delishcaek
Member
Waking up to this... wasting Bluepoint like that is kinda criminal. I guess they can now go ahead and make something for the PS6 launch.
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PlayStation has canceled two more live-service games, from subsidiaries Bend and Bluepoint, Bloomberg has learned
Perrott
Member
To be fair, those slides - while neat-looking and stuff - might had been put together by some interns following somewhat vague direction and without an exhaustive oversight from people from above who'd be really in the know. Because this wasn't the first "mistake" in these sort of presentations from SIE, as in 2021 there were slides that leaked the then-unknown title of the God of War sequel (Ragnarök) as well as the also unannounced PC release of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.
On the topic itself, man, what they were thinking? It would've been less of a waste of Bluepoint's time to let them do the Until Dawn remake instead of Ballistic Moon so that they wouldn't botch it like they did than to move ahead with more live-service adaptations of franchises whose mainline titles already cost upwards of $400M to make -- and of which only Horizon Online remains in development.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Herman needs to go. If the man had any shred of self respect, he would fall on his sword and resign. But fucking corporate cucks have no shame and will stay there until given a golden parachute.
fuck these corpos. They have ruined the best fucking first party studios in the industry with their greed and mismanagement. Forcing BP, ND, GG, Bend, and insomniac to make GaaS trash when they all learned that mp was not for them ten years ago.
The sad thing is that Sony keeps promoting him like MS promoted Phil Spencer. phil literally took down xbox with him. I hope to god Sony comes to their senses before he completely ruins sony first party. Bend and Bluepoint will not release a game until 2030 now. And thats me being generous. What a fucking disaster.
fuck these corpos. They have ruined the best fucking first party studios in the industry with their greed and mismanagement. Forcing BP, ND, GG, Bend, and insomniac to make GaaS trash when they all learned that mp was not for them ten years ago.
The sad thing is that Sony keeps promoting him like MS promoted Phil Spencer. phil literally took down xbox with him. I hope to god Sony comes to their senses before he completely ruins sony first party. Bend and Bluepoint will not release a game until 2030 now. And thats me being generous. What a fucking disaster.
TheDarkPhantom
Member
Good news, I've said it time and again, PlayStation needs to stick to their bread & butter, remember what brought them here and what the PlayStation faithful love about the brand. A couple of live service experiments are cool and arguably necessary but it should *never* have been a focus with so many resources thrown at it, good riddance.
LavitzSlambert
Member
Good riddance, Jimbo the clown. Thank god we won't need to log in to complete our daily trials and grind gatcha bullshit for the world serpent.
DarkstarRising13
Member
I'm not sure if Endymion's sources are reliable, but if its true that Sony Japan were the ones to veto Sony America's decision to keep Concord and Firewalk Studios alive and simply cancel Concord, shut the studio who made it down, and write that POS as a tax-write off, then I'm hoping Sony Japan finally sees it times to reign things down. We need to remember that Sony still is a Japanese company and unlike Microsoft, the folks in Japan will likely say "Enough is enough" and come forward with an axe to boot.
viveks86
Member
Chief Execution Officer
akaFullmetal
Member
Sony has really wasted time and money on this stuff. They should really go back to what they are good at or at least find a good balance between the two.
Perrott
Member
I'll give them credit in that they poured some real money into trying to figure out how to bring Twisted Metal back but no one across two studios seemed to have had the creative vision to live up to the task, not even the heads behind MotorStorm and my beloved DriveClub. Hell, even David Jaffe thinks that it is extremely hard to make Twisted Metal as a concept be worth of today's budgets, unless it was a behemoth of an open-world shared world multiplayer akin to Grand Theft Auto Online.
The same is true about Killzone, you'd have to deliver something several steps above Helldivers 2's production values and scope to even compete with Battlefield, which is the weakest link nowadays in the AAA western military FPS market -- and I doubt even all of Guerrilla would be up to the task, given that Battlefield has several mainline EA studios making it and well over a thousand people... and it still sucks and underdelivers more often than not. Hell, you could argue that Call of Duty has sucked and not been an industry-defining franchise for a decade now, with perhaps the sole exception of Modern Warfare (2019). And that's been with the entirety of Activision behind that game and them essentially making literally the same game since 2007.
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James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
You're blaming Hermen for decisions that were likely above his pay grade before he had the position he has today, and he's the one cleaning up the mess right now....and you're claiming he's ruining first party when it seems like he's course correcting?
I don't get these insanely illogical takes
Kotaro
Member
kiphalfton
Member
Damn, it’s wild that a 400 million dollar failure would influence their development goals.
Wonder how much money they've wasted to date.
$400 million, plus probably another $200 million between bluepoint and bend.
Klosshufvud
Member
He's been head of worldwide studios for four years now. These fuckups are on him. Fuck that guy.
FIREKNIGHT2029
Member
This is probably why Jim Ryan "retired" early. What a fucking dumbass.
They learned nothing from God of War Ascension flopping, Who's the idiot that thought having Blue Point making a GAAS GOW game was a bright idea? Sounds like Jim Ryan idiocy. Bend wasted years on this bullshit too, what a joke. Well at least he's gone now but I won't feel okay until more heads roll.
I'm wondering how much of this cancellation was brought about by Concord being a total disaster. If Concord hadn't failed so miserably I'm sure Sony would have been pushing full steam ahead towards GAAS doom.
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James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Who do you think he answered to? He wasn't head of Playstation. That was Jim. If your boss says, "We need more GaaS", you're the guy that's supposed to go along with it and say "yes sir"
Now, he is head of Playstation. He can call more of the shots - he still answers to the CEO of the company who wants more quality control earlier in development - and it seems Hermen is course correcting. If he was such a disaster he'd just let these teams rot away for another few years and release a GaaS dude that gets forgotten about instead
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
well, there has clearly been a shift. nearly all of the gaas games have gotten the boot. they had announced 12 to be released by 2025, and have only released 2. Concord which was shut down and helldivers. the rest were all cancelled.
- bend - wasted 4 years on their gaas game.
- Bluepoint - wasted 4 years.
- Naughty Dog - wasted 5 years.
- Firesprite (twisted metal) - wasted 3 years
- Firewalk - scifi gaas- wasted 3+ years.
- insomniac - they had a trailer up and running and everything. god knows how much time they wasted on it.
- concord - wasted 8 years.
- deviation games - ex-treyarch/bungie guys- wasted 3 years before studio was shut down.
- helldivers - 8 years dev time but a massive success.
- fair games - 4 years since studio announcement. no gameplay. will likely be shut down.
- GG - 5 years dev time. not a single minute of footage released so far.
- Marathon. - 5 years dev time. 2 years since reveal. awful focus testing. but its bungie so they will salvage it.
they spent 55% of their budget on this thing while laying off talented devs from ND, GG, SSM and Insomniac. How Herman got promoted is a mystery but he probably sucks good dick.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
he's been the head of worldwide studios (shu's job) since 2019. this is on him.
shu greenlit single player games from ND, SSM, GG, Insomniac and Bend after they all had games with MP modes that failed to get any traction.
Then this mother fucker comes in and tells them all to make gaas trash from scratch. this is all on him. literally shu just said this in the other thread that he wouldnt have allowed it. he's literally in charge.
Klosshufvud
Member
Similar levels of cope we see for Phil Spencer. Fanboys will claim he's never at fault until he's the very CEO of Sony and Prime Minister of Japan.
Being head of worldwide studios is a hugely influential role and he got that position precisely because he was willing to kill studios for GAAS while Shu refused.
Yoboman
Member
And who said he did anything more than that?
The game would not be published by Sony without Shu. He has an eye for quality that Hermens does not
firegamer273
Member
god of war live service?????????????????
ok now sony literally does not know what to do with their ip's .
ok now sony literally does not know what to do with their ip's .
CLW
Member
ChorizoPicozo
Member
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Unlike Phil Spencer, Hermen just released two GOTY titles in Helldivers 2 for MP and AstroBot for SP.
Something Phil hasn’t done a single time since Halo 3 era in 2007, when he wasn’t head of Xbox
You’re going to blame Hermen for all the shit going on with GaaS but unwilling to credit him for what’s gone right under his watch
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Perrott
Member
It is not a matter of arrogance. They've given some of their studios too much rope following a stellar end to the PS4 generation and a good bunch of them have hung themselves with it.
London Studio was given a fair shot at a AAA console game and, sure, Sony might have suggested that they should probably take part of the live-service initiative, but I bet no one pointed a gun at them and told them to make this piece of shit:
Any competent studio head and creative director aware of the legacy of that team would've went on to compete head on with Grand Theft Auto Online by delivering a more grounded, gritty version of that set in the criminal underworld of London and, perhaps, even the entire UK. Do you know what that would've been called? The Getaway Online. But those developers wasted Sony's time, money and confidence by making an inclusive fantasy game about purple demons wearing Nike shoes and Supreme clothes -- and that's why they had their asses laid off.
And I suspect the same might have been true of Bend, since Jeff Ross (who is now directing the open-world Tomb Raider reboot over at Crystal Dynamics) has been pretty outspoken about how the newly-recruited soy boys who were hired at Bend in order to get Days Gone out the door felt very unconfortable due to John Garvin's temperamental demeanors, so they had him kicked by Sony's HR. Oh, but who would've guess that those same weak little shits would end up failing to come up with any new original concept or even a Days Gone sequel without the creative guidance of Garvin, who had been the studio's sole writer and creative director for twenty years up until Days Gone's launch.
So the problem is not Sony or its higher ups, but the people in middle management and in the trenches, who seemingly can't get enough out of sniffing each other's farts while moving ahead with terrible game concepts at a studio level. That was the case with Concord. And with London Studio. And unfortunately the Twisted Metal game with no vision whatsoever. And, probably, Bend's new IP.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
At this point, i am used to the defense force. they always contradict to downplay fuck ups.
But lets not forget that sony top brass fucked up. it was jimbo and herman at the top making these decisions. I couldnt care less who made the final call or who asked whom. Fuck em both. Bottomline is that the best first party publisher of the last 20 years was ruined by these two knobheads, one of whom got a fucking promotion. both shouldve been kicked out the door the moment this slide was revealed to investors. everyone on gaf (aside from the same stans in this thread) knew this was a recipe for disaster back then, but the top brass at sony didnt. now they all gotta go. plain and simple.
Rocinante618
Member
A lot of comments on Sony's output is good and well I agree but Sony could have been much more than that. We could have got Bloodborne remake, high quality AAA single player experiences, we could have even had a handheld, a PSP successor.
Don't be sorry, be better.
Don't be sorry, be better.
Perrott
Member
Monster Hunter with an Horizon skin is probably the best idea out of the whole live-service initiative, after TLOU Online's pitch of "The Division but zombies".
The only thing that could possibly held it back from success would be the Fortnite artstyle that we saw from leaked early prototypes of it. But even then, Fortnite's artstyle (and the entire game, if you ask me) sucks and it is still the hottest game in the world.
And, to be fair, it would be a very tall order to expect Guerrilla to be able to support a live-service game for years with regular drops of content if the artstyle and quality of the assets were to be that of the mainline Horizon games. In fact, that's the mistake that got The Last Of Us Online killed.
diffusionx
Gold Member
all these things had major opportunity costs. If you want to know why PS5 feels so light in terms of first party games, this is why.
Using Bluepoint to make a fucking God of War live service makes no damn sense. I still can't believe how stupid it is.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
whats funny is that they tried that in 2013 with ascension and it sold literally half of what gow 3 sold in the first month. no one wanted to play an MP gow game and that one came with a full campaign.
meanwhile BP had just released an amazing souls remake and elden ring broke all records just 14 months later. a simple demon souls 2 wouldve been a guaranteed money maker but no, lets make gaas.
these guys are absolutely clueless. i can close my eyes and pick ten gaffers who can run playstation better than these buffoons.
Topher
Identifies as young
It is hilarious to me that somehow despite all this Microsoft has not been able to take advantage of the situation and make Xbox consoles competitive again. But it shouldn't be surprising considering the clowns that are in charge. We've got Hermen Hulst who was handed a dominant PlayStation on a silver platter and we've got Phil Spencer who has gobbled up ABK and Bethesda with daddy's money.........and yet neither have a clue as to what to do with any of it.
So we get shit like....
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JimmyRustler
Member
Yes, and we all ask ourselves the same question? Why? They all had a good thing going with their line up and all of sudden everyone goes like… lets stop what we are doing and make a lot of woke trash service games.
Seomel
Member
Genuienly dissapointed for bluepoint sake. Talented remake studio, used as support for Ragnarok and then live service slop only to be canceled. Cant wait to see what else they can do in 2029 
And of course Bend, people clearly asked for dg2, but no here have lloter slop, hype up as syphon filter return and cancel it. gg
And of course Bend, people clearly asked for dg2, but no here have lloter slop, hype up as syphon filter return and cancel it. gg
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Perrott
Member
Think Diablo but with GOW's recent over-the-shoulder perspective.
Yeah, although since that was on the cards before the demise of Bend's live-service new IP, I'm tempted to say that it was a Nixxes joint, similarly to their recently released Horizon remaster. In Days Gone's case, I guess the rationale was to have a current-gen SKU of the game to sell whenever the upcoming film adaptation of the game drops -- as it was going to be the case with Horizon and its Netflix show, before it got shelved.
Right now, I guess Sony will look at how it performs, run some numbers on how the original version of Days Gone has performed over the past six years, and according to the results, they'll either force Bend's hand into picking up Days Gone 2 right from where they left off in 2019-2020, turn them into a support studio for Naughty Dog's several upcoming endeavors or straight up kill the entire studio.
viveks86
Member
Close your eyes and pick one:
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
SlimySnake
Like Ascension?
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
6 for bend.
They shipped days gone in April 2019.
They were forced to pitch dg2 which took 6 months only to be rejected.
They took on an uncharted spinoff and hired Hollywood writers only to cancel it after 18 months because they didn’t like Naughty Dog second guessing every creative choice.
That was in april 2021 after which they announced they were working on a new ip.
4 years later, it was cancelled after they only managed to show a new studio logo at e3 2023.
Total time wasted 6 years. DG director said he would’ve shipped dg2 is just under 4 years if it had been greenlit since it would’ve been a direct sequel.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Honestly, as someone who loves competition, I don't mind when the runts are thrown off the cliff. If these weren't working, they weren't working. I was probably going to gravitate towards their bangers anyway.
Plus, PlayStation still has 6 GAAS titles that are likely to release over the next 3 years...
Cyberpunkd
Member
It was not, but they didn't really think through what it means - for every 1 hit you have 5-10 flops where you lose money, get bad PR and lower employee morale. It sounds great on paper - yay, probabilities! - but in practice is a bit more complicated.
Considering it was Bluepoint I wouldn't be surprised if it was a revamped for current gen GoW Ascension
It's not that hard to imagine.
Heimdall_Xtreme
Hermen Hulst Fanclub's #1 Member
Dude... It's WB, what can you expect from a trash company?
Sorry...I'm a hater and very anti-WB.
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Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
The goal of games doesn't have to be billions in revenue. That's a big problem with the mentality of the industry.
Twisted Metal was always fun to play at a base level. You sell that game with some sharp graphics and online play for say 40 dollars and people will buy it. It didn't have to be this crazy big game. Look at Rocket League. Massively popular and it's as simple as you can get. Sometimes people just overthink things. Not everything needs to be open world. A simple AA Twisted Metal game with online components would have been successful.
Remaking Killzones 1-3 with tight gameplay and visuals akin to Horizon Forbidden West with a multiplayer mode that they build up over time would have been a success. Not every game needs to be live service on day 1. You sell that for like 70 dollars and people would buy the campaign alone. At some point the industry decided to disconnect singleplayer and multiplayer games, but historically they've gone hand in hand. If Concord had a single player campaign, I guarantee you it would have sold at least a million copies across PC and Console. That goes a long way towards recouping investment. Sony should also push these GaaS games to play on PS4 as well as PS5. Helldivers 2 would have been even bigger if it was supported on PS4.
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
You have to call things like it is.
This is mismanagement pure and simple.
Biggest problem with fanboys is when they make excuses for the companies they support only to their own detriment.
MrRogers
Member
Helldivers was a fluke, everyone at sony, even Hermen was caught by surprise of its success and yes, we are very lucky Hulst didn't close Team ASOBI and they got one through. HH is responsible for greenlighting all these games since 2019. Hulst is just now course correcting all the major fkups he made over the last 5-6 years. Japan is going to put his ass on the chopping block in next year, you can book it.