Sony has cancelled two more of their live service games.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Sony confirmed that one upcoming live service game from Bluepoint Games, as well as a live service game from Bend Studio, were cancelled by Sony.
This news was originally reported by Jason Schreier on Bloomberg, and he also claimed that the cancelled Bluepoint title would have been a God of War spinoff. It would have been Bluepoint Games’ first original title, but given that Bluepoint intended to shift away from ports to original games, they may reveal a different title in time.
Bend Studio’s last big name release was Days Gone, which was made with high expectations that it wasn’t quite able to meet. That also means Sony has cancelled 8 of the 12 live service games that they planned to release.
It also means, for Bluepoint, Bend, and Naughty Dog, that they will have gone over seven years without releasing a new game. With the amount of time needed to make AAA games to make PlayStation gamers happy, Bluepoint’s and Bend’s games meant to replace these titles likely won’t release until the next generation of PlayStation.
But it’s possible that not everything is doom and gloom for Sony at the moment. Shuhei Yoshida revealed in his recent interview with Kinda Funny that Hermen Hulst gave all their studios enough money that they could experiment with these live service projects, while they were also making their forte of single player games.
This suggests things aren’t what they seem, from when Jim Ryan left the company. While it’s true that Sony put a lot of money into these live service projects, if Sony was throwing money onto those developers to pursue multiple projects, than they may also have other single player projects that have simply stayed unannounced.
Granted, this rosy picture doesn’t match up with the knowledge that Sony fired hundreds of developers last year, as well as closing several studios. Yoshida can only be expected to reveal so much about the situation at Sony, so we may not really expect to get that full picture of what goes on in the company.
As things stand, Sony has seen success with Helldivers 2, and is still planning to release Marathon and Fairgame$. The rumored Gummy Bears project spun off from Bungie may also be a live service title. Sony isn’t chasing Fortnite money out of simple greed – for many PlayStation 5 users, their console is just a Fortnite machine, in the same way that there are gamers who only bought a console to play the latest EA football game, or Call of Duty. There were not enough people who bought Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to protect employees jobs at Insomniac Games, and Sony is looking for a way to remedy that.
So we may yet see Sony regroup and plan to make a new batch of live service games in the future. But perhaps hopefully if they do, they’ll be more careful in how they spend their money, and put their developers’ careers on the line.
