Just last week, Sony had cancelled the production of two unannounced games, one of the cancelled games being one from Bend Studio, best known for their game released in 2019 called Days Gone, which players could find on PlayStation 4. The PC version of the game was released on Steam in 2021. The other game that Sony cancelled was a game from Blueprint Games according to IGN.
From this, the only game that Bend Studio had released thus far has been Days Gone, which was released in 2019. Bend Studio had been working on the new AAA live service game since 2019 according to PSU.
Also according to IGN, “Sony also added that neither studios will be closed and that they will work with them “to determine what are the next projects,” from the two studios will be.” It was also said from IGN that “Sony’s live-service push has struggled significantly.” and that “Sony’s other live-service games were either canceled or suffered disastrous launches.” Their best release that was overall a breakout hit and sold 12 million copies in 12 weeks was Helldivers 2 from Arowhead Game Studios.
Since this news has been released, the developers from Bend Studios began to speak about their upcoming plans for the future. One of the developers and Community Manager from Bend Studio, Kevin McAllister, released a short tweet for their fans.
Hiroki Totoki, CFO at Sony said, “Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”