Bend Studio Dev Says “We Still Plan On Making Cool S**t” After Canceling Sony Live Service

The developer of Days Gone has said it still plans to make “cool s**t” after parent company Sony canceled its unannounced live-service game.

Last week, Sony canceled two unannounced live-service games that were in development at Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games. The Bluepoint game was reportedly a live-service God of War game, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Bend Studios’ live service game is still unknown.

A Sony spokesperson confirmed the cancellations to Bloomberg, adding that neither studio will be closed and that they will work with each to determine the next projects.

Sony’s live service push has struggled considerably. While Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 was a breakout hit, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever with 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks, Sony’s other live-service games were either canceled or suffered disastrous launches.

In fact, Sony’s Concord is one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting only a few weeks before being taken offline amid drastically low player numbers. Sony later decided to kill the game entirely and shut down its developer. The Concord flop came after Sony had already canceled Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game. Last week, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said he would have tried to resist Sony’s controversial live-service video game push if he were in the position of current Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst.

In one tweetBend Studio community manager Kevin McAllister posted a brief message to the developer’s fans: “Thanks for the love and support everyone, especially those who have reached out. PS We still plan to make cool shit.”

As it stands, Bend Studios’ last release was 2019’s Days Gone on PlayStation 4. It launched on PC in 2021.

In a recent financial call, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company had learned from both the record-breaking launch of Helldivers 2 earlier this year and Concord’s failure. Specifically regarding Concord, Totoki said Sony should have run its development ports such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.”

“At the moment, we’re still learning,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, in terms of new IP, of course, you don’t know the outcome until you actually try it. So for our consideration, we probably need to have a lot of ports, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such ports, we need to bring them forward. We should have done these gates much earlier than we did.”

The suggestion here from Totoki was that Sony should have noticed and responded to Concord’s problems earlier in the development process, presumably so it could have improved the game before launch – or canceled it.

Totoki then went on to point fingers at Sony’s “siloed organization” and Concord’s release window, which may have caused cannibalization. Concord launched in August, not long after the smash 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 it could have been much more smooth,” Totoki said.

“And so going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we have many different windows. And we want to be able to choose the right and optimal window so that we can implement them on our own platform without cannibalization, so we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches.”

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

“We launched two live-service games this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both.

“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continuously adding extended content and scaling the service after its release to strengthen our development management system.

“We intend to build on an optimal title portfolio in the current mid-range plan period, combining single-player games – which are our strengths and have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP – with live service- games that pursue upside while assuming some risk on release.”

Looking to the future, there are still a number of PlayStation live service games in the pipeline, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].