A brand new PS5 game from Bend Studio, the team behind Days Gone, has been canceled. PlayStation is one of the three gaming giants alongside Xbox and Nintendo and are best known for their exclusives. PlayStation has worked hard for three decades to assemble a really strong portfolio of the best studios in the industry who produce best in class marquee titles. Naughty Dog, Guerilla Games, Sony Santa Monica, and Insomniac Games make up just some of the great teams working on PlayStation exclusives. However, PlayStation has had some big struggles throughout the PS5 generation. While there have been great games like Returnal, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and God of War Ragnarok, there have been some crushing blows too.
Videos by ComicBook.com
PlayStation has shut down multiple studios, including one that it had invested a lot into. Firewalk Studios, the team behind the ill-fated Concord, was shut down in 2024 after its debut game landed with a total thud. The live-service shooter that was in the works for the better part of a decade, but it shut down in two weeks due to excessively low and lack of enthusiasm for the game overall. It was a case of players voting with their wallet, showing they weren’t interested in more live-service hero shooters. The reception to Concord may have had a much larger ripple effect, though.
Bloomberg revealed that PlayStation canceled two more live-service games this week. One was a new live-service God of War game from Bluepoint, the team behind Demon’s Souls for PS5, and the other was a new game from Bend Studio, the team behind Days Gone. Bend Studio has had a pretty rough go since 2019. Days Gone launched to middling reviews and didn’t perform to Sony’s standards commercially. Although it sold a lot of copies, it seems like a lot of them sold at a discounted rate. As a result, Days Gone 2 was canceled internally and Bend moved on to its next project.
Bend was reportedly working on a brand new Uncharted game for some time, but the project supposedly got canceled early on. After that, Bend teased it was working on a brand new game, but neglected to give any more details. The studio has been quiet for a few years now and many assumed the developer would be gearing up to start talking about its next project for some time now, but to no avail. Not much is known about the canceled game, but some screenshots from Bend’s new game leaked out in 2024. It showed a shooter with some futuristic-looking elements and drew some comparisons to Bend’s other big franchise, Siphon Filter.
Nevertheless, it’s another unfortunate dead end for Bend Studio. Speaking to Bloomberg, PlayStation confirmed that Bend Studio would not be shut down and that the two parties were actively working together to figure out its next project. Whether this could mean Days Gone 2 finally happens or something else remains to be seen. Days Gone is getting a movie, so a new entry in the series could tie-in well with that. Perhaps the Uncharted project gets revived, as Bend had previously worked on Uncharted: Golden Abyss for PlayStation Vita. Either way, it seems like this isn’t all bad news for Bend, though it remains to be seen if any layoffs will happen because of this.
PlayStation did not cite any reasons for canceling this or the God of War project, though it may be a repercussion of Concord failing. PlayStation may not want to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into live service game after seeing how much of a disaster that can be. Some live-service games slowly die over time, but games like Concord and even Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were dead on arrival. PlayStation does have games like Marathon to offer for the live-service genre going forward, but the company may finally be listening to fans and giving them the blockbuster single-player games they long for.
