these contracts are a series of defined game development objectives and goals called milestones. If a developer is under performing they tend to fail these milestones and have varying degrees of accountability placed upon them. Splatterhouse had been in development for over eighteen months and up to having the title taken away from us we had not missed any contractually defined milestones. So either there were no performance issues during that timeframe or Namco’s management of the title was inept.