As far as I know, the license has been sold. After having been put on hold again in 2009, The Getaway 3 turned into another game called
Heist which was cancelled as well a year later (in 2010).
Here are some artworks of the game “Heist”, according to Wikipedia the game was meant to be set in San Francisco in the late 60’s, but these pictures here show a UK police car resembling a Vauxhall and thieves inside a car resembling the Range Rover from the first Getaway. Weirdly enough the pictures were also tagged with “The Getaway”, when the name of the game was already changed to “Heist”.
http://images.vg247.com/current//2013/02/WJQIFj8.jpg
http://images.vg247.com/current//2013/02/GZGTWXw.jpg
About the confirmation, I can’t find it either after searching for it. There were several people from Sony who wrote on Twitter that it was definitely cancelled, all I found however, was this:
A guy asking if the games are still in development:
President of Worldwide Studios (Sony) answering that they aren’t:
Of course this doesn’t mean they’re cancelled, it just means they’re not working on them.
Now if I could find the names of the other people then probably I could find the tweets where they said it was cancelled. Of course this again means nothing, because another studio could always take over the license (which actually happened, since it’s called “Heist” now), Heist could still be taken over by another studio to be finished (or started at all
). The chances however that is would have anything in common with the first Getaway game are… very very small
I guess that’s one reason why they changed the name, because the idea into which the game turned had nothing to do with the original Getaway anymore. (and perhaps also the cost of the name)
But apparently they had such small interest in this series themselves that they forgot to make an official statement to cancel the game, seems like people had to ask them for that