We knew next to nothing about these projects — Bluepoint was actually making a live service God of War title, if you can believe it — but the mismanagement of Sony's first-party PlayStation Studios is really starting to hit home.
With the news of these cancellations, we now have confirmation that Sony had all but bet the farm on its aforementioned live service push. Make no mistake: a staggering amount of resources will have been poured into these projects — and the same goes for Naughty Dog's cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer title.
But Naughty Dog is a big enough studio to support two ongoing projects — and so we have Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet , a cinematic, single-player adventure to fall back on. Bluepoint and Bend Studio, though? That's god-knows-how-many years down the drain. All that effort chasing the live service dream for the sake of absolutely nothing .
And that's when you start to add it all up. The $3.6 billion buyout of Bungie — a developer that couldn't even buy a positive headline if it tried. The now completely forgotten warning sign that was Destruction AllStars . The utterly mind-blowing Concord saga, in which the live service shooter's life support machine was unplugged just two weeks after it launched.
Oh, and let's not forget about the reportedly troubled Marathon (Bungie), the long-rumoured Horizon live service thing, and Fairgame$ . Yeah, it's not looking great for those projects right now, is it? Not when Sony's out here ditching a live service God of War game.
At this point, we probably couldn't even comprehend the amount of money that Sony has sunk into this doomed direction. So many talented developers will have toiled away on these projects for thousands upon thousands of hours; the live service illusion — or what little was left of it — has been well and truly shattered.
So in what state is PlayStation right now? Well, internally, it can't be pretty. You can't have all of these teams working on AAA-budget projects, realise that you're marching straight towards potential catastrophe, hit the reset button, and expect everything to just even out.
Sony will know this, of course — but the damage has been done, and PlayStation will feel the kickback of what has ultimately been a bafflingly misguided crusade towards the live service space. If there's any silver lining here, it's that PlayStation has decided to actually cut its (presumably gigantic) losses and revaluate its business.
Helldivers 2 is the exception — it's certainly not the rule, and Sony has learned that the hard way, having now spent the best part of an entire console generation pissing away time, money, and effort on chasing down a delusional dream.
What do you make of all this? What do you think is next for Sony? Feel free to simply shake your head in the comments section below.
How would you describe Sony's live service push this generation? (4,028 votes)
Simply unforgivable 62 %Bad 34 %Just okay 2 %Good, actually 1 %