Sony's Cancelled PS4 Exclusive About Garden Gnomes Sounded Great

Remember when Sony trademarked Gnomageddon? In addition to groans at the godawful pun, the registration piqued interest: what was the game and who was making it? Well, a pretty in-depth expose from Did You Know Gaming has revealed that the title was in production at Sony San Diego alongside free-to-play MOBA title Kill Strain. We use the past-tense because, er, you may remember layoffs at the studio and the aforementioned title being closed down.

Having watched the video, it sounds like the developer put its faith in the wrong project. Kill Strain apparently lacked creative direction, but garnered the most development resources. Gnomageddon was being built quietly with a small team – it was a free-to-play multiplayer action game where you’d control garden gnomes wielding utensils found in the average yard. While the concept sounds a little similar to Plants vs. Zombies, it sounds like it had some decent ideas.

There’d be loot boxes like in Overwatch that would allow you to customise your character, but there’d also be a mini micromanagement mode that would allow you to send out an army of gnomes to complete missions while you were doing other things. Primary game modes included deathmatch, co-op, and a kind of campaign. But the title was cancelled after Kill Strain flopped harder than a footballer in the penalty area, and that was the end of that.

Apparently Sony lost a ridiculous amount of money on Kill Strain – the video claims that the platform holder spent somewhere in the region of $15 million making it, which blows our mind. It’s all a bit disappointing because Gnomageddon actually sounds kinda good – it probably wouldn’t have set the world alight, but we’re willing to bet that it would have done better than Kill Strain. Sadly, the entire team was laid off, and that’s the end of that.