Sony has canceled two live-service PlayStation games from in-house developers Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games. The company confirmed the cancellations to Bloomberg, and said the two studios were safe from closure.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that the game in development at Bluepoint was a live-service God of War spinoff.
Sony said the cancellations were made “following a recent review” and that it was “working closely with each studio to determine what are the next projects.” The Sony spokesperson didn’t say if there would be job cuts at Bend and Bluepoint, but an internal email seen by Bloomberg said that Sony planned “to do everything we can to ensure there is minimal business impact.”
Still, it will be a destabilising moment for the studios, both of which seemed to be operating well out of their comfort zones by working on live-service games. Bluepoint is known as perhaps the game industry’s premier remaster and remake studio for its work on the likes of Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls, and at the time of its acquisition by Sony in 2021 said it was working on an original game. Bend is best known for making action-adventure games like the Syphon Filter espionage series and 2019’s open-world zombie game Days Gone.
The cancellations come as Sony’s big push into live-service gaming continues to struggle. Sony did have one big live-service hit in 2024, in the form of Helldivers 2. But there was also the ignominious deletion of Concord and closure of its developer Firewalk Studios after the hero shooter had seen just two weeks of operation.
Sony’s hugely ambitious live-service push was announced with fanfare in 2022, after its acquisition of Destiny studio Bungie, regarded as a lynchpin of the strategy. The plan called for no less than 12 new live-service launches by the end March 2026.
As Sony’s ambition crashed head on into the volatile and high-risk world of live-service game development — where the market is dominated by perennial hits like Fortnite that it is immensely difficult to draw players away from — those plans were drastically cut back. In November 2023, the target was cut by half to just six games. At the time, Sony said it still had 12 games planned, but that it had delayed some and was reviewing them.
Since then, Sony has launched Helldivers 2, launched and shut down Concord, canceled a The Last of Us multiplayer game, and reportedly canceled an online Spider-Man game called The Great Web. Bungie is currently prepping its extraction shooter Marathon for expanded playtests in 2025.
