The co-founder of Naughty Dog says that, in hindsight, he has no regrets about the studio falling into Sony’s lap after the sale.

Andrew Gavin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, worked at the studio until 2004. He wrote on LinkedIn about why he thinks the studio ended up being sold to Sony. He made the decision largely because of rising budgets. According to him, in the early 1980s, a game could be made for less than $50,000. By the time the team got to Jak & Daxter on the PS2 in the first half of the 2000s, the budget had reached $15 million. Then, in the last decade, the budget went up even more, and there were titles that cost $500 million. Naughty Dog’s latest game, The Last of Us Part 2, which will be released on the PlayStation 4 in 2020, was a $220 million project.

“Selling to Sony wasn’t just about securing a financial future for Naughty Dog. It was about giving the studio the resources to continue making the best games possible, without being crushed by the weight of skyrocketing costs and the paralyzing fear that one slip could ruin it all. Looking back, it was the right decision,” Gavin wrote on LinkedIn.

Naughty Dog’s next game will be Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment made the announcement at The Game Awards in December. Neil Druckmann, the head of Naughty Dog, said back in July that the studio had several single-player projects in the works, but stressed that they wouldn’t all be The Last of Us (we wrote about the third installment in the news recently), but they would all have a similar goal. They want to create experiences that focus on character and story, especially relationships. The stories will have some sort of philosophical core and everything will revolve around that.

At least Gavin pointed out that games are too expensive to make.

Source: VGC