What’s concerning, is what have their big studios been doing for the last 4 years. None of their big franchises have released anything. Eventually that will come back to bite. They can’t live off of remasters.
In the last 4 years they released new games of IPs like:
- The Last of Us
- Little Big Planet
- God of War
- Horizon (two games)
- Spider-Man (two games)
- Gran Turismo (game + later a VR version)
- Ratchet
- Helldivers
- MLB
- Astro
- Destiny 2 expansions (*not games themselves)
Plus new IPs like:
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Returnal
- Stellar Blade
- Rise of the Ronin
Plus remasters/remakes of:
- Demon's Souls
- Spider-Man
- Uncharted
- The Last of Us
- Nioh (* series published by them outside Japan)
Also, nowadays AAA games take 5-9 years to be made, doesn't make sense to complain about the output of a team who released a game less than 4 years ago.
There has been NOTHING from Naughty Dog.
In the last 4 years we got from ND:
- TLOU2
- Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection (PS5 + later PC port)
- TLOUP1 (PS5 + later PC port)
- TLOU2 Remastered
And as extra:
- Uncharted movie
- TLOU tv show
- Uncharted theme park ride
- TLOU theme park
After TLOU2 they also have been working in the cancelled TLOU Online plus in two new unannounced single player games. Considering nowadays AAA games take about 5-9 years to be made it's nonsensical to complain about their output.
They also cancelled TLOU Factions, the Spiderman MP game, the Twisted Metal online game as well. They were definitely working on several live service titles but scrapped them. That time was wasted and now those dev studios will have to regroup and start anew on other games which will hopefully be the traditional Sony SP offline types.
The Spider-Man MP game and Twisted Metal apparently barely were pitches with a prototype that weren't greenlighted, weren't into production. We also got leaked multiple Insomniac roadmaps and none of them had any Spider-Man MP game.
It isn't a GaaS thing, it's super frequent to don't greenlight game pitches and to cancel games. It happened in all companies in the 50 years of gaming history, but in most cases we didn't know about them because normally happened before they got announced and they weren't leaked.
Sony wanted to have a dozen IPs with GaaS before March 2026, a deadline they later rejected because some weren't going to make it. Sony didn't expect that all of them were going to be the next Fortnite, they knew some were going to fail and other ones were going to be a niche thing while hopefully one or two were going to be a huge success, with the rest performing ok/good.
After acquiring Bungie, apparently their 3 GaaS IPs replaced the 3 weakest/less promising PS Studios GaaS under development, which got cancelled. Other than that, ND decided to cancel TLOU Online because it was going to affect the resources of their SP games they also had in the work. Had to decide between the GaaS and the SP games, and decided the SP games.
So far MLB, Gran Turismo, Helldivers and Destiny 2 The Final Shape are very successful so they should be happy with GaaS even if failed with Firewall Ultra (I assume they saw it coming) and Concord (I think they didn't see this coming, it was a wildcard with a random result). I think they may be specially looking forward with Marathon or Horizon Online plus also have the wildcards with random results as are the new IPs from Haven and Bend.
