Dev Bend Studio says “we still plan on making cool shit” after Sony Live is canceled

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The Days Gone creator said he still plans to make “cool shit” after parent company Sony canceled its unannounced live service.

Last week, Sony canceled two unannounced live-streaming games that Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games were working on. According to Bloomberg, Bluepoint was reportedly a live-streamed God of War game Jason Schreier. Live play provided by Bend Studio remains unknown.

A Sony spokesperson confirmed the cancellation to Bloomberg, adding that neither studio would be closed and that it would work with each of them to identify future projects.

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Sony’s push into live services has been significantly hampered. While Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 proved to be a hit, becoming PlayStation Studios’ fastest-selling game of all time with 12 million units sold in just 12 weeks, other live-action Sony games were either canceled or had disastrous results.

Indeed, Sony’s Concord was one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting just a few weeks before being taken offline due to drastically low player numbers. Sony later decided to kill the game entirely and lock up its developer. The Concord debacle comes after Sony had already canceled Naughty Dog’s multiplayer game The Last of Us. Last week, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said that if he were Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group, he would try to oppose Sony’s controversial push into live video game services.

In tweetBend Studio community manager Kevin McAllister sent a low message to the developer’s fans: “Thank you for your love and support to everyone, especially those who reached out to us. P.S. We still plan to make cool stuff.”

Currently, Bend Studio’s last production was Days Gone from 2019 on PlayStation 4. The premiere on PC took place in 2021.

During a recent earnings call, Sony President, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company has learned from both the record-breaking launch Helldivers 2 earlier this year and the failure of Concord. Totoki said that specifically in the case of Concord, Sony should have launched development elements such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.”

“We’re still learning right now,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, when it comes to new IP, you obviously don’t know the outcome until you try it. So for our reflection, we will probably need to have multiple gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, as well as a timeline for such gates, we need to accelerate them. We should have made these gates much earlier than we did.

Totoki suggested that Sony should have noticed and addressed Concord’s problems earlier in the development process, presumably so that they could improve the game before launch – or cancel it.

Totoki then pointed fingers at Sony’s “isolated organization” and Concord’s release window, which could have caused cannibalism. Concord was released in August, shortly after the huge hit Black Myth: Wukong hit PS5 and PC.

“We have a siled organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think could have been a much smoother process,” Totoki said.

“Moving forward, we have a lot of different windows across our own titles and third-party titles. We want to be able to choose the appropriate and optimal window so that we can deploy it on our own platform without cannibalization, so that we can maximize our efficiency in terms of title launches.

During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president of finance and head of finance Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, stating that lessons learned would be shared across the company.

“We launched two games with live service this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge success and Concord was ultimately shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both of them.

“We intend to share lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management, as well as the process of continually adding extended content and scaling the service once it is released, to strengthen our development management system.

“During the current mid-range plan period, we intend to build on an optimal portfolio of titles that combines single-player games – which are our forte and which have a greater predictability to become hits thanks to our proven IP – with live games that we strive to to grow by taking some risk post-release.”

Looking ahead, a number of PlayStation Live games remain in the pipeline, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.

Wesley is the UK news editor at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. Wesley can be reached at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wy100@proton.me.

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