A developer tied to the Days Gone team says it wasn’t exactly shocking to see PlayStation cancel a live-service title: Bend Studio’s project failed to show “enough substantial progress” across three years, so animator Robert Morrison figured the call was inevitable.
One of the first shockers of 2025 was PlayStation canceling two live-service games. One of them was in development at Bend Studio, the crew behind Days Gone, and the fallout was immediate: cost cutting and layoffs affecting roughly 30% of staff. While many were stunned that Sony walked away from two in-flight efforts, someone inside Bend saw it from a long way off – because the team simply wasn’t moving fast enough.
Robert Morrison is a seasoned AAA developer who served as a senior animator at Bend until last June. He recently caught Xbox fans’ attention by posting a reel of the last decade of his work – spanning the canceled Scalebound, Resident Evil 7, God of War (2018), and New World. The community quickly noted that the lineup also included the mysterious live-service project Sony axed earlier this year.
A user named Gabriel commented, “I’ll never get over what they did to that studio [Bend Studio].” Morrison replied candidly: “To be fair, we didn’t make enough substantial progress during the three years I was there. I saw the cancellation coming.” Others pressed for specifics about the Bend IP that will never ship, but the developer can’t disclose anything – standard NDAs in this industry bar sharing details about projects, even when they end up shelved.
Bend Is Reportedly Building Another Multiplayer Game
What happened at Bend hasn’t derailed Sony’s broader Games-as-a-Service ambitions. Despite the high-profile failure of Concord, the company isn’t abandoning the model and will pursue it alongside single-player experiences. That doesn’t mean the Days Gone team is pivoting back to purely solo adventures: a recent job listing indicates the studio is working on another multiplayer title, though nothing concrete is public yet. Time will tell whether Sony greenlights it or reaches for the axe again.
Source: 3DJuegos
