Ex-Sony indie boss Shuhei Yoshida has revealed during an appearance on the My Perfect Console podcast that Sony Santa Monica Studio, the developer behind the God of War series, was working on a brand new IP but ultimately decided to cancel the project despite having spent $25 million on the game.
Yoshida-san, who departed Sony after more than three decades earlier this year, previously stated that two projects were cancelled at the format holder that had already poured $25 million each into production. It wasn’t known at the time what these games were, but he’s now gone into detail on one of the ill-fated projects.
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One was actually an internal game developed by Santa Monica Studios. Not a God of War game – a new IP. It has a really amazing concept, and really interesting gameplay ideas. Of course, Santa Monica Studio people are very, very capable of creating high-quality art. So we supported [them for] many years, but after $25 million, they came to me and said that we have to stop. I do not exactly remember the reason for it. The team was not able to find ‘the game.’ It was a great concept. Great idea. But the gameplay didn’t really come to be.
Yoshida went on to admit he had cancelled “so many games” during his time with the PlayStation manufacturer, although noted that if projects are scrapped early on they don’t typically cost too much for Sony. He said that if a concept is solid, it’ll continue, but if “it’s not good, rework or stop,” before stating it’s “a really hard decision” to scrap something that has already cost $25 million to develop.
There were many, many good games from Europe. But one game was a big-budget project [that] didn’t, in a similar way, have the core game anyway. These are the two large cancellations. But these days, a $25 million cancellation is nothing special.
Speaking last month in an interview with GameSpot, Yoshida admitted that he was surprised when he heard that Naughty Dog wanted to move away from Uncharted to start working on The Last of Us, which had a considerably darker tone than the popular action-adventure series.
[Source – My Perfect Console via GamesRadar]