 By October 1999, the team had cut the game's multiplayer feature. Pearsall explained that Looking Glass did not "have the resources to do a new kind of multiplayer and ship a finely tuned single-player game". Plans were announced in January 2000 to release a multiplayer-only Thief game shortly after the completion of Thief II. As Thief II's development continued, Looking Glass experienced extreme financial troubles. The company's Marc LeBlanc later said that "Eidos was writing a check every week to cover our burn rate" during the last months of the project. The game's final cost was roughly $ 2.5 million. According to company head Paul Neurath, Eidos informed Looking Glass that "it was not an option" for Thief II to miss its release date, and that there would be "dire consequences if [we] missed by even a day". An anonymous Looking Glass staffer later told Salon.com that Eidos "told us basically to ship [Thief II] by their fiscal quarter or die".
