angrod14
Member
While I was watching the Grounded II doc on saturday Druckmann said something that caught my attention: that there was a very low point for them as a studio while the game was being made (I don't recall if it was after the leaks), and that he was thinking "is this the game that finally sinks Naughty Dog?". I thought about that and it seems a little bit overdramatic to consider the possibility of Sony's best studio closing just because a single game tanks (either critically or, more importantly, in sales).
But there have been cases of studios closing after their games underperformed, even if they were good games. Evolution Studios come to mind, a bad launch (not even a bad game, just its launch) was good enough to bury them. The thing is they were never really that successful: MotorStorm was great but it was ultimately very niche and didn't have a lot of reach. It never became the arcade driving blockbuster maybe Sony was expecting.
Days Gone got shelved after being poorly launched, even if it was a good game after all the patches landed. Thankfully Bend Studio is still up, but they probably got their balls cutted in terms of creative freedom after that.
Naughty Dog is in a position where Sony allows them to do whatever they want. They even let them kill one of their most acclaimed and beloved characters, right from the start of the sequel. While I don't think the game was going to "sink" the whole studio if it flopped, it sure would've made Sony intervene a lot more in subsequent releases to monitor whatever they were coming up with.
I don't think neither Santa Monica or Insomniac have nearly as much as a blank check as Naughty Dog, since they seem to play it extremely safe. Insomniac is great and everything but they hardly do anything new or bold in their games, and the most audacious thing Santa Monica has done was to turn God of War in to a TLOU skin (which I love, but come on, let's not pretend they just copied what Naughty Dog had success with).
But there have been cases of studios closing after their games underperformed, even if they were good games. Evolution Studios come to mind, a bad launch (not even a bad game, just its launch) was good enough to bury them. The thing is they were never really that successful: MotorStorm was great but it was ultimately very niche and didn't have a lot of reach. It never became the arcade driving blockbuster maybe Sony was expecting.
Days Gone got shelved after being poorly launched, even if it was a good game after all the patches landed. Thankfully Bend Studio is still up, but they probably got their balls cutted in terms of creative freedom after that.
Naughty Dog is in a position where Sony allows them to do whatever they want. They even let them kill one of their most acclaimed and beloved characters, right from the start of the sequel. While I don't think the game was going to "sink" the whole studio if it flopped, it sure would've made Sony intervene a lot more in subsequent releases to monitor whatever they were coming up with.
I don't think neither Santa Monica or Insomniac have nearly as much as a blank check as Naughty Dog, since they seem to play it extremely safe. Insomniac is great and everything but they hardly do anything new or bold in their games, and the most audacious thing Santa Monica has done was to turn God of War in to a TLOU skin (which I love, but come on, let's not pretend they just copied what Naughty Dog had success with).
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