Following the Concorde disaster, Sony is reported to be canceling other projects, including the online God of War game.
There are failures, and then there was Concorde. Concord, a PlayStation shooter from former Bungie developers, has been in production for about six years, with development costs totaling a staggering $200 million, according to Kotaku (a figure some industry figures have disputed). It launched last August and lasted 11 days before Sony pulled the plug and shuttered the game’s developer, Firewalk Studios.
In the graveyard of live-service games, Concord may be the biggest tombstone, and it seems to have caught the attention of some PlayStation officials. Sony has previously only talked about the importance of live-service games to its future strategy, and the company has announced plans to launch more than 10 live-service games by fiscal year 2025, which ends March 31, 2026.
Now? Not so much. A new report from Bloomberg says that “following a recent review,” PlayStation has canceled two unannounced live-service games being developed at subsidiaries Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games. Bend is best known for Days Gone and, back in the day, Siphon Filter, while Bluepoint primarily handles high-profile remakes like Demon’s Souls.
The Bluepoint game was reported to be a live service God of War game, which really shows how absurd things were for a moment. I can’t think of a better option for a real-time game than a single-player hack-and-slash game that focuses on the central character (and later his son) and leaves you wondering why anyone would would have thought it would be like this. be a good idea. Maybe I’m wrong and it would be amazing, we’ll never know, but I somehow doubt it.
“Bend and Bluepoint are highly skilled teams and valued members of the PlayStation Studios family, and we are working closely with each studio to determine what their next projects will be,” a Sony spokesperson told Bloomberg. Neither studio is at risk from the cancellations, although the company has not commented on whether there will be layoffs.
Major publishers can’t resist live streaming as a genre because there’s so much money there, and success can lead to a golden goose like Fortnite. Sony had some success with Helldivers 2, released in 2024, and apparently now owns the live-action company Bungie, but it has also previously canceled other projects (such as the Spider-Man and Twisted Metal games), and the experience of something it’s like Concord should be corporate. the equivalent of being slapped with a wet fish. The online services gold rush may finally be slowing down, even if it never stops.