Days Gone Dev Bend Studio Staffing Up for 'AAA Live Service' Game

How much money are publishers willing to risk to lose in chase for golden mine like Fortnite? It's not worth it. Out of ten projects maybe one will be sort of successful.

Oh so they're going to shut down. That sucks.

The original article is completely clickbait and flimsy and I can’t believe push would post this. Bend already said they were working on a new open world ip that would include MP which is what this is most likely pertaining to but it’s easier to just report they are doing a live service game and rile up the haters because that gets more clicks

@get2sammyb But since you lose money on tghose 9 other projects you may not make enought for it to be worth it. And that one project certainly won't be other Fortnite. That one is like one of thousand

@get2sammyb And for the failed games, many studios will suffer, by losing their best staff or getting closed entirely just months after the fail. Imaging going to a casino with 5000 quids, for which you worked a few months. And while others put here 100, there 100 over the course of an evening, you enter the room, go straight to the roulette table, and put all your jetons on red or on black. As a dev, I would try to change my employer.

I hope it fails. I hope all new live service games fail. Maybe if these big companies lose enough money live service games will die

@GoingTheDist Helldivers 2 and Palworld, the biggest successes of 2024 are live service.

That's the studio which director said that people should buy games at full price if they want the studio to make a sequel? And on top of that they are making a live service game?

Now if only they could ramp it up from AAA to AAAA, it would be an instant day never buy for me

Poor guys, they made a fantastic open world with Days Gone, would have loved to see a follow up.

A live service game will be the end of them.

@get2sammyb Imagine being a dev on one of the other 9 projects, knowing that five years of work will be cancelled or shut down in a year or so. I wonder what it does to overall productivity in the industry.

I'm playing through the excellent Metal Gear Solid Master Collection right now and i'm left thinking to myself ''I miss the late 1990s to early 2000s.''
What an era of creativity, of pushing the boundaries, of respecting the intelligence of the audience. You don't know what you've got until you've been saddled with a hundred bad live service games that's for sure.

I don't get why people get so riled up by live service games. If you're not into them, then just don't buy them. There have been plenty of amazing single player games over the past 12 months.

@Czar_Khastik He had already left Bend Studio for a while when he made those comments and they publicly distanced themselves from him. Not something that can be held against them.

@naruball same could be said about Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones (both live services) being the biggest flops of 2024.

@Ainu20 Well then, my bad, glad it turned out that way

Just give me days gone 2.
The first wss epically underrated.

All it needed was a bit more interaction within the world

@ApostateMage Since that's all Sony first party studios are apparently working on now, the outrage is well-deserved. Imagine if Nintendo pulled the same thing? It would be the end of them...heck, it could easily be the end of Sony? 🤷

Why not just do a sequel to Day’s Gone instead. I still haven’t gotten round to finishing it yet.
Not all live service games do well

I guess you can add Bend to the big pile of PlayStation studios whose releases I no longer care about.

@naruball And the biggest flops are mostly live service games so it's 50/50.

@ApostateMage I think the argument is that the more companies like Sony invest in live service games, the fewer single players game are being made. They take away resources from other games they could be making for something that takes a lot of money and time to be made only to crash and burn as soon as it's released.

Personally, I don't mind them, because I already have more games that I could possibly play. A few more first party games won't make a difference to me, though I would have liked some PSVR2 first party games.

@Rangers420 absolutely.

Well good bye Bend it was nice knowing you

I'll never forgive Sony for scrapping Factions 2

I wish they would stop using their non-Gaas studios to do GaaS games. I don't have anything against the genre, but it will likely just get cancelled and waste a chunk of resources and time. It happened with Insomniac, Naughty Dog, FireSpirite and London Studio. Buy Arrowhead, and let them and Bungie make GaaS games and let everyone else do what they do best.

@ApostateMage people get riled up because they think sony should be concentrating on what it does best and not using single player studios to make live service games....plus diverting massive resources to these games as well.I wouldn't disagree🤷‍♂️

What a shame. I'll never play it, because I've got zero interest in live services, no matter the studio or gameplay loop.

How was that old song again: "And another one bytes the dust!"

So apparently Sony didn't actually learn squat, they just postponed launching GAAS games until they could hire people that could actually lead and train one their teams on how this sh...t works, innit? And they actually chose the team they consider most "expandable"... I feel bad for those devs, really, being thrown to the wolves like that, "survive or die, it's up to you!" style... I would have 100% preferred they worked on Days Gone 2 instead.

Just think of all those money they spent on Bungie in a futile effort to chase the same thing.... I wonder how many AAA first party epic games they could have made with that cash for the PS5 - a generation that it's over half it's life and it's still "barren lands" when it comes to it's exclusive first party titles portfolio!

@dark_knightmare2 So...they are hiring people who will "redefine studio from traditional 'boxed product' focussed game development into live service development studio in a key leadership role" because they are not making live service game?

ehh?

That's quite the gamble they are taking. They did say their next game would be open world and co-op a while ago so I guess this fits. Hopefully it doesn't turn into a Suicide Squad for them. I don't think the studio will survive if that happens.

Hopefully it’s a monster hunting game with motorcycles and guns

...and that's why I stopped buying games and clearing my singleplayer backlog...

I'm not willing to support wasting my money on GaaSes. When tides turn then we will see. Enough is I paid PS+ for this year... but no more money for Sony from my side.

God... they don't learn.
Can't you just go and reboot siphon filter before you get yourselves closed? FFS. Metal gear and splinter cell are dead. You can corner the market on single player espionage.

@Darth_Stofi You only need one to succeed to warrant the other losses...

@Shinnok Barren? Legitimately look up the 1st party titles of PS4 and come back. (And no, Spiderman didn't count they were bought later) Speaking of barren.

I am curious cause this is the game that they wanted to work on after the infighting in the studio with previous management (staff was not up for Days Gone 2) and not wanting to work with ND.

Ooh, I wonder what'll happen to those new hires when that game's released?

@LifeGirl That's why I just bought a mini PC for $300 that can emulate everything from Atari to PS3 and installed Batocera on it.

Nah dog.sony needs more single player games.come on son.word up son

I think most live service games failed partly due to haters. They just don’t hate and forget them, they talk about it with almost every breath they take. They start hating with passion as soon as they heard the word. Unfortunately as they are the most vocal ones, it did have a big impact on such games.The thing is live service games such as Multiverse, Foamstars, My Hero academia are free and have a very solid foundation but haters just keep badmouthing without even giving a go. Heck even Gotham Knights and Suicide squad gameplays are good. And haters celebrate like there is no tomorrow once these games fail. The thing is you can play these games and have fun without spending a dime on MTX.

@TrickyDicky99 same here. two years back I bought around 10 ps5 games (8 times I burned my fingers with pretty bad choice). Last year it was just Diablo 4 (big flop) and FF16.

The only weird thing is the timeline considering how they have been "cooking", but now it's time to add this new layer of management because they didn't have anyone capable in the role beforehand.

Call me crazy, but if you have a vision for one thing then maybe have the person capable of delivering on that vision there from the start?

If this was someone coming in for their next project after the one already in development I'd get it

Yeah, cause that's what the masses are clamoring for, right? More AAA, or dare I say, AAAA Live-Service games! Those protesters you thought were fighting for human rights? No, they just want more hot garbage that will have it's servers shut down within 14 months of launch. Excellent use of resources fellas. If that doesn't work out, I've got some swampland in Florida for sale and I'll give you a deal...

This was one of the remaining first party studios from Sony that I actually was looking forward to what they were doing next. Now it'll be a shame to see then shut down. Here's hoping this isn't true or they pull a 180.

Revenge of the Bobblehead. Watch for speed bumps.

@jFug Technically Skull and bones is the biggest flop of 2017, it just took until 2024 to finally see the flash of the explosion.

@get2sammyb @Darth_Stofi For the suits and shareholders getting one billion-seller out of 9 other failed projects must sound like a great win. Of course if you don't get that one billion seller, then you've just spent your company into bankruptcy chasing it. It's a remarkably unhealthy industry if it's run like a casino game. Exec comes in, risk everything, winner take all. If you bust, the staff takes the L and you get a few mil more, dealer always wins. 90% of staff know they're working in a dead end ticking time bomb revolving door until the next doomed from the start failure. No intent from management to build a stable, profitable, growing company, now, it's a gold rush, win big or go home, no success allowed unless you're #1. The consumer space is filled with a store full of total money waste failures, but it doesn't matter because the 10 hits are all that matter for the next 15 years.

Even the music business isn't that cutthroat.

@jFug indeed. Both games you mentioned were a huge gamble that didn't pay off.

In case you missed it, my point was that not all live service games fail nor are they all bad.

@Specky we still don't know if it was good.

@mrbone nice to see/"hear" the voice of reason.

It wasn't flawless, but Days Gone might have been my favorite overall PS4 game - just such an incredible gameplay loop I haven't found anywhere else. The sick thrill of randomly encountering a horde in the wild, never quite feeling safe when you venture out on the bike but gradually getting stronger, then eventually getting to the point where you can take on a full horde by yourself. Incredible stuff, one of the few PS4 games I still think of all the time. I even thought the story and characters surprisingly were surprisingly well done. Worth playing if you haven't tried it yet - just give it a few hours to warm up. It starts off slow (with a steep difficulty curve), but the game really opens up shortly after.

I’m hoping for one thing…

🤞🏻 Days Gone open world multiplayer 🤞🏻

@mrbone @naruball I think that's assigning too much weight to "internet haters." If "internet haters" had that much power the gaming industry would look a lot different than it does, or ever has. In reality the "internet haters" don't have much influence at all. It's the mass market, by far, the determines the success or fail of both single player and GaaS games, but especially GaaS, as we've seen time and time again.

If "internet haters" had a major influence on a GaaS game it means the mass market consumer that is their target market wasn't interested at all, and the remaining market of internet gaming enthusiasts turned each other off it. Which probably doesn't matter because the game needed the mass market. And even if the "internet haters" did have that power, then GaaS is still a bad business bet because that reaction in key demographics can be accounted for and is a market force that's not going to dissipate soon.

The real "business" problem with GaaS is that the "big winner" GaaS aren't merely a commercial success, they're a cultural phenomenon. The industry gold rush into GaaS is an attempt to manufacture a global cultural phenomenon on schedule via careful planning, spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations, and, naturally, the bigger the budget the "more likely" success. Back in reality, it doesn't work that way. You can't manufacture that. You luck into it. You keep producing content that's not dependent on becoming the next big thing, and if it happens to become that, you retire to a pleasure yacht in the Caribbean. And once another is entrenched, replacing it requires even more luck. Fortnite, CoD, Roblox, Among Us, Minecraft, Apex, GTAV online addon mode added years later. Random games, not particularly ambitious or remarkable games, but somehow they just hit that cultural flashpoint at the right time with the right message to the right group and hit it big. It wasn't manufactured, it was dumb luck.

But also notice that list is very, VERY short. I might be missing one or two, but generally does anything else print money like those? A few hit it temporarily big, but then died, like Overwatch. The room for success is very small. And Mario Kart 8, an ostensibly non-service-game, still eats all their lunch money. A port of a WiiU game.

There's a few things that execs are thinking of that THEY see as the same space even though they aren't:
Candy Crush, Clash of Clans - mobile market is entirely different. Execs fail to understand that.

WoW, FFXIV -MMORPG is a very different thing with a very different market.

Genshin. That's the elephant in the room, isn't it? A "AAAA" budget game that rakes in the cash. But it does have a few going for it that other games will fail to have going for it. It's "free", It's a native mobile game, so it has the whole mobile market where most of that service cash comes from, especially with a Chinese-government-approved homeland game, that apes Japanese aesthetics in the mobile market, and literally sells sex appeal as its main money maker....... it's really in a monetization class of its own.

Out of the very short list of lightning in a bottle Service successes Genshin may be the only one that you could say was actually manufactured success. But competing with that is kind of out of the question unless Sony's targeting mobile first, with a premium mobile experience with a focus on Asia, getting China buy-in, and most importantly: selling sex. If Genshin sold green army men I'm pretty sure it would not be as successful as it is.

Guess Bend will be the next studio Sony shuts down after this fails.

@Darth_Stofi not every live service game is Fortnite , assassins creed has been live service and that’s a single player game. I feel like people just assume it means online only games.

Syphon Filter GaaS game with SOCOM style multilayer please!

The last Bends studio game. ))

@NEStalgia Haven’t read all yet but the first point. It is not just the haters, it is the media who tries to cater them. I have seen media give out very low score to such games like Suicide squad 3, 4 and haters engage a lot in such posts and on social media. Suicide squad - I only played demo so far and watched a few videos. In no way it is 3 or 4 low game. Just giving one example. And most don’t even review games like my hero academia or foamstars. It seems people and media starts talking about but is going to be very bad as soon as the game is gaas and not even see or try the game yet.

Bet ye it's no a live service game

@mrbone To an extent you have a point. There's a certain prevailing mindset among the "critics" in gaming that seeming want to be film critics instead that there's a bias toward a very specific type of game being great, and GaaS is very much the antithesis of that. Some amount of the reviews are unfair in that regard.

But there's also the factor that GaaS as a genre itself is rife with problems that effectively appeals to a very specific, particular audience and isn't really appealing to critics, most types of traditional gamers, and much of the mass market as a whole, and the portion of the market it does appeal to is already dedicated to one of the existing hits, and pulling them away requires something extraordinary.

That's really the main problem. Business chases GaaS to seek fame and fortune, and the recurring revenue associated. But particularly outside mobile, it's a very small niche of the niche that already plays games that's really interested, and only interested in moving from an existing one to a new one, and only if basically everyone does, leaving the old one for dead. Much of the industry revenue comes from it, but it's the SAME customers they're all trying to leech. I think a lot of what you're seeing in the community being negative on it is a legitimate lack of demand and the resulting jaded response to the continued attempt to make it "happen." Yes, numbers are big, but it's one shared pool of customers in the GaaS-fan niche. Whenever a new one pops up that gains popularity you see the drop in another one. It didn't get new customers, it just made customers shift from one to another. It's that overall lack of interest and demand in the general market that manifests as the "hate" for them, and the corporate attempt to cash in on the fad at the expense of other content that leads to such vitriol toward the genre.

Suicide Squad may actually play well. But does it play so well that GTA5 should die for it, or Minecraft should, or FFXIV should, or CoD? That's the real problem. For SS to succeed, one of those has to lose its player base and fail. HD2 is big right now, mostly on PC. But I don't expect it has the lasting power the other do, the fad will fade, just on a slow curve as people migrate back to the others.

Well it was nice knowing Bend Studios. I plan on getting Days Gone on sale through Steam and playing it finally after how many years of never getting around to playing it.

Hopefully this is a secondary game to whatever they've already been working on. There's nothing saying they aren't staffing up for a live service game because a lot of their staff is working on a single player game like they already mentioned. It's wild that people just jump to the conclusion that this live service game will now be the only game they are working on without any facts to back it up.

Do I care about live service games? Of course not, as that's why I'm a PlayStation fan and not just on Xbox playing online anymore. I want single player experiences like a lot of other people here do, and obviously it would be damaging for yet another studio to shift their focus, but there's nothing to suggest that here yet.

I guess Helldivers 2 was their motivation

@GoingTheDist why that much hatred? Thousands of people are enjoying successful live service games

@Godot25 go google Bend announcement and see where they say they are starting work on a new open world I.P with MP. This job listing wording means absolutely nothing and when Sony announced their live service plans Bend wasn’t listed as one of the studios working on one. Sony also just cancelled quite a few of those announced live service games. Bends new game that has a mp component isnt being looked at as an afterthought so they want an experienced person to help with it and monetize it but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a live service game which would be totally different from how they announced what they were working on next

@NEStalgia
I agree with your point about competition for the same pool of players and about luck. GTAV is a perfect example. The success of GTAV online was more than Rockstar ever imagined. That success caused single player dlc to be replaced by online dlc, the very long delay of GTA VI, and RDR2 online to be givin very low priority for content and especially fixing problems. With GTA V online printing money years after the initial big investment there is no rush to put to market anything that could stop that flow of easy money.

@dark_knightmare2 Nice way to dodge my post. So I will ask again. Why they are hiring people to transform Bend into live service studio, if they are not making live service game?

It's like if Sony Santa Monica had on their website that they are hiring for PvP Shooter, but you would try to tell me that they are working on action adventure game.

Bend wasn't on live service slide because they didn't appear at the slide at all. So arguing with that is pretty dumb in my opinion.

https://static.tweaktown.com/news/9/4/94381_24_playstation-live-games-will-focus-on-quality-not-quantity-sony-says.png

@Godot25 my guy the studios on the slide and other articles Sony released were their studios making live service games for Sony so that’s why Bend weren’t on there like keep up. They aren’t hiring people to turn Bend into a live service studio Jesus it was one job opening and once again their new open world ip is going to include mp which I’m sure you’ve googled and saw the articles so that’s why. Devs don’t make mp modes that are meant to be played just a few weeks they all want continued live service money so they got to keep those mp modes moving with new content,battle passes etc. Now is this clear enough for you since you somehow say I dodged your post when I literally replied to you lol.

@LifeGirl excellent???...???

@Godot25 listen this conversation is going nowhere so let’s just wait till Sony or Bend themselves make an announcement. You can go on believing they are turning into a live service studio and I’ll continue to believe their working on a new open world ip with mp like they’ve already stated and until then neither of us are wrong

@dark_knightmare2 And who exactly said that open world SP game can't be live service?

Assassin's Creed ringing any bells?

@Godot25 I never said they couldn’t I specifically said that the mp part of their new game would probably be a live service or live service like mode kind of like gta online is for gta now

@Keyblade-Dan sums it up nicely

@LifeGirl yes i could not agree more! This is by far the most disapointing generation in videogame history as far as I’m concerned.

Screw live service! Most are bombs and are ruining the industry along with other things