Sony has cancelled two live-service titles that had been being developed by Bend Studio and Bluepoint Video games.
The brand new was damaged by gaming pundit Jason Schreier over at Bloomberg, after which apparently confirmed by Sony themselves who confirmed that two “live-service” tasks had been cancelled “following a latest overview”.
“Bend and Bluepoint are extremely completed groups who’re valued members of the PlayStation Studios household, and we’re working intently with every studio to find out what are the subsequent tasks,” the spokesperson advised Bloomberg.
On Bluesky, Schreier supplied additional particulars, stating that the cancelled live-service sport at Bluepoint was truly a God of Battle sport.
“Followers have lengthy puzzled what Bluepoint has been engaged on for the final couple of years. I can report it was a live-service God of Battle sport.” mentioned Jason.
Sony introduced plans in 2022 to have 12 live-service video games operating by 2025, however would later carry that quantity down to six. Helldivers 2 launched in 2024 and was a large success, and nonetheless attracts nice numbers. In fact, Harmony additionally launched final 12 months and was an unmitigated catastrophe that misplaced Sony a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars}. If we rely these two and now the cancelled tasks, that may imply Sony is down to 2 live-service tasks left. Presumably, these are Bungie’s upcoming Marathon and Haven Studios’ PvP sport.
As for earlier live-service tasks, there was a rumoured Spider-Man title based mostly across the multi-verse which was apparently canned, together with Naughty Canine’s The Final of Us multiplayer title. That one was speculated to have been axed when Bungie offered suggestions suggesting it wasn’t as much as snuff. A live-service Twisted Steel sport was additionally cancelled again in 2023 when Firesprite confronted layoffs.
Out of all this, it’s Bend Studio I really feel probably the most sorry for. Their pitch for a Days Gone sequel was denied by Sony. They revealed in 2021 that they had been engaged on a brand new IP. If that was the identical sport that was cancelled then that’s 4 years of labor down the drain. If that’s the case and if it’s the one venture they’ve been engaged on, the prolonged triple-A growth instances imply it will seemingly be 3-6 years till they get an opportunity to launch one thing else. Their final sport was the underrated Days Gone in 2019, that means Bend Studio would possibly find yourself going a complete console era with out releasing a single venture.
The success of video games like Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals reveals that corporations completely ought to a minimum of experiment and discover the live-service house, but it surely’s fairly clear that it isn’t an space the place we
