Jason schreier responded on bluesky that it's just bend with the layoffs, bluepoint (who was the other studio with a GaaS cancellation back in january) was not affected for now.
Jason schreier responded on bluesky that it's just bend with the layoffs, bluepoint (who was the other studio with a GaaS cancellation back in january) was not affected for now.
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This game won’t be out for another 4 years
I just want Days Gone 2…….
I swear to GOD they better not touch BluePoint.
Maybe blue point is spared due to local laws?
Sony is in bad shape.
Thanks a lot Jim
This live service push has been such a colossal waste of time, money, manpower, and has resulted in the loss of so many jobs.
What a fuck up. This is probably the worst generation that playstation will ever have.
Watching Sony fumble so incredibly hard with live-service despite being so fucking late to the party is so funny. Especially after they grossly overspent and panic-purchased Bungie for $2B which was already a hilariously bad deal for Sony and is looking worse and worse as time goes on.
It’s astounding watching so many of the same mistakes from the post-World of Warcraft era where publishers tried chasing the MMO Bux thinking they could all make WoW cash despite being so late to the party try to repeat the exact same thing again with live-service games.
To be fair to Sony, this was incoming for a while imo.
Bend was rumored to already be in trouble due to Days Gone flopping (was in dev hell, buggy on release and was critically panned despite being a first party AAA game) and there were talks of Bend being merged into Naughty Dog (they have experience working on Uncharted with the vita).
Bend fought against this and got one last chance to survive by working on a new IP but its basically a last chance and you’re out kind of deal. Obviously, this new IP turned out to be this live-service game that was a spiritual successor to Days which is now cancelled.
I really hope Sony puts all the live service garbage behind them and gets back to making solid single player games again. It was nice to see how the Microsoft showcase was relatively free of F2P live service multiplayer crap.
If I worked for Sony on a GaaS title in a studio they owned? I’d be nervous. I am surprised Sony couldn’t reposition at least some of the 40 people (maybe they did?) but I get it. I was part of the Epic layoffs and didn’t see that coming. And they didn’t find other roles for most of the people let go from our studio.
Bro it’s sad that’s we won’t be seeing another Bend game for another 5 or 6 years.
No one wants to admit it because they all have a playstation connected to their TV right now, but Sony has done the worst job of the big 3 consoles at positioning themselves for the future. The future of gaming is very, very clearly a portable, and cloud augmented experience. If you can’t make your game “play everywhere”, no matter what they are, then the userbase will collapse. People want to play their games wherever they go. They love Mario, and Zelda and Nintendo built a platform that lets them go everywhere with them. People love XBOX games, so MS made a platform that lets them play on almost any device with a screen attached to it. People love their PC games, so Valve made a portable PC for them to play them everywhere. ASUS = portable. Nvidia made a cloud platform. Sony is the only one that didn’t see it coming.
Sony gambled big on Exclusive games, and exclusive hardware, attached exclusively to a TV, with a library of exclusive GaaS games.
And they lost.
The Portal, their half-hearted attempt at copying the Logitech G-Cloud streaming device was a runaway surprise hit[(4% Attach rate to the PS5)](https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463835/over-4-of-ps5-owners-have-purchased-a-playstation-portal-in-the-us/). Because it let people play their Playstation wherever they go.
Now Sony is going to have to pivot hard, and they might not make it through this next step if they don’t plant a solid footing before everyone else runs away with the game.
>In the company’s Corporate Strategy & Earnings Announcement Presentation for this year, it stated it would focus on peripherals that were “strong” and “profitable” like the PS Portal.
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>“We also plan to focus on strong and profitable peripherals such as PlayStation Portal where our recently introduced beta cloud streaming feature allows users to enjoy their games on the go more easily,” reads Sony’s statement. https://tech.yahoo.com/gaming/deals/articles/sony-excludes-popular-ps5-accessory-173612409.html
Sure I could buy a PS5 and then also buy Forza, or Indiana Jones.
Or I could pay $20 to rent 400 games for a month from MS including those games and play it on my TV, Phone, G-Cloud, PC, SmartFridge…
$20 vs $750
The casual consumer math is very easy, and the casual consumer is the whole concept behind why mobile gaming makes more money than every entertainment media combined. If anyone wants their slice of the industry to grow today they have to capture more casual consumers. And MS is already deep in a campaign proving they can bring you a AAA experience without having to buy a console. Casuals do not fret over things like latency. They hook their $14 bluetooth controller they bought on Amazon up to the SmartTV they got on Prime Day, and they’ll sub to GamePass and kick back and smile about the value. “This is an Xbox”
Nintendo and MS are chasing a much wider audience than the “uncle with a playstation that buys every CoD” that Sony is reliant on.
They already told on themselves by throwing a fit when they thought they’d lose CoD players, and then started making all their “exclusives” into timed PC releases. They know their consumer base is shrinking, and exclusives don’t sell hardware anymore. Potential users are going to choose more accessible platforms.
I don’t even know if Bend is still enough of the same studio that they could even make the version of Days Gone 2 that everyone wants, but holy shit everything that’s not that just feels like a waste of time from them. They haven’t released a game in 6 years. I know Days Gone wasn’t great at launch, but it’s absolutely been fixed and found its audience since then.
they will find something better than sony