The designer then goes on to give a rather rosy view of what AI technologies may be able to do down the line. To be fair to McGee he has been transparent throughout the whole period of trying to get Alice: Asylum made and, while he had a Patreon allowing people to donate, he and others have done a considerable amount of pre-production on Asylum over this time, culminating in a design bible for the game which is available for download. He also announced his retirement from game design entirely, so this was about as definitive an end point as you get. The writing was on the wall and in April McGee took to Youtube to say EA was out and it was time to move on. The problem is that, without EA's involvement, the whole thing is scuppered: the publisher owns the rights to American McGee's Alice, and American McGee doesn't. That's not entirely surprising from contemporary EA, which is too busy diving through swimming pools of EA Sports dollars to be enormously bothered about the continuation of a cult favourite. In February this year McGee posted a video basically asking EA to fund Asylum while simultaneously acknowledging the publisher was showing a distinct lack of interest in any continuation.
It didn't seem like things were going too well.
