We have new insight on the situation behind the scenes at Sony’s Bend Studio.
At the start of this year, we learned that Sony decided to cancel the Studio’s live service title. While they assured the fans they were ‘not going anywhere’, the studio did have layoffs in January. They had layoffs again last month, with rumors going that as much as 30 % of the studio’s staff left.
That takes us to today. Timur222 found a LinkedIn profile of a current Bend Studio employee. Their profile indicated this under their experience as a game designer:
Sep 2019 to Jun 2025 · 5 yrs 10 mos
Bend, Oregon, United States · Hybrid
Multiple canceled/unannounced projects:
- Created and iterated on Open World Events and Missions
- Prototyped Open World Events, Puzzles, and Systems
- Created layouts for various POIs in the Open World (2D maps and 3D layouts)
- Wrote Design Documents (Open World Events, Puzzles, Systems)
- Collaborated with Animators to implement in-game cinematics
- Collaborated with programmers to iterate on player traversal movement
Of course, for confidentiality purposes, it wasn’t likely for Bend’s current employees to list any games that they had in current development. We do usually see games listed after they were released, but cancelled unannounced projects are a strange grey area.
If you’ve followed stories of cancelled games, you may already know the double bind developers fall into. Developers can now spend years working on a single project, so if a game does poorly, it can reflect poorly on them. But it’s worse if a game was cancelled, because confidentiality agreements could mean that they will never be allowed to talk about them.
The rules around this have loosened up for artists, but if you are a tester or designer, it’s harder to show proof that you earned experience on that project. In this situation, it is arguably better to have credit for a bad game, because you can at least prove you had that experience.
So these game developers don’t usually state they worked on cancelled games, but it does seem to now be popular to say they had cancelled games, without identifying or describing them too much.
It has been six years since Bend Studio released Days Gone. While we know that they aren’t likely to make a Days Gone 2, we’re now in a situation where no one knows what the studio has been working on, and what the studio is planning for its future.
Truthfully, if the rumor is true that they’re now 2/3rds the size of what they originally were, Sony may be content to just make them a support studio. But we know fans would look forward if they did make an announcement, perhaps for the long awaited return of Syphon Filter? But now it’s up to Sony and Bend Studio to delight us with such a surprise.
